Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games (Warner Independent, 3.14) is simultaneously the ugliest and most repulsive violent melodrama I’ve ever seen (including the thoroughly disgusting I Spit On Your Grave) and the smartest and nerviest critique of sexy-violent movies in the bang-flash vein of Quentin Tarantino, Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, Eli Roth and other purveyors and marketers of homicidal style.

A fair percentage of those brave enough to see this Warner Independent release this weekend are going to walk out on it — trust me. It’s a hateful and infuriating film, no question, and yet it has a worthwhile point. And you can’t not respect Haneke for this.
It’s certainly one of the ballsiest movies ever released by Warner Bros. (technically Warner Independent) in its 90 year history. I mean this in a sense that average people might come out of showings feeling enormous hate for Warner Bros. for having done so. Seriously. If the final effect wasn’t so stunning and dispiriting I could imagine people beating up ushers on the way out.
It’s basically a chilly, creepy home-invasion horror story about two young, ice-cold psychopaths (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet) who terrorize a couple (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Devon Gearhart) and their young son with the intention of gradually killing them. No theft, no ransom, no rape…just sadistic mind games followed by brutal maiming and then awful death.

But it’s not a movie that pulls you into the story and persuades you to suspend disbelief and blah, blah. It’s strictly a “game” piece — an exercise film that feels real and naturalistic as far as it goes until it periodically pulls back, stops and tells you (in three instances with Pitt literally talking to the camera), “We’re wanking you off and trying to get you mad…get it? We’re making a point about all the violent gunplay movies you’ve enjoyed ad infniitum for the last 30 or 35 years, starting with The French Connection but particularly since the start of the Tarantino wave in the early ’90s. Violence is horrible, ghastly, reprehensible ….and it’s time for the all the little moviegoing children out there to wake up to this simple fact.”
Funny Games is a shot-by-shot, line-for-line remake of Haneke’s 1997 Austrian- based original. (Which I’m going to watch on DVD this weekend.) In the press notes Haneke says that “when I first envisioned Funny Games in the middle of the ’90s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch this movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivete…the way American cinema toys with human beings” and the way some of them make “violence consumable.”
What happens in the first 30 or 35 minutes of this film is so ugly and stomach- turning that I was starting to suffer an anxiety attack. I wanted to get up and walk into the movie, Purple Rose of Cairo-style, and shoot Corbet, whose face enraged me. His eyes and mouth especially. (If I see this guy on the street I’m going to have to take a breath and count to ten to keep from taking a poke at him.) I was muttering to myself, “This is the best argument for gun ownership and the NRA I’ve ever seen in a movie in my life.”

I’d love to get into particulars (there are ten or twelve aspects I’d love to sort through and dissect), but I’ll just get yelled at for spoiling. Fair warning: I’m going to discuss every damn aspect of this film that I feel like discussing, no holds barred, sometime on Sunday. No spoiler whining or squealing will be tolerated. If you want to get into it, see it on Friday or Saturday (a good idea regardless given the likelihood that this film is going to be gone very quickly) and get your ducks in order.

Edward Norton is reportedly fighting with Marvel’s chairman David Maisel and production prexy Kevin Feige over the final shape and tone of The Incredible Hulk. Quelle surprise! Norton has been getting into post-production scraps off and on for ten years now, starting with American History X. He’ll always be a collaborator and never just “an actor for hire” — and anyone who hires him knows this. Besides — arguing over a film’s final cut is a very healthy way to go. Better that than an atmosphere of complacency and mutual masturbation.

The hard-luck Chapter 27, the killing-of-John-Lennon drama that’s been kicking around for two years now, will finally open on 3.28. Jared Leto (as Mark David Chapman), Lindsay Lohan, etc. A screening invitation for New York screenings arrived today; nothing yet for LA. Not in my inbox, at least.

The beginning of this Paul Thomas Anderson mash-up is absolutely rancid, dreadful…I wanted to strangle the guy (going by the name of “barringer82”) who cut it. Then it turns into a first-rate thing — exquisitely cut, thought-through, avoiding the easy jokes. Except, like Magnolia, it goes on too long.

A stern argument against Hillary Clinton‘s claim that she has passed the “Commander in Chief test,” posted today and written by Greg Craig, former director, Policy Planning Office, U.S. State Department.

Showest, the longstanding exhibitor convention, kicks off in Las Vegas today. Exhibitors attend because…I don’t know, ask them. It’s basically a dog-and-pony show (stars, speeches, product reels). Trade journalists attend for exhibition stories, for the relationship-fortifying schmooze opportunities, and to report on the product reels (or the occasional debut of a new trailer that hasn’t gone online yet).

I haven’t attended since the mid ’90s. I had a perfectly miserable time. Vibe- and energy-wise it felt like the exact opposite of being, say, at a great big-time film festival or even a small cool one — like I was marooned on another planet with a bunch of chowderheads who didn’t know any more than I did and were basically there to kick back and maybe enjoy a nasty experience on the side. (Which is what all middle Americans imagine they’ll do when they visit this grotesque town. And which 99% of them don’t have the balls to even attempt.)
I wouldn’t dream of going again. I hate Vegas anyway, and I can get whatever news that may come out of it right here at my desk.

Ever since Hillary Clinton failed to correctly pronounce the name of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev (“Medvuh.. vuh-devah, whatever”) during that Ohio debate, I’ve been wondering how to say it myself. And now longtime Herald Tribune and N.Y. Times foreign correspondent Serge Schemann has written a piece that includes a phonetic spelling (courtesy of Voice of America): “mehd-V(y)EHD-yehf.” Say it over and over (I’ve done it about 20 times now) and it gradually begins to feel half-negotiable.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh (a.k.a., Cinemascope) has posted an mp3 of a song called “One More Word,” a tune from a well-regarded low-budgeter film called Strangers. Favorably reviewed after a Sundance showing two months ago by Variety‘s John Anderson, the film will next be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The tune was written by Israeli musician Eyal Leon Katzav but recorded by Once stars and Best Song Oscar winners Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in the Czech Republic a week or so before the Oscar telecast. Strangers is said to be a bittersweet drama in a Romeo and Juliet vein about an Israeli guy and a Palestinian gal, etc. Co-directors Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor plan, Raveh says, to shoot Hansard and Irglova for the music video.

The main point of Chris Nashawaty‘s big Indiana Jones piece in the current Entertainment Weekly (dated 3.14) is that as we approach the May 21st opening of Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the tangy, thrill-a-minute franchise is undimmed — that it still has enormous vitality and fan loyalty.

cover of EW issue #982; Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

But the underlying suggestion in the cover photo, of course, is that the 65 year-old Harrison Ford is still a brawny-studly sex symbol. Which, to many millions, may well be the case. No argument from this corner. (I’m done with the Uncle Festus routine. For now.) But I would have respected the cover-shot choice (as well as Nasahawaty’s article, now that I think about it) a bit more if EW had run a shot of the current Ford/Indy biology. He is what he is, “be here now” and all that….right?

Imagine if a female celebrity emerged from plastic surgery with her mouth sewn up…no lips, no trace, just skin. The rationale, a friend might tell a tabloid reporter, is that while she can no longer talk, sing, smile, kiss or eat, at least the permanent frown — the sagging bulldog corners on either side of her mouth — is now gone, and she’s happy about that. The revulsion would be instantaneous, right? Well, look at this. Because it’s real. I’ve never seen anything so deranged, plastic surgery-wise, in my life. (And while you’re at it, check out that left hand and the dried-blood fingernails…the mummy’s claw!)

A painter I knew in the ’80s always referred to Salvador Dali as “Norman Rockwell on acid.” And now three Dail biopics with three stars — Johnny Depp, Al Pacino and Peter O’Toole — are reportedly being prepared. If I were a potential investor, I would think twice about investing. Movies about eccentric artists tend to piddle along or just lay there. Two exceptions: Ken Russell‘s Savage Messiah and The Music Lovers.

Cadaques, Spain — an hour south of the French border

My most profound commnunication with the spirit of Salvador Dali happened when I visited the Spanish seaside town of Cadaques, where Dali had a home. Nice place, cool vibe.

“Disinvited to a Screening, a Critic Ends Up in a Faith-Based Crossfire,” a 3.10 N.Y. Times story by John Metcalfe, is about how Orlando Sentinel critic Roger Moore managed to attend a screening of a fundamentalist right-wing documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which Ben Stein does a Michael Moore-ish job of selling the idea of “intelligent design,” and how he panned it and so on.

Intelligent design, which President George Bush allegedly believes in, is creationism in new clothes. Anyone who’s seen Inherit The Wind, the Stanley Kramer drama about the famous 1925 “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennesee, knows that creationism is a belief that God in heaven created everything as part of an immaculate design. They also know that creationism’s most fervent supporters during the monkey trial days were backwater yahoos — the religious right of the Calvin Coolidge era.
Premise Media Corporation, a right-wing religious organization involved in various Christian enterprises (including super-churches), produced and is distributing Expelled.
The irony is that I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking. However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero “interest” in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.
What I don’t get is why a sophisticated brainy fellow like Ben Stein would make a movie for Bible-belt types. He surely doesn’t believe that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, or that cavemen and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time. (This issue was brought up by a born-again Christian character in The Sopranos a couple of seasons back, and Tony replied, “What, like the Flintstones?”)

Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Byran during the Scopes “monkey” trial

Stein is a very bright fellow, and not in my judgment the type to look heavenward for answers to everything, and certainly not one to embrace the primitive attitudes of those who call themselves “God-fearing.” When I interviewed Stein for a 1994 Los Angeles magazine piece about Hollywood Republicans, he said that “the agenda of Republicans out here is the same as everyone else — get in on the goodies.” Stein, in short, is basically a right-wing guy who’s in business. What was he paid to be the star of Expelled? What are they paying him to attend early screenings?
In that same article screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd said that “people on the right are considered by people of the left to be too insensitive, too Darwinian. They’re not touchy-feely enough to write touchy-feely movies. They have been ghetto-ized into the action field.” Darwinian?
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