Michael Haneke remaking Funny Games
 

Just read Michael Haneke shot a remake of his own Funny Games due to be released in October. And now it's not an Austrian film, but a US/UK/French release. Although I like Haneke and believe he can make a nice film (even a remake adopted for English-speaking audience), now just two examples come to mind - Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge which was not much worse, but definately no better than the original directed by himself, and George Sluizer's The Vanishing turned out to be a catastrophe after his own brilliant Spoorloos. I'm afraid Haneke can stand in a row with these failures.

Naomi Watts (Also producer) and Tim Roth are fronting this one, so unlike The Grudge, it won't have painfully bad acting. I hear it is nearly a shot-for-shot remake, kind of like what they did with Psycho, but from German to English.

I'm not a big fan of the original, I know what it was getting at, but it just didn't work on all the levels it could have. Memorable flick though.

There's already a thread about this remake:

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=486003

It's generally a good idea to do a search before starting a new thread, in case somebody else has already started one.

Alfred Hitchcock remade The Man Who Knew Too Much and Ozu re-did Floating Weeds.

Oh, believe me, I did. I'm not a newbie here so I did, but we all know how many irrelevant threads we get after hitting the search button...
Well, yeah, acting might be on the good level, but still... Why do it? I still can't understand a reason for Van Sant remaking Psycho. The remake was OK, but still why? If only to take it as some kind of an cinematic experiment...

Search Tip: Search Movie's forum using "Title Only"... Makes life a lot easier.

And why remake your own movie? To bring it to a bigger audience. Haneke is aware of the American dislike of anything foreign and he wants it seen, so what better way to test the english market than have some very talented actors remake a well received movie?

While I have my reservations about some of Haneke's work, he is still a filmmaker with an amazingly assured grasp on the forms and functions of cinema, much more than Sluizer. And I don't mean that as a negative on Sluizer. I just see, in Haneke's films, the hands of a master at work. I may not agree with how he uses that skill in some cases, but it's still something to behold.

So, I look upon this remake as an item of interest, rather than some kind of attempt to appeal to a broader market (regardless of what the filmmakers' actual intentions are).

Though, Funny Games is one of his films I have yet to see. Hopefully one of the venues around me will feature the original when the remake debuts. His stuff is so much more effective on the big screen.

Then a question that's been interesting me for a long time - why Americans don't percept that well anything foreign?

Actually me too, and I'm not that kind of person who always starts moaning: Why, oh God, why?! Why Hollywood always has to ruin good movies with their pityful remakes?!.. No, I'm just a little bit anxious about it, that's all. It's just that Funny Games was arguably a great film. And now Haneke makes a remake and condemns it for a life-long comparison which 99% will be not in favour of this remake. I don't know - maybe it will be ingenious like the rest of his work (although I haven't seen it all), but still I'm anxious...

Lots of US moviegoers just don't like reading subtitles, plain and simple. And furthermore, a lot of them might be leery of watching a movie without a recognizable face. So Haneke gets to kill two birds with one stone with this remake.

I'm really dying to see what this new version will be like. Will it be a virtual shot-for-shot remake with American accents? Funny Games is absolutely brutal, so will it be a straight remake that has been toned down slightly? Or, horror of horrors, will it be like when Sluzier remade his film The Vanishing for American audiences, and had to end it neatly and happily with everything done up in a little bow?

Guess time (and a trailer) will tell.

As much as I love Haneke, I wish he would've made something new instead - or maybe it's because I dig him so much...

He needs to remake Cache just so Ron Howard can't.