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When I first heard that Funny Games was being remade for the U.S. multiplex, I couldn't imagine a more unlikely crossover between extreme European cinema and the American mainstream. But now this. Gosh. I know HBO is reputedly starving for new, edgy content. But really, what the hell is going on?

04.01.08 | HBO COMMISSIONS FUNNY GAMES, COMEDY-DRAMA SERIES BASED ON MICHAEL HANEKE’S FILMS, TO BEGIN AIRING THIS FALL

LOS ANGELES, April 1, 2008 – HBO, in conjunction with Halcyon Pictures and Tartan Films, is set to begin production on the 12-episode first season of the new HBO comedy-drama series FUNNY GAMES, it was announced today by Nicki Brand, executive vice president, HBO Entertainment. Michael Pitt (“The Dreamers,” “Last Days”) and Brady Corbett (“Thirteen,” “24”) will star in the series, reprising their roles from the recent Warner Independent Pictures feature film.

Slated to debut October 31, FUNNY GAMES is executive produced by Michael Haneke (“Cache”) and Ron Howard (“The Da Vinci Code”). Based on the 1997 film directed by Haneke, the show looks at a different ordinary American family each week as they cope with the arrival of the white-clad Peter and Paul, two unwelcome guests who enjoy sinister “funny games” that turn their hosts’ lives upside down.

“FUNNY GAMES is an intense, thought-provoking series that’s unlike anything else HBO has presented before,” said Brand. “The show undermines the creature comforts of the bourgeoisie and mocks the American television audience through telling moments of sadism and brutality in a way that broadcast TV can’t do.”

“We’re definitely going to push the envelope,” said Howard. “Michael’s brilliant films never found the audience they deserved, but I’m incredibly excited to think that, every week, the HBO viewing audience will have the opportunity to rethink its relationship to the thoughtlessly violent entertainment spectacles it craves.”

The show will also introduce a groundbreaking interactive component. Midway through each episode, viewers will vote via 900 number or text message on whether or not the family in that week’s installment should be allowed to survive. But, in a soul-shattering twist that underscores the relation between cinematic spectatorship and sadism, each installment will nonetheless end with the casual murder of each family member, as well as any pets.

“Since I first conceived it in the mid 1990s, FUNNY GAMES has always been my intelligent, passionate reaction to stupidly violent American cinema and the audience of shabby, knuckle-dragging cretins that thoughtlessly consumes this kind of naïve, morally destitute entertainment,” said Haneke. “Fuck you,” he added.

I hadn't realized that music-video director extraordinaire Mark Romanek was attached to helm Universal's big-deal remake of The Wolf Man. But, well, not any more .... Hey, remember that Utah-based cottage industry built around editing violent and salacious bits from DVDs in order to protect the sensibilities of family-minded locals? One of its mini-moguls has been arrested for allegedly paying to get blow jobs from 14-year-olds (original reports said this guy was one of the founders of the core Clean Flicks operation, but apparently he's just a second-stringer and the famous original Clean Flicks is now apparently suing him over the misunderstanding) .... In other decency news, the FCC (citing a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue) has just declared your butt a sex organ .... Also, You Suck at Photoshop .... And, finally, enjoy words from Ghostface Killah and Harlan Ellison (not at the same time or in the same room, mind) on getting paid.

Ghostface


Harlan

With the arrival of this new R-rated promo-clip montage, it becomes obvious that Warner Independent is still trying to figure out what the fuck to do with Michael Haneke's sure-to-be-unpleasant Funny Games remake.

Well, the writers' strike is on. And as tempting as it is to pontificate on the role of the director as the real authorial voice in filmmaking, or to suggest various roads to amiable compromise, I have to say go writers. That screenwriters are still being compensated for video sales at a compromise rate agreed to when home-video was still a rental market seems unjust to me, given the profitability of DVD sales — and demands for royalties on Internet-distributed content that outpace what they originally got for VHS are morally defensible from a won't-get-fooled-again standpoint if nothing else. It seems disingenuous to suggest that the content industry won't be able to monetize the freaking Internet. (See Jon Stewart, above.) Big Corporate versus Organized Labor — this is how the system is supposed to work.

For a long time I was resistant to the idea of making a point of reading novels that were being made into films. If a noted filmmaker's reading list intersects your own, then fine -- but I'm generally more interested in the film qua film than I am in its relationship with the source material, unless said source material is uncommonly fine. I found complaints about changes made by Peter Jackson to the Tolkien mythology to be tediously petty, especially since the films turned out so well (and also because the books bored my pants off as a youngster), and although I suppose I'm grateful when a talented critic nutshells the vagaries of a particular book-to-film adaptation, I seldom feel the need to do the kind of homework required to elucidate that process myself. At the end of the screening, after all, the film needs to stand on its own.

The death of a great artist is easier to take, for obvious reasons, when that artist's body of work is more or less complete. Robert Altman, for instance, died after making a pretty good musical and before he could start work on a new, off-the-wall project. But Ingmar Bergman more or less retired back in 1982, upon the release of Fanny and Alexander, his lengthy but highly entertaining account of two very eventful childhoods. It's not that I'm less sorry to see him go, exactly, but that the body of work left behind feels intact — like a journey that's reached an at-least-somewhat-satisfactory destination — rather than simply incomplete.

Well, I'll be damned. It looks like Kirby Dick's little movie on the ratings system may have done some good.

I like to keep these environs hype-free as a general rule, but I really like the posters that have come over the transom for "Planet Terror" and "Death Proof," the segments directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, respectively, for the April release of Grindhouse. (Click each image for a larger version.)