“I didn’t want to offend anyone, but I did perhaps want them to be provoked. If anybody is offended, it’s his [or her] own fault. You are free to leave the theater after 5 minutes. I have always said: anyone who watches the film from beginning to end apparently has needed it,” says Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke to Stern about his latest film Funny Games U.S., a scene for scene, shot by shot remake of his own notorious creation bearing the same name sans the U.S. tag a decade ago. The original German cast (starring The Lives of Others‘ Ulrich Mühe) is replaced by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, and the story is taken to the US. Why a remake of his own film? Because, the controversial director elaborates, the 1997 original has not reached his intended American audience due to the language barrier and the average viewers’ aversion to subtitles.
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Popularity: 33%
June 6th, 2008
Posted by
em8chel <<
spoiler alert, thought for food >>
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This is indeed a sick ol’ world…
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Popularity: 55%
October 12th, 2007
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em8chel <<
bruising my religion, party like it's 1984, spoiler alert >>
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The first time I saw The River, it being my first movie by Tsai Ming-Liang, I brushed it off as overdrawn and artsy. The Wayward Cloud from 2005, however, has so impressed me that I started digging into Tsai’s film archive: Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a fantastic idea somewhat lost in pretension; Rebels of The Neon Gods feels like a reminiscent tribute to my teenage years. When Tsai’s latest I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone premiered last year at the London Film Festival, a friend of mine who saw it told me, vaguely and without irony, that the film was about a mattress. He was not all too enthusiastic about it alright. So when the movie opened in Taipei a couple of weeks ago, I walked into the movie theater half expecting to be staring at a flea ridden mattress for 2 hours.
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Popularity: 34%
April 20th, 2007
Posted by
em8chel <<
gay stew's coming to dinner, spoiler alert, thought for food >>
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It is 1984. The totalitarian state of paranoia and terror George Orwell immortalized in his cautionary tale half a century ago is really happening right in front of our eyes. This is East Germany, where Stasi, the ruthless GDR secret police, “shield and sword” of the regime, spies on its citizens to find everything there’s to know about “the lives of others” by wiring apartments, tapping phone lines, and turning family members, friends, neighbors and colleagues into informants. It is estimated that some 102,000 Stasis and as many as 2 million informants have been recruited to espionage and oppress the 17 million population over four decades. Violators of the GDR criminal code, such as “Treasonable Relaying of Information” (talking to a journalist from West Germany), “Treasonable Agent Activity” (planning immigration to West Germany) or spreading “propaganda hostile to the state” (criticism of a party member) are to be severely “corrected”. This all in the name of “protecting the party and the state”.
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Popularity: 47%
February 24th, 2007
Posted by
em8chel <<
spoiler alert, thought for food >>
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