By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Cache and carry: Howard remakes Haneke?
While Michael Haneke‘s American remake of his own Funny Games, starring Tim Roth, Michael Pitt and Naomi Watts (co-producing again after The Painted Veil) for Warner Independent, holds creepy allure, with rumors that he won’t hold back on any of what make the earlier film so horrifying, news of Ron Howard‘s (The Da Vinci Code) expressed desire to have his way with Haneke’s Cache is less toothsome. Report Diane Garrett and Steven Zeitchik in Variety, Grace is Gone prodco Plum Pictures has pulled Hidden out for the mogul, adding that the “Universal version, to be set in the U.S., is expected to amp up the suspense and consequences.” One of the better examinations of the original comes from Robin Wood in Artforum: “Haneke’s dominant concern is with the bourgeoisie—its inner tensions, its perpetual uneasiness, its guilt, the despair that underlies and disturbs its complacency… Haneke is perhaps the most pessimistic of all great filmmakers. But insofar as there are positive values embodied in his films they are expressed, albeit tentatively, through the children… This recurring and developing motif receives perhaps its most remarkable enactment in the final shot of Cache (during which, sensing the imminence of the end credits, half the audience typically gets up and leaves, missing the film’s ultimate and crucial revelation, registered characteristically in distant long shot).” Wood says something of Haneke hardly ever said of Howard: “Every Haneke film represents a challenge to the spectator; his films demand the closest, most alert attention and repeated viewings (I began to feel confident that I had understood Cache somewhere around the third or fourth)… Many dislike Haneke’s films. They are too dark, too depressing, too cruel. Even at their close there is seldom cause for optimism and the future remains uncertain.”
as sussanne lothar being the undisputed lead of the 1997 german version of “funny games” directed by the same michael haneke, this remake stars naomi watts playing the lothar’s role of anna, is clearly also the lead, supported by tim roth and michael pitt.
please do not slight oscar-nominee watts against roth, or an actress (female) against an actor (male).