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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, scarybloodman09.jpgGrace 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.”

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One Response to “Cache and carry: Howard remakes Haneke?”

  1. steandric says:

    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).

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
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“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon