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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Funny Games (1997)




"The movie gives you what you think you want, and then gives you some more, and just when you think things can't get any worse, Haneke swoops in and smashes the wall between fiction and reality, turning the viewer into a direct accomplice to what's transpiring onscreen. It is an astonishing film, sure to be controversial, and quite simply unforgettable"

Funny Games plot is profoundly simple. A middle-aged  upper-middle-class Austrian family, mum (Anna,Susanne Lothar), dad (Georg, Ulrich Muhe) and their son  begin vacation at a lakeside summerhouse. There they encounter two young man, Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch). At first they seem polite and innocent enough, but upon being invited inside gradually proceed to terrorize the family, initially imposing themselves beyond comfortable social custom before eventually assaulting, taking hostage and playing sadistic games on them.The escalation of events is horrifying . 



One of the most popular criticisms of Funny Games is its lack of characterization of any of  four main characters.
 Funny Games is far from being a straightforward exercise in genre filmmaking, as is made clear by its notorious "fourth wall breaking". The first instance of this occurs when Paul, subtly and in extreme close-up, winks sinisterly at the camera. Later on the two villains totally obliterate the boundary between on-screen character and audience, as Paul and Peter directly address the viewer, asking us what we think is going to happen.Then towards the end of the film, when Ann gets hold of the shotgun and shoots  Peter,  Paul uses remote control can to rewind the scene .
"Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anyone who stays does!' Said Michael Haneke when it was suggested that the most 'morally appropriate" response to his excruciating German-language film Funny Games was to walk out. 

 
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