Michael Haneke is one of those filmmakers that I've known about for several years, reading reviews of his films as they were released in theaters and on DVD, but until today I had never actually seen any of them. And yet, I remember seeing a trailer several months back and, long before it showed the title, thinking, "Wait, did somebody remake Funny Games?" Soon enough my suspicion was confirmed and it was quickly followed by the revelation, "Ah, I see. Michael Haneke has remade Funny Games." In the months that followed I toyed with the notion of seeing the 1997 original first, but decided to view the remake on its own terms. In retrospect, this was probably the best course of action.

Funny Games is one of Haneke's more notorious films, dealing as it does with two unfailingly polite young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet in this version) who show up at the vacation home of a nice, upper middle class family (Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and Devon Gearhart) and proceed to terrorize the living shit out of them. It's difficult to say any more without giving the "game" away, but the whole thing starts with a simple request for eggs and, before it's over, they're not the only things that end up getting broken. Pitt and Corbet make for very creepy home invaders and the games they come up with are designed for maximum discomfort, both for the "players" and for the audience. In fact, Haneke has some rather pointed things to say about the kind of person who would "enjoy" the violence in a film like Funny Games (which is why it is kept, for the most part, offscreen). I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I can definitely say that I admire Haneke's chutzpah in putting a film like this out there, twice -- and I would take it over a hundred Saws or Hostels.

One final note: Best use of John Zorn's "Bonehead" and "Hellraiser" ever (not that I've ever heard them used anywhere else, but still).

Yasujiro Ozu's third and final remake was 1960's Late Autumn, which revisited the plot of 1949's Late Spring, swapping the gender of the parent to give Setsuko Hara the role of a widow eager to see her 24-year-old daughter happily married. Yôko Tsukasa plays the daughter, who's in no hurry to leave the nest, but that doesn't stop three of her father's old friends (Shin Saburi, Nobuo Nakamura and Ryuji Kita) from clumsily playing matchmaker. All three of them had crushes on Hara once upon a time as well, so when it becomes clear that Tsukasa won't leave her mother all alone, their solution is for the widower in their midst to propose marriage.

Others with a vested interest in seeing Tsukasa tie the knot include her friend from work (Mariko Okada), who takes the three older men to task for their meddling, a young man from one their firms (Keiji Sada) who is rejected sight unseen when they try to set it up, but has better luck when a meeting is arranged by a mutual friend, and her uncle (Chishu Ryu), who runs an inn in the country. The film moves along at Ozu's usual leisurely pace, slowly building to its foregone conclusion, with a few unexpected wrinkles along the way. It be wrong to call them plot twists, though. They're just the sorts of things that happen in life. As one of the matchmakers concedes after things fail to go completely as planned, "It's people who complicate life. Life is surprisingly simple."

Yasujiro Ozu's second film of 1959, Floating Weeds was another remake of one of his early silents -- in this case 1934's A Story of Floating Weeds, released in a dual package with it by the Criterion Collection. Criterion's Eclipse imprint is putting out a trio of silent Ozu comedies in April, so I'll wait on the latter until I can watch it in context. As for Floating Weeds, it tells the story of a kabuki troupe led by Ganjiro Nakamura that comes to a small fishing village and plays to ever-dwindling audiences until the show closes, leaving them stranded until another booking comes up.

Nakamura isn't too troubled by this turn of events since it means he can spend more time with an old flame (Haruko Sugimura) and their adult son (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), who has been led to believe that the actor is merely his uncle. This, however, doesn't sit too well with Nakamura's current leading lady (Machiko Kyô), who is quite the jealous type and convinces ingenue Ayako Wakao to seduce the young man. As often happens in cases like these, though, Wakao actually falls for him herself, leading to more than one confrontation with the volatile Nakamura. Chishu Ryu rounds out the cast as the impresario who brings the troupe to town and ends up taking a bath. Considering how hot it's supposed to be, I'm surprised we don't see more people doing just that.

Toward the end of his career Yasujiro Ozu turned his hand to remaking some of his early films. The first was 1959's Good Morning, an update of the 1932 silent I Was Born, But... A high-spirited comedy of manners (and the lack of them), Good Morning is unique in Ozu's oeuvre in that it is mostly seen from the point of view of the children in the story and it is a positively rife with fart jokes. (There's even a running gag about how one of the boys soils himself daily trying to force one out.)

The two main children are Minoru and his younger brother Isamu (Koji Shitara and Masahiko Shimazu), who wear matching outfits and frequently skip their English lessons to watch sumo wrestling on television at a neighbor's house. (Minoru is the one taking lessons; the only English phrase Isamu seems to know is "I love you.") Soon enough they're pestering their parents (Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyake) for a set of their own and eventually resort to taking a vow of silence until they acquiesce, which has unforeseen complications.

Even before then there's unrest amongst the neighbors since it is believed that Women's Association group head Haruko Sugimura (the mother of the boy who soils his pants) has spent their dues on a washing machine for herself. This turns out not to be the case, but later on Sugimura believes she's being snubbed by the two boys, leading to more misunderstandings. Rounding out the cast are Keiji Sada as the English teacher/translator who helps look for the boys when they go missing and won't admit that he's in love with their aunt, the equally reserved Yoshiko Kuga. The small talk they engage in may indeed be a "social lubricant," but it's not helping them express their feelings. At least the children know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease (or in this case, the television set).

The world wasn't crying out for another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1993, but it got one all the same and, for the most part, it probably could have done without it. This time the movie was simply called Body Snatchers and the action was shifted to an army base, which was probably seen as a thematic coup by at least one of its sets of writers. (The screen story is credited to Raymond Cistheri and genre veteran Larry Cohen, with Stuart Gordon & Dennis Paoli sharing screenplay credit with Nicholas St. John, frequent collaborator of director Abel Ferrara, so it's fairly safe to say he had the most input.)

The film is narrated by sulky teenager Gabrielle Anwar, daughter of EPA inspector Terry Kinney, who's carting the family around the south while he's evaluating how the U.S. Army is storing its chemical weapons. Anwar already knows what it's like to have a member of her family replaced, since stepmother Meg Tilly has filled in for her dead mother. (Naturally, Tilly is the first member of the family to become a pod person.) Soon after arriving at the base, Anwar makes friends with the general's rebellious daughter (Christine Elise) and a hotshot helicopter pilot (Billy Wirth), while Kinney has his run-ins with the dismissive general himself (R. Lee Ermey, who doesn't get to raise his voice once) and concerned Army doctor Forest Whitaker, who fills the Kevin McCarthy role by getting the most hysterical about the situation. (Similarly, Kinney's role as an EPA inspector echoes Donald Sutherland's part in the 1978 version.)

Certain motifs are carried over from the 1978 version, like the garbage trucks picking up human remains and the screams of the pod people when they identify anyone who isn't one of them. And from the 1956 version the filmmakers borrowed the use of voice-over narration and the feeling of being in an isolated community. What neither of those films had, though, was a scene of a helicopter launching rocket after rocket at a convoy that has been dispatched to military bases all over the country and blowing up the mother base real good. Whether this counts as a happy ending is open to debate, even with the note of ambiguity in the final moments.

Whoever said you can't go home again probably knew what they were talking about, but that's exactly what Michael Chambers does in 1995's The Underneath when he returns to Austin for his mother's wedding and decides to stick around and try to patch things up with the girlfriend he left in a lurch. And director Steven Soderbergh did the same after he completed the film, his fourth and one that convinced him he needed a break from studio filmmaking. At the time, this remake (of the 1949 film noir Criss Cross) seemed like a creative dead end to him, but I happen to think it's stylish enough to justify giving it a second look.

Working from his own script (written under the name Sam Lowry and sharing screen credit with Daniel Fuchs, who wrote the original screenplay), Soderbergh reunites with sex, lies and videotape star Peter Gallagher, who plays the charming drifter who finds himself inexorably pulled back into the orbit of old flame Alison Elliott, who has since taken up with abusive club owner William Fichtner, the sort of man you don't want to cross. The same can be said for Gallagher's resentful cop brother Adam Trese, who also has an unhealthy obsession with Elliott. The supporting cast is quite strong, with Joe Don Baker, Joe Chrest, Paul Dooley, Shelley Duvall and Elisabeth Shue all pitching in. And since the film was shot in Austin, Texas, Soderbergh got director Richard Linklater to play the doorman at the club where Gallagher seeks Elliott out. (He's the one who stamps Gallagher's hand "SUCKER" and tells him "Good luck.")

In many ways, it's almost a shame when the crime thriller part of the story has to kick in. Until then, Soderbergh sketches a pretty compelling portrait of a man trying to pick up the pieces and re-enter a life he thought he had long abandoned. The Underneath also finds him toying with a fractured narrative for the first time, using some of the editing techniques he would return to in The Limey and the visual shorthand he would use in Traffic to tell viewers when and where they are in the story. Even if Soderbergh considers the film a failure, at least it shows he was still willing to experiment.

When it came time for Don Siegel to direct the remake of The Killers in 1964, more than just cosmetic changes were made to the story. For one thing, the doomed man, here named Johnny North (played by a brooding John Cassavetes), is a hotshot racecar driver instead of a boxer. For another, he's working at a home for the blind when the killers (Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) come to carry out their hit. (That's an easy way to be sure there are no eyewitnesses.) And finally, instead of an insurance investigator the killers themselves decide to follow the trail and find out why they were paid $25,000 for a simple hit.

Another thing Siegel and screenwriter Gene L. Coon did was cut down on the number of flashbacks used to the tell the story. First Marvin and Gulager track down mechanic Claude Akins, who tells them all about Johnny's doomed romance with kept woman Angie Dickinson. The reason it's doomed is because the man she'd kept by is Ronald Reagan, playing the villain for the one and only time in his career (in acting, that is). Then they look up Reagan's old flunky, Norman Fell, and sweat some information out of him that leads them to the big man himself and, they hope, the $1 million payoff from a robbery they pulled four years ago. (Instead of a factory payroll, they rob a U.S. Mail truck carrying casino receipts with Johnny driving the getaway car.)

This version was originally made for television, but I can understand why it was considered too violent for broadcast. Marvin and Gulager are downright ruthless when it comes to extracting information out of people, and Gulager has an insolent way of playing with things wherever they go. Quentin Tarantino must have been taking notes when he was developing the characters of Jules and Vincent for Pulp Fiction. In the short term, Marvin and Dickinson would be reunited just a few years later in John Boorman's stylish Point Blank, an early example of what came to be known as neo-noir. This was probably the first, though.

The world wasn't crying out for a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978, but it got one anyway and, all things considered, I'm very glad it did. Relocating the action from small-town America to the bustling city of San Francisco at the culmination of the Me Decade, director Philip Kaufman and screenwriter W.D. Richter give the film more of a scientific grounding, fleshing out some things that had been glossed over in the earlier film. (For example, we actually watch as the alien spores travel through space until they arrive on Earth, delivered by the rain.) They also have more time to let the story develop organically (the remake runs a full 35 minutes longer than the original's lean 80-minute running time).

Donald Sutherland stars as a Department of Health inspector who delights in busting gourmet restaurants for health code violations and who has a crush on fellow government employee Brooke Adams, who becomes concerned when her dentist boyfriend Art Hindle (who would go on to star in David Cronenberg's The Brood the following year) becomes more withdrawn than usual. Sutherland takes her to a book signing by smug self-help guru Leonard Nimoy, where they run into another one of his friends, struggling poet Jeff Goldblum, who doesn't think much of Nimoy's work. Nimoy is able to talk some sense into Adams, but Goldblum goes off in a huff, winding up at the bathhouse he runs with wife Veronica Cartwright. Substitute a massage table for a billiard table and the rest of the story follows from there.

In a clever nod to the original, Kevin McCarthy appears as a ranting man who is seen running from a crowd, and director Don Siegel shows up as a taxi driver who picks Sutherland and Adams up when they're trying to get to the airport. (His small talk as they pull away from the curb: "Some night, huh?") Unsurprisingly, the special effects in the film are more sophisticated than the ones they had to work with in 1956 (the pod effects are especially disgusting), and there's an undercurrent of black humor that wasn't present the original (as Adams points out at one point, even the homeless get pods). And the dog scare that gives Sutherland and Adams away where they're trying to pass for pod people is damned freaky. All in all, it's a fun, suspenseful ride -- the rare remake that is the equal of the original.

Normally I abhor remakes, especially of horror films, and particularly of films by John Carpenter. I didn't bother with the recent versions of Assault of Precinct 13 and The Fog, and I was all ready to do the same with Rob Zombie's Halloween when I started seeing commercials for it (the curse of having television again) and, well, my curiosity got the better of me. What got me is it looked like it was going to be faithful to the original while giving Zombie the opportunity to craft his own vision of the night Michael Myers came home.

Eschewing the elegant, unbroken tracking shots that open the original, Zombie instead takes the time to paint a grim portrait of young Michael's (Daeg Faerch) home life. His mother (Sheri Moon Zombie) is a stripper, his stepfather (William Forsythe) is an abusive, crippled lout, and his older sister (Hanna Hall) is a little tramp. The only bright spot in his life is his baby sister Laurie, but he's already started down the path to being a psychopath, wearing a clown mask at the dinner table and killing small animals for pleasure. After taking out some aggression on a school bully (the first victim in a film with a body count far in excess of the original), Michael does in most of his horrid family (not just the slutty sister) and is sent to Smith's Grove Psychiatric Hospital under the supervision of Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who tries to reach him but finds it difficult once Michael starts donning homemade masks and refusing to speak.

Fast-forward 15 years. Loomis has given up on curing Michael and has written a book called The Devil's Eyes: The Story of Michael Myers. Myers (now a hulking beast of a man played by Tyler Mane) breaks out of the asylum and heads for Haddonfield, where his sister Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) is now a high school senior, completely unaware that she has a homicidal older brother. And I could describe how the rest of the film plays out, but it sticks close enough to the original that I doubt I need to. Some of the action has been moved around (a lot more scenes take place at the dilapidated Myers house) and the ending has been extended, but Zombie knows a good template when he sees one and that's what John Carpenter and Debra Hill gave him.

One of the major pleasures of Zombie's film is recognizing all of the genre veterans he got to be in it. You've got Brad Dourif as Sheriff Lee Brackett, Udo Kier and Clint Howard as two of the asylum's administrators, Danny Trejo as a guard who finds out the hard way that Myers doesn't care how nice you've been to him, Dee Wallace as Laurie's adoptive mother, Ken Foree as a trucker, Sybil Danning as a nurse, and Sid Haig as the cemetery manager who discovers that Michael's mother's headstone is missing on Halloween. And like in the original, Zombie has The Thing from Another World playing on television in a couple scenes (and throws in White Zombie, House on Haunted Hill and Forbidden Planet for good measure), and Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" also puts in a few appearances (along with other classic rock staples like "Love Hurts" and "Tom Sawyer").

When it gets right down to it, I don't regret going to see this (and paying $8.50 for the privilege), but it has in no way, shape or form replaced the original in my estimation. The most damaging embellishment is probably Zombie's need to give Myers a backstory -- a gambit that I didn't see the need for in the odious Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, either. We don't need to know what makes characters like Michael Myers and Leatherface tick. Not knowing why they do what they do is what makes them scary. "Was that the boogeyman?" Laurie asks near the end of the film (a line that got a bad laugh at the screening I saw). I'd say Michael Myers was better off when one could imagine that he really was.

In 1981, Jack Nicholson re-teamed with director Bob Rafelson for the first time since 1972's The King of Marvin Gardens to do a remake of the classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the first novel by James M. Cain and boasting the first screenplay by David Mamet (soon to be nominated for an Oscar for his second, 1982's The Verdict). Unlike Body Heat, which applied its film-noir trappings to a modern-day story, Postman stays resolutely in the '30s, when the original novel was set. It still amps up the sex and violence, though, making explicit what could only be hinted at in 1946.

Nicholson stars as a drifter who, after bumming a ride off a salesman (played by his One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest co-star Christopher Lloyd), winds up working at the roadside diner/service station run by Greek-American John Colicos and his much younger, decidedly non-Greek wife Jessica Lange. The first time they have an afternoon to themselves, Nicholson and Lange have some extremely graphic sex (if you can call it that) and soon after they're making plans to bump Colicos off. Things don't go the way they planned it either time they try it, though, which is where lawyer Michael Lerner and his shady associate John P. Ryan come into the picture. The film also features a bizarre interlude with Anjelica Huston as a lion tamer Nicholson has a one-night stand with and Brion James has a walk-on as a sailor unhappy with the way Nicholson shoots craps and then walks off with the money he wins.

I saw the original version of The Postman Always Rings Twice several years back and liked it well enough, even if it was hamstrung by the censorious era in which it was made, but I've always held off on seeing this one because of its middling critical reputation. I recently picked up Alain Silver and James Ursini's Film Noir Reader 4, though, and it contains an essay on noir remakes of the '80s, with particular attention given to this one since it was the first of the cycle, followed by Against All Odds (based on Out of the Past), No Way Out (based on The Big Clock) and D.O.A. I've never been a big fan of remakes in general, but I do like to see films in cycles, so I may catch up with some or all of these. There are certainly worse ways for one to pass the time.

In 1960, Patricia Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was made into a film by French director René Clément and retitled Purple Noon. The film was a huge success and made an instant star out of Alain Delon. Four decades later, director Anthony Minghella adapted the novel afresh, not only restoring its original title, but also exploring certain areas -- like Ripley's latent homosexuality -- that were simply too taboo when the earlier film was made.

Matt Damon stars as Ripley, whose talents (which include playing the piano in addition to forgery and impersonating other people) aren't exactly setting the world on fire when he takes advantage of a rich shipping magnate's offer to send him to Italy to coax the man's wayward son Dickie (Jude Law) into returning home to New York. When he gets to the village where Dickie is staying, though, Ripley becomes enamored of both his lifestyle and his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow) and quickly ingratiates himself into their lives. When the notoriously fickle Dickie tries to break things off with him, though, Ripley takes drastic measures and assumes his identity to ensure his continued comfort.

Complicating matters are socialite Meredith (Cate Blanchett), who already thinks Ripley is Dickie since that's how he first introduced himself to her, and playboy Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who sees through his charade, but things really come to a head when Dickie's father (James Rebhorn) arrives with a no-nonsense private detective (Philip Baker Hall) in tow. (This is on top of having the Italian police constantly breathing down his neck.) In the end, Clément wasn't allowed to let his protagonist get away scot-free, but Minghella makes it clear that while his Ripley may not get caught by the authorities, he's still going to be punished for his transgressions.

Thanks to Turner Classic Movies, today I finally got to see Fritz Lang's 1954 film Human Desire, based on the same Émile Zola novel as Jean Renoir's La Bête Humaine (or "The Human Beast," which was this film's working title). Made the year after The Big Heat, it features the same leads, with Glenn Ford as a railroad engineer returning home after three years in Korea and Gloria Grahame as the wife of his co-worker, assistant yard master Broderick Crawford (who was not in The Big Heat, but stay with me).

Crawford is a bit of a hothead, so when he loses his job he gets Grahame to ask a favor of a bigwig she knew when she was growing up. As it turns out, though, he's also the jealous type and lets it work on him until he takes drastic measures, implicating Grahame so she'll stay with him. Meanwhile, Ford is being pursued by Diane DeLaire as the daughter of the couple he's rooming with, who represents a much more conventional (and safer) choice than Grahame's desperate housewife.

This is actually not the first chance I've had to see Human Desire. In the spring of 2002, International House in Philadelphia showed it as part of a "Fritz Lang in the USA" double feature with The Big Heat. I must confess that I wasn't all that interested in Lang at the time, though, so I skipped it. It wasn't until that fall when I saw the restored print of Metropolis that I caught the Lang bug. I'm very glad that I did.

1955's House of Bamboo doesn't strike one as a typical Samuel Fuller film. For one thing, he didn't write it (that was Harry Kleiner's doing, Fuller is only credited with additional dialogue). For another, the film is far too subdued, although it does have its definite high points, the closing shootout at the amusement park being one of them. Most of all, it's the romantic subplot that slows things down and takes up far too much screen time, but this was a big studio picture -- shot in CinemaScope -- and I guess they had certain expectations.

Shot entirely on location in Japan, this is an interesting counterpart to the postwar films of Akira Kurosawa and others that showed the influence of Western culture and customs on Japanese society. In it, Robert Ryan is the leader of a group of ex-servicemen with criminal records who pulls jobs out of Tokyo. Robert Stack is an army cop sent undercover to infiltrate his organization and investigate the killing of one of the gang. (It seems if one is wounded during an operation, the standing order is to kill them so they can't get captured and talk).

Along the way, Stack gets involved with the gang member's Japanese widow (Shirley Yamaguchi), who helps him by posing as his kimona girl (thus earning her cold stares from her neighbors), and runs afoul of Ryan's right hand man (or ichiban), played by a hotheaded Cameron Mitchell. Also on board is DeForest Kelley as Charlie, who's an integral part of the organization, but not important enough to get a screen credit. Funny how that sort of thing worked 50 years ago.

So says Dame Judi Dench at the beginning of Casino Royale, the latest reboot of the James Bond franchise, this time by way of an adaptation of the first Bond book Ian Fleming ever wrote -- and not a remake of the 1967 spoof of the same name. Directed by Martin Campbell, who also helmed 1995's GoldenEye (which ushered in the Pierce Brosnan era and which was, coincidentally, the last Bond film I had seen), the film gives us Daniel Craig as a newly-minted 007, sprinting from Prague to the Bahamas to Venice and numerous points in between. He's a Bond of intense action -- and one who's not afraid to get his hands dirty. He knows how to use a gun, but he's also up for some vicious hand-to-hand combat and kinetic foot chases through unusual locations. (The chase through a Madasgascar construction site is a clear standout).

Dench returns as M, but there's no Q ("Sorry, Mr. Cleese, but we don't need you this time out.") and no overreliance on gadgets and gizmos (save for the most up-to-date cell phone and defibrillator technology). Mads Mikkelsen co-stars as Le Chiffre (a part last essayed -- to much less menacing effect -- by Orson Welles), banker to terrorists and organizer of the high-stakes poker tournament that Bond enters, staked by the British government; Jeffrey Wright is Felix Leiter, who plays alongside them and quickly finds himself outclassed; Giancarlo Giannini is Mathis, Bond's contact in Montenegro (the location of the titular casino), who also has a sideline in explaining the basics of poker to the slower members of the audience; and Eva Green is Vesper Lynd, the treasury agent who becomes more involved with Bond than either of them anticipated.

The screenplay was written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade (who wrote the last two Bond films) and Paul Haggis (who wrote the last two Clint Eastwood films and a little movie called Crash -- you may have heard of it). If I have one quibble with the film it is that at 144 minutes it tends to go on a bit too long, but for the most part it's exciting and engaging. At the end of the credits, one of the last messages that scrolls by is the standard "JAMES BOND WILL RETURN." With Daniel Craig in the role, I'll be sure to return as well.