Oh hell.

My man Roger Ebert [Edit: I guess it was actually Ebert's editor. Dang. Still good review though] said it best: "This isn't a movie, it's a thesis. "Funny Games" represents the laborious execution of an abstract notion. The concept is the movie, kind of like Andy Warhol's ''Empire'' (1964), an eight-hour stationary shot of the Empire State Building. You don't have to sit through the whole thing to get the point, unless you really want to."

The two…

[Nine years later, I kind of hate this review but I'm leaving it up for now because a number of people seem to like it.]

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver was released in 1976, after the end of the Vietnam War. This was a time when America was rethinking the posters on its cultural wall. The massacre at My Lai by American troops had been made public years earlier, in 1969. Many citizens felt disillusioned with the idea of America as…