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If the Brechtian alienation effects of such unconventional and meta-cinematic addresses to the camera/audience in Funny Games U.S. don’t quite come across, the film’s deployment then violation of more conventional cinematic and generic codes (especially those of the suspense-thriller-horror movie) are even more effective in the remake…  Haneke has been clear about who he hoped to address with the remake: The first film didn’t reach the public I think really ought to see this film.  So I decided to make it again.  The original was in German, and English-speaking audiences don’t often see subtitled films.  When I first envisioned Funny Games in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie… But because I made Funny Games in German with actors not familiar to U.S. audiences, it didn’t get through to the people who most needed to see it. Those who did see it expecting a typical genre film with lots of gory violence were of course outraged.  Their online condemnation of the film has been fierce but has also generated some more thoughtful response urging the disappointed to examine the reasons they disliked it so much.  Haneke was no doubt pleased with the intensity, if not the number, of irate responses to the film when it opened. —Roy Grundmann, A Companion to Michael Haneke, 2010.

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“A lesser artist than Laughton might have to busy himself through an entire career to break half the Hollywood shibboleths that Laughton shattered in this single work.  As the mad, murderous zealot, Laughton cast heroic he-man Robert Mitchum.  Against Tinseltown tradition, the script stayed remarkably faithful to the original novel, even though this mean killing protagonist Shelley Winters before the film was half over, and serveral years before Hitchcock was to do away with Janet Leigh in the first half of Psycho.  Laughton ensured that his music composer and editor, rather than start their work after the footage was shot, participated during the entire making of the movie.  With his art director and his cinematographer, Laughton created a visual style which forsook objective realism for the images of a child’s dream world.  He used devices such as the iris-in which, outside of cartoons (and Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons), had not been seen since silent picture days.  He employed highly effective but rarely utilized gambits, such as helicopter shots (nowadays an action movie staple), and devised images that had never been seen in the movies before, from the boy photographed through the leaf shadoes on his wall, to the murdered woman sitting in her car beneath the river. “The end result was a film which earned wildly mixed notices from the press and a resounding veto at the box office.  To some, it was artistic, to others, arty.  To Hollis Alpert of Saturday Review, who made Hunter the subject of one of the magazine’s rare movie-oriented cover stories, it was one of the Ten Best of the Year, exploring the expressive qualities of the medium more than any other film of 1955… Time gave this picture a glib pan, and didn’t include it on its list of movies currently worth seeing.  William K. Zinsser, critic of the New York Herald-Tribune, placed the film among his Ten Best, yet the redoubtable Bosley Crowther of the New York Times thought Laughton’s first effort a nice try that had misfired.” —Preston Neal Jones, Heaven and Hell To Play With, 2002.

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Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis’s feature debut Amreeka was acclaimed at both The Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals in 2009.  Her narrative features a family of Palestinian immigrants adjusting to post-9/11 American life in suburban Illinois and is partially autobiographical. “So the filmmaker understands from personal experience that immigration sagas are at once the saddest, the happiest and the most quintessentially American of stories. Every new group of arrivals faces the same general challenges as well as their own specific ones in their quest to come to terms with this most welcoming and most forbidding of new homes.  [The film] brings a keen and serious eye as well as that feeling for affectionate human comedy to this fraught situation, smartly avoiding both stridency and sentimentality in the process — it’s an elegant balancing act.” —Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

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“Almost all nominees come to the award show now–the biggest night of the showbiz; I saw Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon papers–about whom a documentary film is made this year–in the crowd (Even Steve Jobs is there). It was not always the case: Martin Brando refused his Oscar. In 1971, Vanessa Redgrave refused to attend after being nominated, saying that Americans didn’t like her and that the Nixon administration refused her a visa. Six years later, she did attend the ceremony only to accept the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and denounced Nixon and the “Zionist hoodlums” in her acceptance speech. George C. Scott dismissed Oscars as a ‘two hour meat parade’, and refused to attend even when he won Best Actor for Patton. Some absences were tragic: Sidney Howard, winner of the 1940 screenplay award for his Gone with the Wind, was run over by a tractor just before Oscars night. Some were intentional: George Bernard Shaw refused to cross the Atlantic to collect his writing award for Pygmalion. He even quoted: ”It’s an insult for them to offer me any honour, as if they had never heard of me before – and it’s very likely they never have. They might as well send some honour to George for being King of England”. Shaw received his statuette by mail and used it as a door stop. In view of all these absences, Joan Crawford’s in 1946 was masterly. Nominated as best actress for Mildred Pierce, she didn’t want to face losing so she claimed she was ill with flu. She sent her make-up artist and hair stylist to the ceremony in case she won, which she did. Immediately, the statuette was sent to her hospital, closely followed by photographers. There she posed for the above pictures. They stole the next day’s front pages and upstaged everyone else who won that night.” via Iconic Photos.