It looks sick, which is presumably the point.  The two squeaky-white lads invade the family’s home, cripple the father, and spend the rest of the night torturing the helpless victims (and presumably killing at least one of them).  The perpetrators are polite, well-dressed, and gleefully sadistic. 

The same goes for the movie itself, which seems to be a cut above the usual “masked guy slaughters horny teenagers” exploitation flick.  Haneke looks to be genuinely talented.  I have little doubt that he’s made a quality film.

The hot debate is whether Funny Games is torture porn along the lines of Saw and Hostel (which I haven’t seen) or, as the director says, an indictment of violence-loving American movie audiences.  Allegedly, he’s not glorifying or showcasing violence so much as making us feel bad for how much we love it.

That's for someone else to figure out, because I will never, ever watch this movie.  I hate films like this.  I hate being subjected to their previews, and I refuse to sit through them. 

This is not a high-minded protest.  I don’t care if Haneke wants me to salivate at torture, or whether he thinks I’m a Neanderthal for doing so.  There's nothing inherently wrong with what he's peddling, but I can't watch it.

I simply can’t stomach the creepy mood, the graphically drawn-out pain, or the “are they going to die?” suspense.  It is not my thing.  It is not worth two hours of my time.  I’m sure some great art is supposed to make me feel sick and uncomfortable, but I will happily miss out.

This isn't a screed against violence in movies.  I enjoy shoot-‘em-up violence, kung-fu violence, sports violence, military violence, realistic Godfather violence, and all-the-bad-guys-die Sly/Arnold violence.  Blood doesn’t faze me.  Explosions are awesome. 

Maybe these things desensitize us, but we should be intelligent enough to handle it.  We can stay civilized while paying lip service to our natural caveman impulses.   

One of my favorite films is Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, which must have set the record for creatively gory on-screen deaths.  The helpless Mayans are stabbed, gutted, skewered, beheaded, bitten by rattlesnakes, and in a rare moment of mercy, simply pushed off a cliff.  

Gibson takes a certain undeniable glee in filming all of this, but the violence is not his point.  There is always humanity and uplift to balance the unrelenting death.  We wince when good Mayans die, and we feel a certain thrill when the bad guys go down, but there is always something bigger happening than the torture of innocents.

After seeing the Funny Games preview four times, I get a different sense from it.  The pain seems to be the point.  It might be highbrow, or lowbrow, or tacky, or brilliant.  But we are the ones being tortured, and I can't sit through it.

If you can, great.  There’s room for everything in film, and in life.  But I know the movie would reduce me to a curled-up ball of goo, and that’s not an experience I’ll voluntarily endure.