2008 Emmy Awards:

Best Actress, Comedy, Tina Fey from the series ’30 Rock’

One of the most exciting days in the Television world has recently come and gone. The 2008 Emmy Awards is a dazzling cross section of the very best that broadcasting has to offer and offers the ‘crème de la crème’ of current television productions an opportunity to be rewarded for entertaining us to such a great extent.

New and old faces alike, here are the winners:

Best Series, Drama
Mad Men

Best Series, Comedy
30 Rock

Best Actor, Drama
Bryan Cranston
‘Breaking Bad’

Best Actor, Comedy
Alec Baldwin
’30 Rock’

Best Actress, Drama
Glen Close
‘Damages'

Best Actress, Comedy
Tina Fey
’30 Rock’

Best supporting Actor, Drama Series
Zeljko Ivanek
‘Damages’

Best Supporting Actress, Drama Series
Dianne Wiest
‘In Treatment’

Best Supporting Actor, Comedy Series
Jeremy Piven
‘Entourage’

Best Supporting Actress, Comedy Series
Jean Smart
‘Samantha Who?’

Best Reality Competition Program
The Amazing Race

Cinema Casino Movie Review:

Brace yourself for the European school of Thriller!

Michael Haneke remakes the 1997 Austrian psycho-thriller film Funny Games – Naomi Watts and Tim Roth team up for the avant-garde thriller.

One thing that can be said about Michael Haneke’s style is that it is unconventional to say the least. The German born, Austrian director has enjoyed great achievements in the European film festival circuit especially with his 2001 film, La Pianiste (The piano teacher) where he starred Isabelle Huppert as a priggish, sexually repressed and socially estranged piano professor. La Pianiste shot Haneke up in the ranks of the great directors after the film won three of the most prestigious awards at the Cannes Film Festival – those for Best Actor, Actress and the highly esteemed Grand Prix award. Although La Pianiste never ascended to the American valued ceremonies such as the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, it was critically revered by many nonetheless.

In 1997, four years before his great 15 minutes to fame and the success of La Pianiste, Haneke toyed with the idea of creating a Clockwork Orange type film – one of fear, terror, and the opaqueness of a broader audience in connecting to cruelty and sub-human emotionality. This film was dubbed Funny Games, a name which bares an antonymic and sarcastic description of the actual actions and strifes contended in the film.  

Now, eleven years after the realization of the original, Haneke brings us a remake of the disturbing narrative. It seems like Haneke’s films have not been registered by most of American audiences and it is perhaps with this in mind that the director has decided to create the American version of the brusque original.

The film has more or less identical scenes as the original with occasional interferences from the able cast employed.

The plot reveals a well-off, thirty-something family (Tim Roth and Naomi Watts) departing to their lake holiday house in the mountains. Accompanying them is their son (Devon Gerhard) and beloved pet dog. Soon enough, the next door neighbor pays the family a visit and introduces them to two young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbert) who slowly begin to impose themselves on the family until a peeved Anne (Naomi Watts) asks her husband George (Tim Roth) to expel the young men from the premises. Paul (Michael Pitt) breaks George’s knee with his own golf club and the two men take the family hostage. From here on the film becomes a gloomy nightmare of psychopathic and sadistic proportions. The movie portrays a needed clichéd pair of deviants. Paul is the amoral intelligent type while Peter (Brady Corbert) is the stupefied sidekick who does as he’s told (he is however vicious). The pair commences by playing cruel games with the family that jeopardizes their well being as well as that of the dog. The games engaged by Paul and Peter go as far as a bet: the family must bet that they will be alive by 9 am the following morning although the evil duo thinks that such a feat would be very unlikely.