Benny's Video Reviews and Ratings


  • ahhh1989
    October 27, 2009
    ahhh1989
    By far my favorite Haneke film and one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen.
  • jimbotender
    October 4, 2009
    jimbotender
    A haunting piece of art,Benny is like a neo-structuralist child of the remnants of Nazi youth.The repetitive violence he's self-subdued into,unbeknown to his parents leads us to a powerful question,that of the worth of human responsibility.
  • n1mr0d
    July 24, 2009
    n1mr0d
    slow by good. focus mom
  • HorrorMovieCinema
    May 2, 2009
    HorrorMovieCinema
    Benny's Video was the fifth Haneke's creation I watched after "The piano teacher", "Funny games", "The hour of the wolf" and "Cache". It is strong,allegorical,cynical and plain.With an actor's expression or line it offers you many thoughts and directions.This movie made me unders...( read more)tand why Haneke refuses to comment on the meaning of his films.You have to try and play his game.To decode his pictures and words which isn't so hard, trust me.The ending is also powerful and summarizes the whole picture.It was one of the best films I have ever seen.It is amazingly coordinated with our times even though it was filmed about 18 years ago. You should definitely try to find it! and I love Arno Frisch as Benny is Great and i also love him in Funny Games(1997) hes such a great actor and Anyways great Movie.
  • bbliumis
    January 19, 2009
    bbliumis
    hERE u have another amazing film from HANEKE.

    WATCH THIS PIG HOW DIES IN THE START.... THAT WAS NOTHING COMPARING ON WHAT U GONNA SEE!
  • Phonex
    December 20, 2008
    Phonex
    A lumbering, full-grown pig, muzzled through a leash that has been tied around its snout, is led outside the barnyard doors of an unidentified farm and into a clearing where a group of apparent bystanders cavalierly await its slaughter. The skittish, herky-jerky video image taken...( read more) from the handheld camera moves in relatively tight side view close-up to frame the head of the animal as the farmer places the barrel of a revolver onto its forehead between the eyes and, amidst its persistent (and disturbingly unnerving) suffocated grunts and squeals, pulls the trigger - the pig's body immediately collapsing to the ground, its limbs still involuntary twitching from the residual neurological response impulse to the bullet's fatal impact. The video image is then curiously paused and rewound in slow motion, the soundtrack audibly slowed to a cadent, monotonic bass to the point where the origin of the sound becomes strangely alien, disembodied, and haunted. The viewer of the amateur footage is revealed to be its unseen videographer, an adolescent named Benny (Arno Frisch), who shutters himself for hours in his dark, cluttered room perpetually immersed in the self-induced, often compounded stimuli of loud music, rented videos, and broadcast television, his view of the outside world paradoxically reduced to a live video feed onto a monitor from a camera that has been positioned to point out of his shade-drawn window and onto the street. His distracted, emotionally distant father (Ulrich Mühe) and equally disaffected, obliging mother (Angela Winkler) seem tolerant of Benny's hermeticism, even exploiting his estranged, sentinel-like omnipresence in the household and penchant for video surveillance to spy on their older daughter Evi's suspect activities after moving out of the family home, as she uses the well-appointed apartment to host a party designed to generate revenue through a pyramid scheme in her parents' absence. It is a convenient domestic arrangement of tacit mutualism (and mutual disregard) that soon reveals the moral crisis innate in their dysfunctional relationship when Benny befriends a seemingly bored and aimless young girl (Ingrid Stassner) who transfixedly watches the random features displayed from the shop window of a local video store each afternoon after school, and brings her home to share in his obsessive, alienated reviewing of the slaughter footage.

    The second installment on the correlative effects of urban alienation and media violence in contemporary society in what would become known as Michael Haneke's trilogy of "emotional glaciation" (along with The Seventh Continent and 71 Fragments in a Chronology of Chance), Benny's Video is a provocative, confrontational, and indelibly haunting exposition on isolation, rootlessness, displaced turmoil, and human desolation. Using the opening sequence of the animal slaughter home video as Benny replays, hyperextends the moment of death through frame by frame pauses, or otherwise manipulates the resulting images captured on tape into increasingly indistinguishable resolution and textured, decontextualized audiovisual patterns of signal noise, Haneke illustrates the underlying process of cognitive abstraction - and consequently, systematic dissonance - that serve to not only dissociate the innate violence of the act with its logical consequence, but also blur the distinction between the experiential levels of fictional and real violence through the synthesis (and contextual anesthetization) of public information and entertainment in the creation of a commercially viable, commodified consumer media product. Moreover, through the narrative incorporation of Evi's pyramid scheme, Haneke also provides an intrinsic structural correlation to the collapse - and perversion - of the nuclear family in the absence of communication, trust, moral guidance, and emotional engagement as the ever-widening confidence game reveals an overarching socio-behavioral pattern of self-interest, a mindset that compels the individual to become progressively distanced from the initial source of the "investment" in order to realize profit, and the requirement of the participant's covert complicity (and cover-up) in the perpetuation of the scheme. It is this underlying disarticulation of moral responsibility and dissociation of cause and effect in the wake of media saturated infotainment and socially fostered, empty shell games of deflected accountability that is inevitably reflected in the film's eerie prescience on its examination of the consequence of desensitizing technology and the pervasiveness of media violence - a senseless and tragic portrait of empty privilege, alienated communication, and despiritualized bankruptcy.
  • daghka
    October 13, 2008
    daghka
    Haneke has a way of really making the audience feel uncomfortable. This film is by far his best and the most accomplished in how he intermingles video with film and plays with it and toys human emotions in the cinema. I personally was totally twisted in my mind absolutely watchin...( read more)g this and I am saying that because because I am still twisted and have no definite term to say anything regarding this. The whole idea of the destructive impact of video and the life it encapsulates is just fascinating and I wonder how this is for someone involved in that business like Haneke.
  • rebvodka042099
    July 13, 2008
    rebvodka042099
    Desturbing and beautifully directed but it's probably one of Haneke's weakest movies.
  • egyptiansushi
    June 26, 2008
    egyptiansushi
    Another wonderfully woe ending by Haneke.
  • tammytrauma
    June 13, 2008
    tammytrauma
    I don't know if haneke's other films have the same vibe and pacing, but I did not like this one too much. I realize that the characters void of conscience or compassion were intentional, but I was really not engaged.

    I can see why some appreciate it though, I give it it's due. ...( read more) A 3 star rating in my opinion.
  • olechristian
    June 8, 2008
    olechristian
    Damn you, Haneke! Why must your movies be so deadly dull and pointless?!
  • SaintFrancisofAssisi
    June 6, 2008
    SaintFrancisofAssisi
    Not interested in seeing this.
  • justindavis1
    March 7, 2008
    justindavis1
    Another good Michael Haneke film. Not his strongest, but I like all Haneke, and enjoyed this film.
  • consciouscadaver
    October 8, 2007
    consciouscadaver
    Definately raises alot of questions
  • cacutshaw
    October 5, 2007
    cacutshaw
    Very good film. The first Haneke film I saw and was really impressed. Bleak, depressing and well told.
  • juanchi119
    June 18, 2007
    juanchi119
    great movie!! one of the best villains ever!!!!
  • emrikmovies
    June 4, 2007
    emrikmovies
    scary, haneke is the king!
  • theresasein
    April 17, 2007
    theresasein
    I watched this movie a couple of years ago and expected some light teenage love story as the backside of the dvd seemed to promise and got literally blown out of my shoes.The turning point in the story came so sudden, brutally and unexpected that it really went down your spine.I ...( read more)was torn between keep on focussing the screen out of curiosity and incredibility and turning it off because I couldn`t stand the sight.
    A movie that thrilled me but that I am not going to watch again.
  • pryde4747
    April 14, 2007
    pryde4747
    One of Michael Haneke's best films: disturbing, beautiful and headed up with great acting.
  • xaajiciise
    September 13, 2006
    xaajiciise
    i want to sexjid 9ad
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  • JeffHaneke
    June 6, 2006
    JeffHaneke
    Vraiment brillant. Le tout est bien construit et extrêmement bien filmé.

Summary

Benny's Video Summary