For those of us out there who are active moviegoers, the weekend of March 14 has been circled on our calendars for some time. While 2008 has seen a handful of worthwhile releases hit the cineplex (think Be Kind Rewind, think Charlie Bartlett), the indie-inclined viewer has had painfully few movie choices from which to choose from so far this year. However, all that changes this weekend when Neil Marshall's Doomsday, David Gordon Green's Snow Angels and Michael Haneke's Funny Games make their way to a theater near you. While all three will must sees (at least in my book), one of these flicks is drawing significant levels of pre-release controversy (if not great reviews). Specifically, Haneke's Americanized remake of his own 1997 pic Funny Games is being labeled by notoriously cranky film blogger Jeffrey Wells as being "the ugliest and most repulsive violent melodrama I've ever seen (including the thoroughly disgusting I Spit On Your Grave)" and, simultaneously, "a smart and nervy critique of sexy-violent movies ... and one of the ballsiest movies ever released by Warner Bros. in its 90 year history." Um, sign us up!

While won't put on a front and pretend that we have seen Haneke's 1997 original (we wonder what percentage of critics who have claimed to see this movie in their reviews actually did), we are big fans of both The Piano Teacher and Caché. And when you combine our appreciation for Haneke with a terrific cast (featuring Naomi Watts — easily one of the finest and most underrated actresses working today — Tim Roth and Michael Pitt), we have a must-see movie on our hands, despite what some of the critics have to say. Here's a quick sampling of some of the critics pre-reviews, none of which can dull our anticipation for Friday's release:
· "A highly, if grotesquely, skilled exercise in Snuff Guignol, Funny Games doesn't come out of nowhere. It has many antecedents, from the mocking cool sadism of A Clockwork Orange to the pressure-cooker intensity of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs to the house-party torture games of Roman Polanski's 1966 classic, Cul-de-Sac." [EW]
· "it was only a matter of time before the cinema of sadism would seek a new, virtually untapped market among the egghead arthouse crowd." [News Blaze]
· "There's disturbing, there's scary, there's terrifying. And then there's this movie." [Kyle Smith]
· "Shocking and deliberately manipulative." [Variety]
· "The most perverse movie ever released by a major American studio." [Esquire]