You're going to criticize Aronofsky for resorting to nifty tricks, and yet praise Haneke, the director of Funny Games? Come on now. Explain to me how the rewind sequence in Funny Games is any different. It served no purpose other than to say "Hey, that looked cool!"
One of Funny Games' intents is to bring to the surface the expectations that we have for the films we watch. Chief among these expectations is the rule of karma (or what we interpret to be karma in the Western world), or, simply put, the expectation that the good guys will come out on top and the bad guys will get theirs. But, Haneke wants nothing to do with escapism; film, to him, isn't meant to be a panacea that imposes moral order onto something that he believes to be chaotic and meaningless (i.e., life).
Ultimately, then, the rewind sequence serves to, at least partially, satisfy Haneke's aforementioned intent. We, as an audience, get a sense of relief when one of these young sociopaths is finally shot and, presumably, killed. But, then Haneke rewinds the film in order to show us that he won't acquiesce to the unstated demands that most viewers have. Condescending? Maybe. Effective and purposeful? Most definitely.
You know I respect you tdigle, but that's simply wrong. Aronofsky's films don't deal with social themes? Drug addiction isn't a social theme? I'm sure you've seen The Wrestler, and while it's obviously a character study first and foremost, it clearly deals with several social issues including poverty and addiction. Besides, I'm not sure how the fact that Haneke deals primarily in social issues makes his films better than those that are character studies. That's a pretty outlandish statement.
Do Aronofsky's films offer a critical look at society and examine how it affects the characters of his films? I would argue that this is not the case. His characters are addicted to drugs, and they are impoverished, but he doesn't really explain why they are addicts or extremely poor. Aronofsky takes things as they are. There's nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't preclude him from being a great director, but it does show that Aronofsky, relative to Haneke, doesn't look at the big picture, or how things work on a macro rather than micro level.
Furthermore, in mentioning how Haneke deals with social issues, I was merely stating facts and looking for a point of comparison between the two. No theme has more value than any other, so I'm not sure where you got that impression.
Like I said before, I haven't seen La Pianiste, but I'll have to see it now that i've heard you speak so highly of it. It would have to be unbelievably amazing though to be more harrowing than Requiem For a Dream. Requiem is genuinely one of the most frightening films I've ever seen.
Perhaps I simply have a different outlook on Requiem than you do because the themes of the film are ones that I can identify with from personal experience.
Haneke is great don't get me wrong. But I've never seen a film by him and thought "Well, he just summed up every single aspect of the topic he was dealing with, no film will ever be necessary again to delve into that subject" in the way that Requiem does for me. It basically makes any further films about drug addiction obsolete IMO.
It is probably the case that we do have different perspectives on the films that we watch, as you say. And, I will agree with you to a certain extent that Haneke doesn't deal with subjects with such finality as other directors. But, I don't see how this is meant to be disadvantageous to Haneke, as, instead, with his films, he has provided unprecedented insights into the human condition. I don't think any film of his better demonstrated this than Cache, which seeks to show that egoism plays a bigger role in our lives than we want to admit. And, if Haneke's argument here does have merit, then there are many, many disheartening implications for social progress.
