Two movies in limited release at the Lagoon Theater reaffirm what many parents and most if not all grandparents have feared for decades: Youth and its American incarnations in particular are as disenchanted as ever.

Michael Haneke's remake of his own movie "Funny Games" is audacious for two reasons. 1. It is a shot-by-shot remake of his 1997 Austrian movie, also titled "Funny Games," except made-over with more recognizable headshots, namely Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt (when, after all, was the last time you set out for the theaters to see the latest picture starring young Arno Frisch, main character of the first "Funny Games"?) 2. It's determinedly sadistic with all the implied torture and violence its youth impart on a vacationing couple and their young boy. And because you're watching it and maybe enjoying it, and because your ethics are supposed keep you away from such indulgences, you are a determinedly masochistic, possibly sado-masochistic, member of the audience. This is no doubt by design.

The other is "Paranoid Park" by director Gus Van Sant, who has made a career out of obsessing over snapshots of young people's idiosyncratic traumas, and as of late, high school students' specifically. He did as much with "Elephant," a movie that delighted 2003 audiences everywhere with its drawn out school day (as they all were when lived through) that ends early with a school shooting depicted in fine detail. The camera of his movie "Last Days" hung around Blake, also played by Michael Pitt, who it seems safe to say is the face of disenfranchised America, one that no one has seen, or at least, they wouldn't immediately put face to name. Blake is a Kurt Cobain act-alike who wears a fur coat over his boxers while he walks around the woods, smoking cigarettes and murmuring to himself before probably committing suicide, though maybe he was murdered. But who knows for sure? Van Sant seems to wonder, with a life as unfulfilled as this, what does it mean for a culture to bother over the precise degree of the performer's final bow? It's much like the William Holden character in "Sunset Boulevard." Or if that doesn't do it for you, think Anna Nicole, and even more recently, Heath Ledger.

Again with "Paranoid Park," the chosen one (and there's always One) is a high school student, introverted, misunderstood, and a bit of a Romantic in the classical sense. For instance, he might break up with his girlfriend after they have sex for the first time, but he'll walk to a park bench on a picturesque sandbar near the Pacific overgrown with weeds (which is also picturesque, the growth of the weeds), just to write a letter he has no intention to send, a letter that he is in fact going to burn. Seeing Van Sant's movies as snapshots — a single day or part of a day told and told again like a scrutinized photo album paged through years after the fact — gives an impression of American Youth as an indefatigable syndrome without a traceable family history of illness, or a prescription. That he is this meticulous movie after movie suggests a perfectionist who hasn't yet convinced himself he's gotten it right. The problem with perfectionists being, when will they ever be convinced? The answer being, never. But audiences might stop believing he can pull it off, and keep their eye out for the next visionary to come around calling the shots.

In the end neither film is classic. Few films about youth ever are, with the exception of "A Clockwork Orange" and "The Graduate," two films which I venture to guess both directors and Haneke in particular, and particularly "A Clockwork Orange," are likely to revere. Of greater staying power is "Funny Games," but not only because of its theory-friendly tug-of-war between institutions of power (God-and-man, state-and-people, movie-and-audience, etc.), which includes what it means today for a young man to have all that power, for the institutions to be revolutionized, in a sense. (This is revolution as the legend of Che Guevara might imagine it, or, conversely, as the legend of a different sort, that belonging to his fellow, Fidel Castro, has demonstrated.) But it's also nearer classic, in a cult sense at least, for a simpler reason, a more quantifiable reason: because he made it twice. (The first is being labeled "Funny Games '97," the second, "Funny Games U.S.")* Seeing as 5 of the top ten grossing films of 2007 were the third or later installation of a series, and that the top 4 were all "family" pictures, this is a significant achievement, a funny one indeed. Michael Haneke has made a sequel to his own film, which is exactly like his own film, with a bigger budget and receiving larger grosses, if only slightly larger grosses. He's playing Hollywood.

Rather than tell the same story with the same faces, as Pirates of the Caribbean has, or as Shrek has, only changing the exotic locations and the costumes for its major players, Haneke tells the same story in the same way and only changes the faces. It wouldn't be out of the question to say he did so only to make money, and Warner Bros., the studio that distributed the film through its independent branch, Warner Independent, certainly only did so to make money, unless they've rethought their business model. So maybe its second appearance is not so radical from its critically and theoretically adored "tug-of-war between institutions of power." Film theorists love that kind of thing, and Haneke knows his theory (see "Caché" for another example). It's an admirable criticism of the contemporary studio system, one that has only been matched in recent memory by "Ratatouille" (no joke, a movie with rats and men and art and tradition and industry and criticism is always about everything and the kitchen sink), though "Ratatouille" is the more entertaining of the two, in my opinion. Call me a family man.

"Paranoid Park" is strong for those who are drawn to Van Sant's intricate storytelling, plicated and condensed like a Japanese fan spread open with great care to reveal a beautiful tale painted on its surface. It's a murder mystery and a commendable "wrong man" picture re-imagined with more despair. The sound mixing is especially mesmerizing. A shower in an empty home becomes a rainforest shaded beneath a thick canopy. The pouring faucet builds into a torrent slapping against broad leaves. Macaws and toucans call and sing, insects trill, and spider monkeys taunt. Then piece by piece they're taken away and the domestic sense of the suburban home returns as if from a long, much-needed vacation, though you've never left the bathroom.

Van Sant sometimes uses 8mm footage of skateboarders in Paranoid Park, and the sequences feel like an old Volcom video cassette dug out of the closet. He also rolls slowed down 70mm footage of skaters soaring one after another in identical arcs off one of the skate park's many vertical bowls, a nice contrast between two aesthetics — the coarseness of concrete parks where young people gather to smoke and drink and skate, and the eloquence of skaters negotiating steep inclines on a seven-inch plank fixed with metal and polyurethane. To Van Sant's credit, the footage is never distracting to the point of being mundane, although skateboarding videos, like hot rod and Harley videos and television shows featuring Winchester rifles, have the feeling of a ritualistic observance, and is therefore cherished exclusively by believers and potential converts. You get the sense that Van Sant worships these boys, and he can't help it if boys these days happen to ride skateboards. It's a sense similar to when Haneke has Pitt's character look over his shoulder and smile knowingly at the audience, or later, when he addresses the audience directly and asks who you're rooting for. You become implicit, and the stakes, as "Funny Games" makes explicit, raise ever higher.

Van Sant seems to ask his audience who is responsible for these boys, because it is mostly boys, sometimes suggested as straight ("Paranoid Park) and sometimes suggested as gay ("Elephant"), but always boys and usually sexually ambiguous, right down to the androgynous bone structure and complexion, the long hair and the aw-shucks insecurity. The insecurity is of the brand a Studio Era picture might have reserved for the young ingénue who Gable or Grant would have pursued with prowess. Van Sant's boys would be the Humphrey Bogart character half a century ago — mysterious, calm and stalwart, but guarding insecurity. The difference being that Bogart had the government or some other clear form of power to resist. For Van Sant's boys, even the parents are like they were to Charlie Brown and his clan. They're indistinct. They come and go. They seem to have little consequence to the social make-up of these boys' relationships, with girls and with one another.

In "Paranoid Park," Van Sant refuses Alex (a name intentionally chosen for its androgyny, I assume) the occasion to express the impact an absent father with sleeves of tattoos decorating his arms might have on his social life, though he makes a point of setting the two together in a tool shed, as the father wipes the grease off wrenches and vice grips with a rag and explains to his son that he will do everything he can to make it easier on the boy. You get the feeling that there's not much he can do. You also get the feeling that both he and his son know this, but Van Sant forces the question: how do you bring up a father's inadequacies in conversation? And so the father leaves and Alex retreats to the Oceanside to write a note to a girl (as she suggested he do), about whatever is bothering him. What's bothering him is that he accidentally killed a security guard. It's the necessary drama used to diagnose the symptoms. Like torture and violence in "Funny Games," the murder in "Paranoid Park" exposes vulnerabilities. A boy without authority is without suppression, but he is also without relief should an accident happen, which they always do.

And so Alex turns inward. He must wrestle with his own demons, to put it in masculine terms, and the result of that match with Van Sant as referee turns out to be a draw. Alex writes his letter and throws it in the fire. Sometimes all that matters, the girl tells him, is that you get your thoughts out there. The trick is you address the letter to someone you know and can trust. "Write it to me," she says. There will be another round to the match. There will be another season.

Haneke confronts the struggle directly, amplifying it for affect. Following a false escape the husband and wife are again under the boys' control. After prematurely killing the couple's son, the boys leave and Naomi Watts' character makes a run for it, but she is caught on the road trying to find help and the three return to the home for more. The boys continue with their diplomatic tones ("You really shouldn't have done that Anne. That wasn't very nice." And at the door to inquire about some eggs, brilliantly underwritten and overacted: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but…"). Haneke ends "Funny Games" where he began. The Michael Pitt character knocks on the door of another vacation home and asks to borrow eggs. Then he looks at the camera and the frame freezes. Screaming noise music blares as you look him in the eyes. The credits roll.

It's demented. And it's demented because it was done again, identically. It's demented because these boys have no one to answer to for their violence but themselves. It's also demented to see Tim Roth, age 46, hit on the shin and left powerless before Michael Pitt, age 26, looking dapper in his white polo and shorts and perversely obliging. The boy isn't supposed to be stronger than the man. But that's not even the most demented part. What's truly demented, and what "Funny Games" really succeeds at, is suggesting a world where boys will be boys, and so will the men, a world without the fears of parents or grandparents, a world without parents or grandparents altogether.

This is the world of "Paranoid Park" and "Funny Games." It is a world governed by its own arbitrary rules, where torture and violence are the rules of the game, where timeouts are taken at will and without limit. As it so happens, in this world, there is no weaker sex. The perversity that concerns both movies and especially "Funny Games," is that reality and its fictional counterpart are close associates who share characteristics and strategies, part married couple, part business fellows. It's a tug-of-war to determine who holds the control.

*I apologize for all the parentheses.