When Robin Williams withholds emotion, he becomes a blank, buttoned-up automaton, the creepy antithesis of his repellent, bleeding-heart clown in a movie like Patch Adams. For most of The Final Cut, this star confronts the world wearing the same mask of sunken eyes and lipless mouth clenched in a straight line that he put on in One Hour Photo. Imagine Buster Keaton as the world's most constipated undertaker.
In this chilly sci-fi fantasy, Williams' character, Alan Hakman, is the go-to guy for people who demand the ultimate obituary. Alan works as a "cutter," anthologizing the greatest hits from people's memories into mini-movies that are marketed as Rememories. His digests of golden oldies splice together the happier, upbeat moments he selects from so-called ZonChips, nearly invisible devices implanted in people's brains at birth that record a lifetime's experiences.
Scrolling through strangers' lives on a playback machine with multiple screens, Alan has seen it all and then some. As you watch the reruns of their lives, viewed entirely through their eyes, you get a creepy understanding of Alan's godlike perspective.
He knows every lie, every sexual indiscretion, drunken moment and ethical breach firsthand, so to speak. But his posthumous retrospectives clean up the mess. They play like sanitized home movies edited into infomercials. In making them, Alan's most important functions are to press the delete button and to keep his mouth shut.
The metaphoric possibilities suggested by the ZonChip are endless. Most obviously, The Final Cut could be a critique of Hollywood or Washington and the way entertainment corporations and political candidates compete to present lies and subterfuge as reality. The more closely the film approaches the sinister ramifications of Rememories, the closer to the bull's-eye it hits.
But The Final Cut is saddled with distractions and cheesy subplots, and unlike Alan's memorial Christmas cards, it is poorly edited. The most serious distraction is Alan's own mawkish psychodrama. As a little boy, he once coaxed another boy to walk across a thin, shaky plank. The other boy fell and landed unconscious. When Alan couldn't rouse him, he fled, harboring his guilty secret for decades. He has grown up convinced he is responsible for the boy's death. He sees his occupation as a quasi-religious way to expiate his sins. In "redeeming" sordid lives by editing them into saintly ones, he is doing good by making the world a happier place and saving his own soul as well.
In the movie's sentimental conceit, this Man Incapable of Feeling experiences a dramatic catharsis that recalls The Pawnbroker and countless other films that offer instant redemption, and it feels like just as manipulative a sop today as it did in the 1960s.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS