Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: Sure, that works. I guess her heart was as cold as her ass was phat.

[quote name="Pirate Private Memory Review"]She had icewater in her veins, and veins in her tits, and refried beans in all three major orifices. (You can have that one for the box copy, Netflix.) Next video. The Final Cut was a sci-fi film about editing memories that had the misfortune to come out a few months after Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It also had the misfortune to star Robin Williams in a sad role, and I had the misfortune to watch it. The film posits a not-explicitly-futuristic medium-topia (regular-topia? not particularly topia one way or the other), in which the fad amongst the wealthy and upper middle class for the last fifty-plus years has been installing an implant at birth to record everything the bearer sees and hears. The sole application for this technology, as far as the film is concerned, is to allow "cutters" like Robin Williams to assemble two-hour video montages of people's life experiences, to show on conventional TVs at their funerals. If that sounds like a fine premise for a black comedy, prepare to be disappointed, because it's actually a tech noir. The closest thing to a joke in the film is how Robin Williams' work computers are all panelled in rich mahogany, like a casket - which is pretty funny if you've ever tried to cheap out on a funeral, though I'm not entirely sure it was meant to be. Robin Williams (playing a cutter with the groanworthy name "Alan Hackman," so you'll understand if I just call him Robin Williams) comes into posession of a powerful man's memories after his death, and since this is a noir and the writer-director has seen Chinatown, it's strongly implied that these memories include an incestuous pedophilic relationship with his own daughter. This is where the film goes from dumb to depressing. Not just because incestuous pedophilia is one of the most tragic crimes you can suggest on film, and not just because Robin Williams in the off position is a walking cautionary tale about the dangers of not getting enough cocaine, but because in a world where memories can theoretically be edited like videotape with or without consent, the writer-director had to resort to literal rape for a plot point. This is science fiction, for god's sake! Sure, you can imply child molestation, take us right up to the line, but when we get there why not swerve? Why not show us the heinous ways this technology could impact our lives, make us afraid of it, use it as anything more than a conventional blackmail device? The problem with the disruptive technology at the heart of this science fiction story is that it's not disruptive. It's a glorified GoPro. The character at the heart of this noir story has the same problem. He's not noble, he's not corrupt, he's just a sad-eyed man going about his business, observing other people's lives while allowing his own to wither. Was he meant to be a lesson for film students about not spending all their time in the editing bay? He's sure as hell not Gene Hackman in The Conversation. His risk-averse nature is supposedly because he did something dangerous as a ten year old, and another child died for it. I liked that backstory better when it involved young Captain Picard launching his bald head, torpedolike, at three Nausicaans over a rigged game of pool. There's the prospect that the two throughlines, disconnected man and memory machine, might meaningfully intersect at one point, when Robin Williams' so-far-out-of-his-league-she's-played-by-Mira-Sorvino girlfriend discovers he first met her through the experiences of her dead boyfriend. But the whole thing is brushed off in the very same scene, as nothing more frighteningly manipulative than the Julie/Rachel pros and cons list Ross left on Chandler's laptop. Better get a padlock for your wood-panelled computer, good buddy! Theoretically interesting questions are raised about whether events are significant because of the impact they had on those who experienced them, or because of the way they shape our perceptions of those who experienced them; the primacy of internal versus external life; and the existential horror of toothcare, as illustrative of our futile struggle against entropy in a finite universe. At least, I think it was the movie that raised them, it's possible I was just daydreaming.[/quote]