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.
With one week left until election day, the drama is high in the race for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chair. The race is still potentially wide open between the three frontrunners. The most accurate poll is done by Apollo Survey & Research Co (艾普羅民調公司), which was conducted a week and a half ago with two-thirds of the respondents party members, who are the only ones eligible to vote. For details on the candidates, check the Oct. 4 edition of this column, “A look at the KMT chair candidates” on page 12. The popular frontrunner was 56-year-old Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文)
“How China Threatens to Force Taiwan Into a Total Blackout” screamed a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) headline last week, yet another of the endless clickbait examples of the energy threat via blockade that doesn’t exist. Since the headline is recycled, I will recycle the rebuttal: once industrial power demand collapses (there’s a blockade so trade is gone, remember?) “a handful of shops and factories could run for months on coal and renewables, as Ko Yun-ling (柯昀伶) and Chao Chia-wei (趙家緯) pointed out in a piece at Taiwan Insight earlier this year.” Sadly, the existence of these facts will not stop the
Oct. 13 to Oct. 19 When ordered to resign from her teaching position in June 1928 due to her husband’s anti-colonial activities, Lin Shih-hao (林氏好) refused to back down. The next day, she still showed up at Tainan Second Preschool, where she was warned that she would be fired if she didn’t comply. Lin continued to ignore the orders and was eventually let go without severance — even losing her pay for that month. Rather than despairing, she found a non-government job and even joined her husband Lu Ping-ting’s (盧丙丁) non-violent resistance and labor rights movements. When the government’s 1931 crackdown
The first Monopoly set I ever owned was the one everyone had — the classic edition with Mr Monopoly on the box. I bought it as a souvenir on holiday in my 30s. Twenty-five years later, I’ve got thousands of boxes stacked away in a warehouse, four Guinness World Records and have made several TV appearances. When Guinness visited my warehouse last year, they spent a whole day counting my collection. By the end, they confirmed I had 4,379 different sets. That was the fourth time I’d broken the record. There are many variants of Monopoly, and countries and businesses are constantly
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