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.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
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