After all, if everything you do is being recorded for posterity, what can you get away with?
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Picture this: you just completed a documentary, and you are shopping around your first screenplay. Your dream cast would be Robin Williams, Mira Sorvino and Jim Caviezel. Your dream crew would be Tak Fujimoto ("The Sixth Sense") on camera and Dede Allen on the editing team. Then picture this: all your dreams come true.
That´s what happened to Omar Naïm. There is an adage in the movie business that when your own credit list isn´t very long you should surround yourself with an award-winning cast and crew. Naïm certainly did this. His previous film was a documentary: "Grand Theater: A Tale of Beirut" (1999), which told the tale of the Lebanese Civil War from roots to aftermath through the eyes of an old theater where actors, directors, soldiers and civilians cross paths and clash. This was enough background to win him the collaboration of Nick Wechsler as producer, and funding from Canada and Germany.
His directing of the actors certainly seems to hold up, but unfortunately the script is too slight to bear the weight of what is otherwise an excellent production.
The thematic center of "Final Cut" is a modern variation of the homunculus. Various meanings of the word "homunculus" (Latin for "little man," sometimes spelled "homonculus") exist, but the most modern meaning is also the most relevant here. The word homunculus is used to illustrate the functioning of a system thought to be run by a "little man" inside. Such a system includes human beings, as some inner entity or agent is somehow assumed to be inside our brains, making things run. One example of this was Descartes´ use of the homunculus to resolve his theory of dualism, (that the soul and the body are two completely separate entities). He posited a "little man" behind the eye to process visual stimuli. Of course, this immediately raises the question of who is behind the "little man´s" eyes – another little man? And so on, ad infinitum.
In "Final Cut" the homunculus is actually a recording device called the "Zoe Implant", which scans and preserves everything the wearer sees and hears for their entire life. As the EyeTech propaganda built into the DVD menus states: "Memory fades. Even the most important moments in your life slip away over time. Colors change, participants are erased, added, and erased again. Even your most vivid memories are not quite how things actually happened. And when you pass away, those memories will disappear altogether."
The only way to recover the saved memories is after death, when small cubic recording device can be removed from the body. The recorded material is then edited by an editor, called "cutters", and a summary is played and the dearly departed´s "rememory" event (memorial service to you and me) for the benefit of his or her loved ones. All of this for one flat fee paid in advance by the parents of Zoe implant wearer at the time of birth. As a result, only the wealthy can afford it.
Williams plays Alan Hakman, a "cutter" who is also the main character in the film. As Hakman puts it, he doesn´t care about the dead, he only cares about the living; his job is to take all the dirty, criminal, and simply unpleasant memories and delete them, and leave the funny, tender and charming for the survivors to see. In spite of such delicacy on the part of the cutters, some people with Zoe implants (implantees are not even told about their implants until they are of age) resist them. After all, if everything you do is being recorded for posterity, what can you get away with? Resistance takes the form of vivid tattoos all over the skull, which somehow "block" the signal.
The head of this resistance movement is a former cutter played by Jim Caviezel, in a morally ambiguous role that is quite refreshing after his slew of sacrificial lambs and vengeful martyrs. Hakman bears the brunt of the protests as he is known to specialize in cutting "difficult" cases, such as the incestuous CEO of EyeTech himself. This particular "rememory", as the Zoe-movies are called, is the concern of most of the film, as the CEO´s memories hold not just his own criminal memories but evidence of institutional crimes of the EyeTech company and, accidentally, the key to a secret of Alan´s.
Alan tries to track down the answer to his own mystery while ignoring the combined mafia-forces and resistance-forces that are also breathing down his neck for the same footage. Except for his obsession with one childhood trauma, Alan seems oblivious to other aspects of his own life, especially his relationships to women. These range from his colleague, Thelma, played by Mimi Kuzyk, whose lascivious and beguiling performance is wasted on the slight role, (we get a glimpse of some of her acting chops in the deleted scenes) and his love interest played by Mira Sorvino, who seems to be on one end of a continuous lover´s quarrel that Hakman doesn´t even know they are having.
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[release]15004[/release]