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THE FINAL CUT 2004
Written and Directed by Omar Naim.
Starring Robin Williams, Mira Sorvino and Jim Caviezel.
If you watched only 10 minutes of The Final Cut, you’d probably come away thinking it’s a very smart movie. Which only demonstrates that appearances really can be deceiving.
This story takes place in a world where a device called a Zoe Implant can be surgically inserted into your brain and record everything you see and hear. The implant can even be installed before you’re born, so every moment of your life is preserved with crystal clarity. This has led to a new funeral tradition – the “rememory”, where people gather to watch the implant footage of the deceased. It’s up to “cutters” to take those years and years of images and sounds and turn them into short little films. The cutters have three rules
1. You cannot sell or give away implant footage.
2. A cutter cannot have an implant.
3. You cannot splice together footage from different implants to create a rememory.
Alan Hakman (Robin Williams) is an expert cutter, haunted by a terrible childhood memory of his own. He’s an extremely reserved and quiet man with a reputation for taking on difficult rememory assignments – cases of people who’ve lived terrible lives and done horrible things, where you have to edit it all out and create a film about what a wonderful person they were. And he’s just been handed a job that another cutter couldn’t bring herself to do, because the deceased was so incredibly vile, and on the implant footage he thinks he says someone from his childhood trauma.
On the face of it, that’s a really interesting concept and it sounds like the makings of a compelling story. But coming up with that foundation apparently exhausted the brainpower of Omar Naim because The Final Cut fails to live up to ANY of its potential. It’s like he sat down and wrote out a list of all the intriguing possibilities suggested by this story, then he checked them off as the script dealt touched on each possibility in the most perfunctory manner. How would constantly being “on camera” affect people’s behavior? Check. Are imperfect human memories better or worse than perfect electronic recollection? Check. How does seeing everything in other people’s lives affect the way a cutter lives? Check. Wouldn’t people object to being involuntarily filmed by someone else’s implant? Check. And check and check and check.
But Naim never explores any of those questions or ideas in any significant way. He starts out focusing on the conflict between Hakman’s own horrible childhood experience and the way he deletes all the horror from the memories of others, then it shifts to the morality of erasing the bad things from a bad man’s life and what that means to the people who had those bad things done to them, then it shifts again to a crudely conceived and sketchily portrayed conspiracy of people trying to discredit the delegitimize the implant technology, then it shifts to the idea of using the implant technology to correct or change your own memories and finally ends with a really silly chase through a graveyard.
Robin Williams does a good job as Hakman, but it’s the same quiet acting we’ve seen from him in One Hour Photo and Insomnia. Without much of a story to latch onto, he resorts to the same basic tricks. And while Mira Sorvino and Jim Caviezel are both fine actors, they can’t do anything of note with their tired and contrived roles of girlfriend and friend-gone-bad, respectively.
To its credit, The Final Cut looks very good in creating a world of clean, classic design in furniture and clothing. It’s a world of wood paneled computer terminals and minimalist decorations. But all the pretty images in the world can’t cover up for a wandering, shallow, inconclusive story.
(500) DAYS OF SUMMER 2009
Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.
Directed by Marc Webb.
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffry Arend, Chloe Moretz, Matthew Gray Gubler, Clark Gregg, Minka Kelly and Ian Reed Kesler.
This movie is a black comedy where all the darkness has been sucked out and replaced with a creamy filling of Zooey Deschanel. It’s a brutally heartbreaking tale told with whimsy and wry appreciation.
One of those stories where the guy acts like the girl and the girl acts like the guy, (500) Days of Summer is about all the time Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) found himself in love with Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel). He’s a failed architect who now makes a living writing greeting cards. She’s cute and smart and quirky and seems like the perfect girl Tom has been waiting his whole life to love. The problem is Summer hasn’t been waiting her whole life to love anyone, especially Tom. She tells Tom up front that she doesn’t believe in love and isn’t interested in anything serious. As the movie jumps back and forth among the end, beginning and middle of their relationship, we see what happens when one person thinks they’ve found their soulmate and the other just thinks they’ve found a buddy. When Summer tires of indulging Tom’s romantic pretensions, he’s crushed flatter than a piece of chewing gum run over by the bulls of Pamplona and it’s not at all clear if the story’s going to end with Tom getting over Summer, getting her back or killing himself.
If you’ve ever been in one of those “I love you more than you love me” relationships, you know how painful they be. Watching that sort of thing in this movie, however, is a very pleasant experience. Part of that is the delightful Miss Deschanel. Most of it comes from these filmmakers recognizing that the bad guy in this story isn’t Summer, it’s Tom. (500) Days of Summer isn’t about a good guy who gets his heart stomped on by some unfeeling bitch. This is about a guy who still clings to immature fantasies about love and his life and what it finally takes for him to grow up. You could think of this film as a less contrived and more relaxed version of Forgetting Sarah Marshall where the humor comes from understanding how many of Tom’s problems are his own doing.
Miss Deschanel is lovely as the somewhat opaque Summer. We never get to see inside her character, but that’s kind of the point. Tom never really sees her either, just how the idea of her fits in with his fantasy of love. Joseph Gordon-Levitt also excels in a tougher role than you’d expect. He never really gets to play the sympathetic victim because Tom isn’t that sympathetic. While it shows Summer being a bit emotionally insensitive, the story never wavers from Tom’s own responsibility for his situation.
With some comic relief from Tom’s friends and his little sister, a great dance number and a nice soundtrack, (500) Days of Summer is a sweet little confection of a film. It does end on a moral that doesn’t fit the rest of the story and it is very lightweight, but if you’re looking for something to help you realize that maybe that old girlfriend isn’t actually to blame for your life falling apart, I believe you’ll quite enjoy it.
THE FLOCK 2007
Written by Hans Bauer and Craig Mitchell.
Directed by Andrew Lau.
Starring Richard Gere, Claire Danes, KaDee Strickland, Ray Wise, Russell Sams, Avril Lavigne, Kristina Sisco, Dwayne L. Barnes, Matt Schulze and French Stewart.
The Flock is another one of those films you see sitting on the shelf at your local video store and you are perplexed because it has big stars in it, but you’ve never heard of it before. I call these Alzheimers Films because they make you wonder why you don’t remember hearing anything about them. Unlike most of its brethren, The Flock is fairly good, even if it swerves a bit too much out of realism and into melodrama. The film starts out strongly enough, though, that you're willing to forgive the decent-sized holes that crop up in its second half.
Erroll Babbage (Richard Gere) works for the New Mexico Department of Public Safety. His job is to keep track of a list of registered sex offenders, which he refers to as his “flock”, and Erroll is almost as obsessive about that as the rapists and child molesters are about their deviant desires. Erroll is constantly circling stories of abduction and sexual violence in the newspaper and checking to see if one of his “flock” is responsible. He harasses his assigned offenders and isn’t above beating the crap out of them if he feels they’re getting out of line.
Largely because of his frightening intensity and nearly maniacal focus, Erroll is being forcible retired. With a month left of the job, he’s assigned to train a new sex offender supervisor named Alison Lowry (Claire Danes). She seems almost comically unprepared for the job compared to the unrelenting Erroll and is hesitant to accept what Erroll has to teach her about sex offenders, who they are and what they’re capable of. But when a young woman disappears and Erroll finds a taunting clue that one of his “flock” might be responsible, these two complete opposites must rely on each other as they plunge into the darkness of exploitation, violation and murder to save the missing girl and as much of their own humanity as they can.
The best thing about this film is the character of Erroll Babbage, both the magnetic performance of Richard Gere and the way the character is used to examine the corrosive nature of violent sexual predation. Erroll isn’t a cop. He’s a civil servant who’s been called upon to act as an ever vigilant sentinel against people who can only achieve satisfaction through the misuse, abuse and even butchery of others. Erroll takes that responsibility so seriously it nearly destroys him as a functional human being, yet even more disturbing than that is the idea other people with this job don’t take it as seriously. How many end up suffering at the hands of a sex offender because of the 9-to-5, “it’s just a job” attitude of people like Alison Lowry? The Flock suggests that not only can sex offenders not be safely reintegrated into society, but that the act of corralling and controlling them is too corrupting to those who try to do it.
The rest of the movie isn’t quite a strong as its main character, however. The second half gets much more theatrical, becoming a depraved version of the standard “race to find the missing girl” story. There are also some moments when it gets really hard to believe and/or accept that Erroll and Alison don’t call in the real cops to handle the situation and there’s one scene where the story needs to get from point A to point B and the writers apparently didn’t know how to do it, so they just wrote something really stupid to get the job done. And while Claire Danes does a nice job, her role is woefully undeveloped.
It’s not perfect, but The Flock is good enough to make you wonder why it never got a chance to play in theaters. It’s certainly better than a lot of the crap that does. |
