THE DUKE ON
THE FINAL CUT
THE FINAL CUT
What’s gonna happen is I’m gonna take a great big giant leap into
the fires of supposition right now and assume that there are
folks out there in the “world” that would rather have the molten
rocks of Hades shoved up their arseholes for the next fortnight
than sit down for to watch the latest Robin Williams picture.
Maybe back in the day, man, maybe back then when we were younger
and more carefree and something about Jefferson Airplane. Maybe
then we would have sat down for an hour and a half of Robin
Williams Live In Vietnam or Robin Williams Live In Animated
Arabia, but not now, not in this time, not in this fucking
universe, man, no way.
Things have happened, our perspectives have shifted. There’s been
The Pill, there’s been L.S.D, there’s been fucking Jack and
Fathers Day and that thing were he was a doctor. Stretch
Armstrong or whatever it was called. We can’t go back to those
times, man, cause what happened is you, Williams, you hairy-
handed motherfucker, you tore those times apart piece by piece
and shat on them and then wiped the shitty times in our face.
You had us standing on our desks saluting you, Williams. You had
us following you out that stuffy old classroom and where did you
lead us? You led us to fucking Flubber, man! To Nine Months! How
can we ever look you in the face ever again?
But hang on now just a second, friend. Allow The Duke for to draw
up some graphs and pie-charts for to illustrate the following;
When thrust in the right direction, maybe by Jim Caviezel
pointing a gun and saying shit like “Left, Williams, left! Keep
moving you hairy motherfucker!”, Robin Williams is capable of
some damn fine work in the acting field of things. Sometimes he
surprises everybody and decides to do a film that has some
intelligence and originality in there, as opposed to just another
load of toss about some wacky mental type does wacky mental shit
for a while and then learns something or other.
Robin Williams, y’see, seems to operate within four distinct
genres, although, granted, these occasionally overlap.
To Wit;
The Funny Ha-Ha
The kinda stuff where all it is, is a load of old bollocks
wrapped around an hour or so of Williams doing his zany shtick.
He might be in Vietnam or Cuba or wherever the hell, he might be
in a dress and then it’s funny cause he sets his boobs on fire,
but wherever he is, he may as well just be on a stage, like in
Robin Williams Live, ranting on and off about whatever the fuck
he feels like, even if it ain’t got a damn thing to do with the
narrative.
The Family Feel-Good Stuff
What this entails, is a watered-down version of Williams at his
Funny Ha-Ha best, spouting off a series of shitty jokes and then
teaching us to learn about some crap or other. There are moments
when The Family Feel-Good Stuff comes alarmingly close to The
Funny Ha-Ha, like Aladdin, for example. Sadly, though, a fella’s
more likely to get stuck with shit like Jack or Bicentennial Man.
Some consider Jumanji to be a reasonable example of The Family
Feel-Good Stuff, ignoring the fact that although Kirsten Dunst is
in it, She’s very, very young, and therefore nobody in their
right fucking mind would ever for a second think of putting it on.
The Serious Drama
The Serious Drama itself can be divided into a further two sub-
genres; The Serious Drama With Beard, and The Serious Drama
Without Beard. The former is without doubt the more preferable of
the two, even though Dead Poets Society clearly belongs in the
latter. If it’s a choice between Good Will Hunting or Jacob The
Liar, though, ain’t nobody but a motherfucking Sadist gonna ask
for the one where he’s in the holocaust.
The Funny Strange
Often this merges with The Serious Drama, just as The Serious
Drama can often saddle up alongside The Family Feel-Good Stuff
(i.e. Toys). Notable characteristics of The Funny Strange are as
follows; No beard, often rather sheepish, seemingly harmless, but
watch out, cause most likely he’ll stab you in the teeth given
half a fucking chance. Examples can be found in One Hour Photo
and Insomnia, and even Death To Smoochy, which ruthlessly bounds
between The Funny Ha-Ha, The Serious Drama and The Funny Strange
with nary a thought for no one.
And so we come to The Final Cut, a recent entry in the Williams
oeuvre.
Ones first impression is that The Final Cut is most likely going
to be an example of The Funny Strange. Williams has no beard,
appears rather sheepish, and spends a lot of time with
photographic equipment of some sort, ala One Hour Photo. He looks
harmless, but nobody who’s harmless would wear such a jacket,
surely, and also, there’s some stuff before the credits about a
kid falls down a big hole.
What The Final Cut concerns itself with, is that it’s the future
time, and so a new invention by the name of The Zoe Implant is
fitted into the heads of folks whose parents can afford it,
recording every second of their lives, which will then be edited
and screened at their funeral, or “remembering”. The folks who
spend their lives doing the cutting and the pasting are known,
fittingly enough, as Cutters, and it turns out this is what Robin
Williams does with his time now.
He must be pretty hard-up in the future, I’m guessing. Surely the
royalties from Rock DJ didn’t run out that quick?
The Final Cut, let’s be honest here, is cursed with a screenplay
fit only for wiping the crud from the arseholes of fallen
harlots. Every time anyone opens their mouth, you can be sure
they’re gonna say something imbecilic. You can be sure nobody is
gonna say “So what did you make of Get Over It, then?” during car-
journeys, since most likely they’re gonna say “So here we are,
taking the car to the office where my cousin Alfred works” or
some such bollocks, even though they’re half-way through the
journey already. Who would say that, in a real life automobile-
based conversation? You might say “So you wanna go to Alfred’s
office?” when you meet your travelling partner, but you ain’t
gonna wait until half-way through the ride to say it. He knows
it's your cousin, I’m guessing. It was his fucking idea to go in
the first place. What the fuck do you need to say that for,
anyhow? Why can’t you just shut your stinking face, if every time
you open your yap you’re gonna make a mockery of this whole
futuristic get-up?
Also, I’d have loved for to have been able to say that The Final
Cut doesn’t have a computer that talks in a stern electronic
female voice. I wish I could say that in The Final Cut, they got
rid of that old cliché, since all folks are gonna think of is
that fucking toothpaste advert. I wish I could report that the
computers in The Final Cut don’t say a damn word, or if they do,
it’s with the voice of the woman who did the demon in The
Exorcist. I would love to tell you that, but I’m a religious
fella and I’m fairly sure I’d get my nuts zapped from here to
Oakland if I even thought of espousing such fabrications.
However, despite the horrible script and the laughable
“futuristic” touches here and there, The Final Cut is well worth
the hour and a half it takes for to arrive and bugger off. What
it does, is it tries to be at least half-way original in its
ideas. For sure, some of them are lifted straight out of Strange
Days, but this is nowhere near as shitty as that was.
It’s dark, it doesn’t for a second think of offering any hope or
light or anything much that’s gonna make a man feel good about
himself. There are all sorts of questions raised, questions about
ethics and the media and all sorts. Questions about consent and
democracy in a world were everything is commodified, even a man’s
motherfucking mentals.
You can forgive all sortsa shit when a flick’s brain is in the
right place. Also, you get Jim Caviezel without a face full of
gore, looking shifty as all hell.
I don’t trust that Caviezel, man. Oh, sure, it’s all redemption
and salvation when he’s up on the wood, but get him down, dust
him off and give him a nice suit, next thing you know he’s trying
to shoot the fuck out of you with a pistol.
Director Omar Naim has done a couple things prior to The Final
Cut, stuff like 1999’s Grand Theatre – A Tale Of Beirut, being a
documentary all about the Lebanese Civil War, but this here,
which he also scribbled, is his first BIG FUCKING PICTURE. At
times I was reminded of the shockingly shitty The Butterfly
Effect, another high-concept dark sci-fi number with a touch of
the paedophilia running through, in that even though it looks all
pretty and there’s some nice ideas, the thing is just far too
ridiculous.
With The Final Cut though, the flaws are all in the dialogue. The
plot is pretty grand, all being told, with Williams being hassled
by anti-Mind Video hoodlums, the likes of Jim Caviezel, for
example, and trying to forge some sort of relationship with Mina
Sorvino. There’s all sorts of notions about culpability, about
how Williams is, in effect, taking the lives of scumbags and
almost deifying them. All these ideas are in there, but it’s like
asking a three year old to explain whatever that theory was
Albert Einstein came up with. The one about E’s are square or
whatever. The kid might well understand said scientific
ponderings, but you try getting a sensible sentence out of their
faces.
So maybe the thing to do would’ve been to have all these folks
speak in Hebrew. Obviously Caviezel’s an old hand at that kinda
bilingual shit. Then we could put it all down to horrible
subtitles, and just enjoy the lovely camera-work, the harsh blues
and greys and the like.
As it is, it takes a lotta work to get over the cack being
spouted every ten seconds, but it’s worth it, is what The Duke
would wager. It’s noir-ish, it’s inventive, it doesn’t for a
second worry about happy endings or anything of that sort. It’s
far from perfect, but it’s pretty good nonetheless.
And it’s a fuck of a damn sight better than Jack.
Thanks folks
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
the fires of supposition right now and assume that there are
folks out there in the “world” that would rather have the molten
rocks of Hades shoved up their arseholes for the next fortnight
than sit down for to watch the latest Robin Williams picture.
Maybe back in the day, man, maybe back then when we were younger
and more carefree and something about Jefferson Airplane. Maybe
then we would have sat down for an hour and a half of Robin
Williams Live In Vietnam or Robin Williams Live In Animated
Arabia, but not now, not in this time, not in this fucking
universe, man, no way.
Things have happened, our perspectives have shifted. There’s been
The Pill, there’s been L.S.D, there’s been fucking Jack and
Fathers Day and that thing were he was a doctor. Stretch
Armstrong or whatever it was called. We can’t go back to those
times, man, cause what happened is you, Williams, you hairy-
handed motherfucker, you tore those times apart piece by piece
and shat on them and then wiped the shitty times in our face.
You had us standing on our desks saluting you, Williams. You had
us following you out that stuffy old classroom and where did you
lead us? You led us to fucking Flubber, man! To Nine Months! How
can we ever look you in the face ever again?
But hang on now just a second, friend. Allow The Duke for to draw
up some graphs and pie-charts for to illustrate the following;
When thrust in the right direction, maybe by Jim Caviezel
pointing a gun and saying shit like “Left, Williams, left! Keep
moving you hairy motherfucker!”, Robin Williams is capable of
some damn fine work in the acting field of things. Sometimes he
surprises everybody and decides to do a film that has some
intelligence and originality in there, as opposed to just another
load of toss about some wacky mental type does wacky mental shit
for a while and then learns something or other.
Robin Williams, y’see, seems to operate within four distinct
genres, although, granted, these occasionally overlap.
To Wit;
The Funny Ha-Ha
The kinda stuff where all it is, is a load of old bollocks
wrapped around an hour or so of Williams doing his zany shtick.
He might be in Vietnam or Cuba or wherever the hell, he might be
in a dress and then it’s funny cause he sets his boobs on fire,
but wherever he is, he may as well just be on a stage, like in
Robin Williams Live, ranting on and off about whatever the fuck
he feels like, even if it ain’t got a damn thing to do with the
narrative.
The Family Feel-Good Stuff
What this entails, is a watered-down version of Williams at his
Funny Ha-Ha best, spouting off a series of shitty jokes and then
teaching us to learn about some crap or other. There are moments
when The Family Feel-Good Stuff comes alarmingly close to The
Funny Ha-Ha, like Aladdin, for example. Sadly, though, a fella’s
more likely to get stuck with shit like Jack or Bicentennial Man.
Some consider Jumanji to be a reasonable example of The Family
Feel-Good Stuff, ignoring the fact that although Kirsten Dunst is
in it, She’s very, very young, and therefore nobody in their
right fucking mind would ever for a second think of putting it on.
The Serious Drama
The Serious Drama itself can be divided into a further two sub-
genres; The Serious Drama With Beard, and The Serious Drama
Without Beard. The former is without doubt the more preferable of
the two, even though Dead Poets Society clearly belongs in the
latter. If it’s a choice between Good Will Hunting or Jacob The
Liar, though, ain’t nobody but a motherfucking Sadist gonna ask
for the one where he’s in the holocaust.
The Funny Strange
Often this merges with The Serious Drama, just as The Serious
Drama can often saddle up alongside The Family Feel-Good Stuff
(i.e. Toys). Notable characteristics of The Funny Strange are as
follows; No beard, often rather sheepish, seemingly harmless, but
watch out, cause most likely he’ll stab you in the teeth given
half a fucking chance. Examples can be found in One Hour Photo
and Insomnia, and even Death To Smoochy, which ruthlessly bounds
between The Funny Ha-Ha, The Serious Drama and The Funny Strange
with nary a thought for no one.
And so we come to The Final Cut, a recent entry in the Williams
oeuvre.
Ones first impression is that The Final Cut is most likely going
to be an example of The Funny Strange. Williams has no beard,
appears rather sheepish, and spends a lot of time with
photographic equipment of some sort, ala One Hour Photo. He looks
harmless, but nobody who’s harmless would wear such a jacket,
surely, and also, there’s some stuff before the credits about a
kid falls down a big hole.
What The Final Cut concerns itself with, is that it’s the future
time, and so a new invention by the name of The Zoe Implant is
fitted into the heads of folks whose parents can afford it,
recording every second of their lives, which will then be edited
and screened at their funeral, or “remembering”. The folks who
spend their lives doing the cutting and the pasting are known,
fittingly enough, as Cutters, and it turns out this is what Robin
Williams does with his time now.
He must be pretty hard-up in the future, I’m guessing. Surely the
royalties from Rock DJ didn’t run out that quick?
The Final Cut, let’s be honest here, is cursed with a screenplay
fit only for wiping the crud from the arseholes of fallen
harlots. Every time anyone opens their mouth, you can be sure
they’re gonna say something imbecilic. You can be sure nobody is
gonna say “So what did you make of Get Over It, then?” during car-
journeys, since most likely they’re gonna say “So here we are,
taking the car to the office where my cousin Alfred works” or
some such bollocks, even though they’re half-way through the
journey already. Who would say that, in a real life automobile-
based conversation? You might say “So you wanna go to Alfred’s
office?” when you meet your travelling partner, but you ain’t
gonna wait until half-way through the ride to say it. He knows
it's your cousin, I’m guessing. It was his fucking idea to go in
the first place. What the fuck do you need to say that for,
anyhow? Why can’t you just shut your stinking face, if every time
you open your yap you’re gonna make a mockery of this whole
futuristic get-up?
Also, I’d have loved for to have been able to say that The Final
Cut doesn’t have a computer that talks in a stern electronic
female voice. I wish I could say that in The Final Cut, they got
rid of that old cliché, since all folks are gonna think of is
that fucking toothpaste advert. I wish I could report that the
computers in The Final Cut don’t say a damn word, or if they do,
it’s with the voice of the woman who did the demon in The
Exorcist. I would love to tell you that, but I’m a religious
fella and I’m fairly sure I’d get my nuts zapped from here to
Oakland if I even thought of espousing such fabrications.
However, despite the horrible script and the laughable
“futuristic” touches here and there, The Final Cut is well worth
the hour and a half it takes for to arrive and bugger off. What
it does, is it tries to be at least half-way original in its
ideas. For sure, some of them are lifted straight out of Strange
Days, but this is nowhere near as shitty as that was.
It’s dark, it doesn’t for a second think of offering any hope or
light or anything much that’s gonna make a man feel good about
himself. There are all sorts of questions raised, questions about
ethics and the media and all sorts. Questions about consent and
democracy in a world were everything is commodified, even a man’s
motherfucking mentals.
You can forgive all sortsa shit when a flick’s brain is in the
right place. Also, you get Jim Caviezel without a face full of
gore, looking shifty as all hell.
I don’t trust that Caviezel, man. Oh, sure, it’s all redemption
and salvation when he’s up on the wood, but get him down, dust
him off and give him a nice suit, next thing you know he’s trying
to shoot the fuck out of you with a pistol.
Director Omar Naim has done a couple things prior to The Final
Cut, stuff like 1999’s Grand Theatre – A Tale Of Beirut, being a
documentary all about the Lebanese Civil War, but this here,
which he also scribbled, is his first BIG FUCKING PICTURE. At
times I was reminded of the shockingly shitty The Butterfly
Effect, another high-concept dark sci-fi number with a touch of
the paedophilia running through, in that even though it looks all
pretty and there’s some nice ideas, the thing is just far too
ridiculous.
With The Final Cut though, the flaws are all in the dialogue. The
plot is pretty grand, all being told, with Williams being hassled
by anti-Mind Video hoodlums, the likes of Jim Caviezel, for
example, and trying to forge some sort of relationship with Mina
Sorvino. There’s all sorts of notions about culpability, about
how Williams is, in effect, taking the lives of scumbags and
almost deifying them. All these ideas are in there, but it’s like
asking a three year old to explain whatever that theory was
Albert Einstein came up with. The one about E’s are square or
whatever. The kid might well understand said scientific
ponderings, but you try getting a sensible sentence out of their
faces.
So maybe the thing to do would’ve been to have all these folks
speak in Hebrew. Obviously Caviezel’s an old hand at that kinda
bilingual shit. Then we could put it all down to horrible
subtitles, and just enjoy the lovely camera-work, the harsh blues
and greys and the like.
As it is, it takes a lotta work to get over the cack being
spouted every ten seconds, but it’s worth it, is what The Duke
would wager. It’s noir-ish, it’s inventive, it doesn’t for a
second worry about happy endings or anything of that sort. It’s
far from perfect, but it’s pretty good nonetheless.
And it’s a fuck of a damn sight better than Jack.
Thanks folks
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
