BEFORE: I got a copy of this one too late to be featured in the Robin Williams chain last July - so I slotted it here, after another film about human memory (though last night's film used the word to mean "storage capacity"). Sometimes I just have to put two films next to each other and hope that they'll have something in common, as I imagine they might. Linking from "Johnny Mnemonic", Udo Kier was also in "Moscow on the Hudson" with Robin Williams (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian").
THE PLOT: Set in a world with memory implants, Robin Williams plays a cutter, someone with the power of final edit over people's recorded histories. His latest assignment is one that puts him in danger.
AFTER: This is something of a high-concept piece, imagining a future (or at least an alternate present) where every moment of a person's life can be recorded and stored though an organic implanted chip of some kind. The details about how the chip works, and where such a massive amount of video information get stored are somewhat sketchy, but perhaps irrelevant.
I assume that we are being shown the way this alt-world works, in order to make some kind of point about the world around us - that's usually how these things work, right? But I'm struggling to see the relevance here - the best I can come up with is that much like the cutters in this film, when someone we care about passes away, we tend to remember the good times we shared with them, and try to forget, or at least not focus on, their less-than-perfect qualities.
But this seems a long way to go to make a simple point. To re-imagine the way that people remember each other, the re-structuring of society to accommodate people who are essentially walking recording devices, the legal and personal ramifications of recording every moment of someone's life - couldn't this point, or whatever point they were going for, be made in a simpler way?
Besides, when you cut out the dull moments, the bad moments, the personal losses from a person's life experiences - aren't you devaluing any lessons learned from them? The problem with any editing is that you make a statement with what you leave in AND what you edit out - and just because something painful happens to you does not mean that the event is not also important.
My screenplay writing is stalled again - gee, I never seem to have much free time, I wonder why - but in order to continue working on it, I have to remember details from a certain period of my life, and that means all the good parts AND the bad parts of a relationship. They're both important if I'm going to create something that has a deeper meaning.
As for tonight's central character, he has a shameful secret in his past, and by ignoring it, he has also made himself distant and numb, but those happen to be good qualities for a cutter, someone who views all of the footage from other people's lives, and then has to edit out the bad parts without judgment. But a controversial editing job also happens to bring up his own secret, which leads him on a quest for his own redemption.
I had a grade-school classmate call me once, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, and he was going through a 12-step program and had reached the step where you have to address people you may have wronged. He wanted my forgiveness for some bullying incidents back in grade school, and what was I going to say? I mean, I guess you've got somebody over a barrel at that point, they can't move forward with their sobriety unless you say they can - so can you like, ask for money or something? I told him I didn't harbor any ill will, and besides, anything that happened back then made me who I am today, and I'm OK with who I am.
I mean, we all have days we'd rather forget, or things that we might do differently if given the chance, but it's not really constructive to focus on that stuff, right? Movin' on...
Also starring Mira Sorvino, Jim Caviezel (last seen in "Deja Vu"), Mimi Kuzyk
RATING: 5 out of 10 picket signs
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