Film: The Final Cut
Aug. 15th, 2013 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cut_%282004_film%29
I sat down to watch the first ten minutes of this to see if I wanted to watch it at all.
Film just finished.
*blinks a lot*
I feel like I should have Thoughts about this, but mostly my thought is I'm glad I just watched it without knowing what it was about or anything. I'd forgot why I recorded it even. So it just kind of unfolded.
I'm stuck wondering if I want to watch it again to see how it did it or if it just kind of did its thing already and a rewatch wouldn't work.
I didn't fast forward, I didn't turn the sound off, and when they stuffed commercial breaks in it I just got annoyed because there were no moments that needed interrupting like that.
So that was a very well paced film.
And I noticed the camera stuff only rarely, and then to notice that they really know what they're doing with camera stuff.
It kept deliberately drawing your attention to camera and music, messing with the lines between what we're seeing and what is real in the movie world.
This kept making me think this was a movie made by people who make movies. Which sounds stupid. I've been trying to think of a better way of putting it. But the basic premise is there's an implant that makes the eye into a camera, so at the end of someone's life there is footage of every moment of their lives, from before birth even. So then there's people who have the job of going through this footage and making a single movie from it, to show at an event kind of like a funeral or wake or something but instead of everyone talking about the deceased it's two hours of what the deceased saw. That's what their whole life turns into. One movie.
So, you know, people who spend all their time thinking about movies, like film students and film makers, this is their kind of three in the morning thought.
It's also about how memory isn't the same as having a camera in your head. There's moments small and large where what a character remembers and what the implant shows are not the same thing. But there's also a moment where the central character plays back a compilation of impossible things that implants recorded. These things that are being treated as objective truth, that people are letting override their personal memories, they record things that theoretically couldn't be true. He says some implants have a flaw, that they can't tell the difference between what the eye sees and what the mind sees.
I'd actually been way creeped out with the footage right up until that point. And then I was smiling. I think the earlier stuff was weirdly bland, pictures like the person is a camera, and the thing where it's necessarily looking out and not at kind of erases the person it's theoretically about. Like unless they're looking in a mirror they're gone from their own lives. And they're dead, so they're gone, and they can't have opinions on these rememory films. But if the recording is what the mind sees, that puts the person back in. That makes it human again.
But also, if those implants those times are recording impossibilities and subjective things that can't be true, how can anyone be sure about all the rest of the times? So the tech doesn't take away the problems of memory, it just puts them on a screen for everyone to see.
... I'm kind of wanting to put a Keanu woah gif in here. I mean, it's like it's deep, but mostly to film people. Is film deep? Is it really a woah to make a movie about how memory is and isn't like a movie?
So, anyway, I can't decide if I have Thoughts about this or if it's just, you know, film school.
But it was really well put together.
There was also a plot. One that ended up with running and violence. Which seemed at the same time like the inevitable ending and like it belonged in a whole other movie. Like this one was about life and memory and people being sad and exactly what is creepy about forgive and forget, when there was very bad creepy stuff implied to happen, but then there were people running around shooting, because in the movie the people aren't having a meditation on life and memory they're having an urgent important thing they think is worth shooting people for. Also, if looked at as a crime drama or something it totally doesn't resolve, there's a whole stack of things at the end where nobody knows the answers for certain sure, not the characters or the viewers. But it's more about this one central character sorting out the inside of his own head. That bit gets resolved. Sort of. Except his life both professional and personal is about editing memory, chopping and splicing and reinterpreting until there's a story in it, and by the time he thinks he's found his answer, the viewer, having seen all the same things, can conclude nothing is certain enough to call the answer. And revealing both the uncertainty and the necessity of narrativising a life was what the film set out to do.
So, you know, sitting here thinking possibly Thoughts, feeling like the film ended when it had to but like there should be more of it too.
Life, dude.
*blinks more*
I sat down to watch the first ten minutes of this to see if I wanted to watch it at all.
Film just finished.
*blinks a lot*
I feel like I should have Thoughts about this, but mostly my thought is I'm glad I just watched it without knowing what it was about or anything. I'd forgot why I recorded it even. So it just kind of unfolded.
I'm stuck wondering if I want to watch it again to see how it did it or if it just kind of did its thing already and a rewatch wouldn't work.
I didn't fast forward, I didn't turn the sound off, and when they stuffed commercial breaks in it I just got annoyed because there were no moments that needed interrupting like that.
So that was a very well paced film.
And I noticed the camera stuff only rarely, and then to notice that they really know what they're doing with camera stuff.
It kept deliberately drawing your attention to camera and music, messing with the lines between what we're seeing and what is real in the movie world.
This kept making me think this was a movie made by people who make movies. Which sounds stupid. I've been trying to think of a better way of putting it. But the basic premise is there's an implant that makes the eye into a camera, so at the end of someone's life there is footage of every moment of their lives, from before birth even. So then there's people who have the job of going through this footage and making a single movie from it, to show at an event kind of like a funeral or wake or something but instead of everyone talking about the deceased it's two hours of what the deceased saw. That's what their whole life turns into. One movie.
So, you know, people who spend all their time thinking about movies, like film students and film makers, this is their kind of three in the morning thought.
It's also about how memory isn't the same as having a camera in your head. There's moments small and large where what a character remembers and what the implant shows are not the same thing. But there's also a moment where the central character plays back a compilation of impossible things that implants recorded. These things that are being treated as objective truth, that people are letting override their personal memories, they record things that theoretically couldn't be true. He says some implants have a flaw, that they can't tell the difference between what the eye sees and what the mind sees.
I'd actually been way creeped out with the footage right up until that point. And then I was smiling. I think the earlier stuff was weirdly bland, pictures like the person is a camera, and the thing where it's necessarily looking out and not at kind of erases the person it's theoretically about. Like unless they're looking in a mirror they're gone from their own lives. And they're dead, so they're gone, and they can't have opinions on these rememory films. But if the recording is what the mind sees, that puts the person back in. That makes it human again.
But also, if those implants those times are recording impossibilities and subjective things that can't be true, how can anyone be sure about all the rest of the times? So the tech doesn't take away the problems of memory, it just puts them on a screen for everyone to see.
... I'm kind of wanting to put a Keanu woah gif in here. I mean, it's like it's deep, but mostly to film people. Is film deep? Is it really a woah to make a movie about how memory is and isn't like a movie?
So, anyway, I can't decide if I have Thoughts about this or if it's just, you know, film school.
But it was really well put together.
There was also a plot. One that ended up with running and violence. Which seemed at the same time like the inevitable ending and like it belonged in a whole other movie. Like this one was about life and memory and people being sad and exactly what is creepy about forgive and forget, when there was very bad creepy stuff implied to happen, but then there were people running around shooting, because in the movie the people aren't having a meditation on life and memory they're having an urgent important thing they think is worth shooting people for. Also, if looked at as a crime drama or something it totally doesn't resolve, there's a whole stack of things at the end where nobody knows the answers for certain sure, not the characters or the viewers. But it's more about this one central character sorting out the inside of his own head. That bit gets resolved. Sort of. Except his life both professional and personal is about editing memory, chopping and splicing and reinterpreting until there's a story in it, and by the time he thinks he's found his answer, the viewer, having seen all the same things, can conclude nothing is certain enough to call the answer. And revealing both the uncertainty and the necessity of narrativising a life was what the film set out to do.
So, you know, sitting here thinking possibly Thoughts, feeling like the film ended when it had to but like there should be more of it too.
Life, dude.
*blinks more*