Special Report - FINAL CUT: LADIES & GENTLEMAN (2012)

There are some ideas for movies that everybody has but are never realized - one that's been kicking around my head for years is to make a movie entirely from clips of other movies, building a rudimentary plot from tiny excerpts strung together.  While I conceived it as a psychological thriller, I'm overwhelmingly happy to say that a movie has emerged that is exactly that but is a love story rather than a thriller.  The film is called Final Cut: Ladies & Gentlemen, and it is a "film for educational purposes" (as well as a "recycled film") created by Hungarian director György Pálfi and a team of four editors who created a basic, but moving, love story out of clips from some 450 movies (mostly American and Hungarian).  The idea of making a short film by this method is mind-blowing enough, but Pálfi and company managed to make an 85 minute feature with a comprehensible plot.  After three years of work and several versions, the latest version is receiving a limited theatrical release in the U.S., and I was lucky enough to see it at SIFF Cinema Uptown in Seattle tonight with an overjoyed crowd.

The story is as old as time itself - boy meets girl.  After the opening credits form an image of a man and a woman kissing out of names of famous filmmakers and actors (as well as the ampersand in the subtitle), we follow a series of clips as a man wakes up in the morning, goes out to work and bumps into a woman, and sparks fly immediately.  Along the way they will see conflict, separation, despair and a miraculous renewal, and not a second goes by without some kind of tangible joy exuding from the screen.  The clips range from half a second to 10 or more, and the sources cover practically every famous movie you can think of off the top of your head from The Great Train Robbery to Avatar.  I recognized quite a few movies but a lot of them I didn't, such as all of the Hungarian ones and a lot of Far Eastern movies.  The trick isn't so much that you recognize the source film, but how seamlessly the clips flow together, such as somebody walking through a room shifting perfectly to somebody walking in the same direction towards a phone, or a woman in a 50's kitchen about to touch a pot of something shifting to a clip from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves showing the resolution of that action.  It's because of this meticulous action matching that we are able to follow the plot, and the plot is simple enough that the film doesn't disintegrate into a bad music video.  

While much of the sequencing is empirical and smooth, some of the superimpositions are surprisingly funny.  For example, at one point the woman is at a hospital being shown her baby as an embryo inside of her, and the movie cuts to a shot of the Star Child from 2001.  A set of shots meant to be the same character can suddenly switch to a strikingly different person, and Yoda is used a few times like this to hilarious effect.  The audience, as well as me, was delighted every time a shot of The Addams Family was used, and it's a reminder of just how funny that movie was.  The director restricted himself to using no more than two movies per director, and you can tell what his favorite directors are by the frequent use of clips from Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow and Beetlejuice; a LOT of clips from Sleepy Hollow), Terry Gilliam (Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and most strikingly David Lynch, for whom he breaks the rule (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Dr.).  I hated every second of Wild at Heart, so much so that I had to shut it off after 15 minutes, so his inclusion of multiple clips from it is the only thing I found irritating about the movie (at least they were vaguely interesting).  He also includes some lesser-known but interesting movies, like Luc Besson's Subway (featuring Highlander's Christopher Lambert with white hair) and Tarsem Singh's The Cell (an underrated favorite of mine), and a handful of animated films (including Spirited Away, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie and Paprika*).  While some predictable filmmakers get featured, like Tarantino, he is able to not overuse them, such as Spielberg and Hitchcock, and one movie in particular, Bram Stoker's Dracula, got used quite a bit, which made me quite happy.


The audience had a blast at my screening, with a lot of laughs as certain famous movies showed their faces (the biggest one arguably with the inclusion of a shot from Species).  They also laughed a lot at an extended sex scene around the 1/3 mark, which includes a few highly explicit shots (like some cunnilingus and an erect, gold-painted penis).  These shots prompted the theater to put up a warning sign on the front door, saying the movie was an "unrated, European film" (a descriptor I find really funny as well as apt, considering how much more laid-back Europe is about sexual content in movies).  There's also some violent content in a fight scene in the first half of the movie, but nothing too graphic.  Teenagers would get a kick out of the movie, and in a better world (or Europe) they'd be able to see it just as easily as adults.  And honestly, everybody should see it.  

I can't remember the last time I had a more astonishing and entertaining theatrical experience as Final Cut, and considering the multitude of possible copyright issues the film could encourage you may never be able to see it again (without some trickery, anyways).  If you live in the Seattle area you can see it at the SIFF Cinema Uptown (down the road from Seattle Center), but hurry, as they're only showing it nine times and two of those have already passed.  Do yourselves a favor: check out the showtimes here and get your butt downtown to see the thing - you may never get another chance and it's more than worth the price of the ticket.  It also comes with Precious Images, a 1986 short film that won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short that year and was made for the 50th anniversary of the Directors Guild of America.  It too is cobbled together from hundreds of movie clips, but has no plot and is much shorter.  It's somewhat cheesier than Final Cut but it's pretty fun and a poignant homage to great film.  Whatever you're doing tomorrow, forget it - go to the 5:00 or 7:00 showings of Final Cut and have the time of your life.  It's the film experience of a lifetime, and you shouldn't let it pass you by.  The clip below doesn't even begin to sum up how great it is.

~PNK

*I'm a huge fan of anime director Satoshi Kon, the mad genius behind Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers and Paranoia Agent, but I'm really not a fan of Paprika, which unfortunately appears to be his most popular movie right now (and his untimely death at 47 means that it'll probably stay that way).  The movie is everything that anime's detractors dislike about the industry, and all of his other work does a great job of avoiding those qualities.  Unfortunately, those qualities are more profitable than the stuff I like from his other projects, and that's probably why the movie made it to Hungary in the first place.  Do see those other movies, by the way - really, really awesome stuff.