Wed February 11, 2004 11:16 PM ET
By Scott Roxborough
BERLIN (Hollywood Reporter) - The Berlin Film Festival has gotten a much-needed shot of levity when Robin Williams turned the news conference for Omar Naim's sci-fi thriller "The Final Cut" into a free-association comedy routine.
Williams got the biggest laughs from the packed room of international journalists and critics on Wednesday when he started taking shots at the Bush government and its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
"Bush is complaining about a lack of intelligence, which seems sort of redundant," Williams joked. "They say they don't know if Iraq had any WMDs -- well, all they have to do is ask (Vice President Dick) Cheney for the receipts."
Set in a near future in which people can have a computer chip implanted in their brains that records their entire lives, "The Final Cut" was well received by the Berlin crowd in its competition bow, with hearty cheers greeting it at the sold-out press screenings.
Williams plays a video editor who splices together the deceased's recorded memories, cutting out anything unpleasant to make horrible lives into picture postcards.
Asked what he would cut out of the movie of his life, Williams quipped, "Probably those years I was drinking -- but that seems to have happened already."
