Yangcheng Evening News reporter Gong Weifeng
The competition variety show "Director Please Advise" was on fire after its premiere last week! Topics such as "The director please advise is to spit on the conference" and "the director please advise the film critics to dare to say" quickly appeared on the hot search list. However, unlike the high topic discussion on the Weibo platform, this show was swept away by the low rating of "one star" in Douban.
In line with "Actors Please Take Place", the basic setting of "Director Please Advise" is that the director makes the film and the audience selects the desired work after the film, and then evaluates the high and low. The core should be "the work is king", but the first program has some vague focus: the director's shooting stage forcibly sets many thresholds; the audience appreciation stage does not give enough room for interpretation.
Competition - mode for soup change does not change medicine
"Director Please Advise" was launched, which is related to the aesthetic fatigue brought to the audience by acting competition variety shows. Since Zhejiang Satellite TV launched "The Birth of an Actor" four years ago, similar types of variety shows such as "Actors Please Take Place", "Acting School" and "Actors' Character" have appeared one after another.
Nowadays, the producer of "Actors Please Take Place" naturally launched "Director Please Advise", and the personnel allocation of the two programs has come to a "big shift": the director who sits in the mentor seat in "Actor Please Take Place" has become a contestant in "Director Please Advise"; the actor who is the contestant of the former has become the "tool person" who helps the director complete the task in the latter; the producer who sits in the jury seat in the former sits on the "mentor seat" of "Director Please Advise".
The model of the two is also in the same vein, the general context is "selection + filming + movie + comment + elimination": 16 directors choose classic film and television IP to create a script, and make a short film of about 10 minutes. At the movie viewing party, the director PK in pairs. Wang Jing, Fang Li, Chen Zhixi, Hao Lei, four producers, decided to enter the next round of directors, as well as into the pending seats of directors. This model forms an interesting industrial closed loop – the director produces the work, the producer is responsible for the budget and the market, the film critic analyzes the content, and the audience buys tickets according to preference.
Candidates – Do they need support?
A major theme of this season's "Director Please Advise" is to support newcomer directors, known as "based on the industry ecology and the responsibility of the times faced by newcomer directors, I hope to make every effort to build a platform for excellent directors, so that the value of creation can be seen by more people". But after the list of 16 newcomer directors came out, the Internet questioned: "Are they newcomers?" Do they need to be seen? ”
For example, cross-border directors Cai Kangyong, Han Xue, Liang Long, Wu Zhenyu, Wu Zhongtian, etc., have caused many questions: "Han Xue moved out of Zhang Yimou's team and Han Hong to do behind the scenes, she used support? The other category is Ning Yuanyuan, Wang Wenye, Degna and other "shadow second generation". Among them, Ning Yuanyuan's father is the sixth generation director Zhang Yuan, his mother is the screenwriter Ning Dai; Wang Wenye's father is Wang Zhonglei, CEO of Huayi Brothers Media Group. Guan Jinpeng, who has many representative works, has become one of the contestants, which is even more puzzling, and some netizens commented: "If Guan Jinpeng is also a newcomer director, then Wang Jing, Er Dongsheng, and Xu Ke can all come to the competition!" ”
The list of "luxurious" directors has caused many netizens to question the impure motives of "Director Please Advise": "Young creators who really need opportunities seem to be unable to break into this show." "Does the director need exposure or does the program team need exposure?"
Creation — The director's work is questioned
The "Director Please Advise" program team asked the director to finish a short film in two to three days. However, after the first broadcast, except for Bao Bell's adaptation of "Nezha", which reached the passing line, the standards and attitudes of the other three directors were questioned.
Second-hand Rose's lead singer Liang Long directed and adapted the IP "Crazy Alien", the entire short film has very few lines, relies on visual language to tell the story, and the obscure narrative expression makes many viewers fall into the dilemma of understanding. The short film was not finished because the number of votes fell below the movie-going threshold. At the scene, an actor asked Liang Long to introduce his story ideas, and Liang Long refused to interpret himself on the grounds that the short film was not finished.
Bi Zhifei, director of "Chasing Dreams in Showbiz", adapted and directed Fei Mu's famous work "Spring in a Small Town". But Li Chengru bluntly said that this short film lacks originality, and Bi Zhifei just copied it very similarly, but it is not his work to copy it anymore. In addition, The working state shown by Bi Zhifei during the filming process was also complained: he could not sort out the character relationship and narrative logic, let the actor sort out the context, and the actor Lu Xingchen directly replied: "Director, you should tell us about this!" However, due to the two-by-two PK format, because Liang Long's short film was not finished, Bi Zhifei "won without a fight".
Xiang Guoqiang, a teacher in the photography department of the Beijing Film Academy, adapted and directed the short film "Nezha Noisy Sea". The narrative logic of this short film is not clear enough, and it has not been recognized by the on-site judging panel, and the bullet screen is also mostly bad reviews. Some netizens complained: "Running away for half a life to do work, returning is still student homework." For the criticism, Xiang Guoqiang did not accept: "This film is still quite deep, they did not understand this film." "If you can objectively put the film online, it will definitely catch fire." This caused more netizens to complain: "It's not that I'm bad, it's that you don't understand me... Looking down on the audience? Spiritual Victory Law? ”
Effect — The "Debate Tournament" dominates
How does a show whose mission is to support young directors go to chaos step by step? It is not unrelated to the selection of clips by the program team on the jury's comments. In the program, there are many views that can set off topic discussions, but because many views have not been explored by the vine, deep excavation, and the lack of editing, the final effect shows that the topic lacks logical sorting, and the debate tournament has become a quarrel.
The phenomenon of "protecting the short" in the film critics circle is reflected in the comments of Professor Meng Zhong of the Beijing Film Academy on his colleague Xiang Guoqiang's short films. He said: "Director Xiang Guoqiang graduated from the photography department of the film school, and I can guarantee that the students who graduated from the film school will not become a problem in technology. This comment was quickly refuted by Hao Lei: "Graduated from a professional school, the film is very bad, and the change of line is more, this is not a criterion." Unfortunately, after this rhetoric, the two did not explain their views, tearing apart the phenomenon, but did not touch the essence: is the academic school blindly confident? Is there anything to reflect on in film education?
The phenomenon of "dropping the book bag" in the film critics circle is reflected in meng zhong and Wang Xudong's comments on Bi Zhifei's short films. The two moved out of chinese film history to question Bi Zhifei's aesthetic pursuit and lens language. Wang Xudong turned the comment scene into the scene of the thesis defense and asked Bi Zhifei: "Have you seen Mr. Fei Mu's other works?" "Wolf Mountain Blood" and "Confucius", where is their oriental aesthetic embodied? Specifically a few shots! The audience was disheveled: "What is oriental aesthetics?" How? They didn't say anything from start to finish. ”
The gap between film critics and the general audience is also magnified in the editing. For example, when some film critics supported Liang Long's silent films, some viewers questioned their profundity, and film critic Zhao Wendi responded: "We use our industry knowledge and experience to tell the audience the creative ideas of this film." We tell you that you will be able to enter from the right entrance and the right exit. "But must the entrance and exit given by the film critics be correct? Does the audience need to be guided? There is a bullet screen that represents the opinion of many people: "The only person who has the right to instruct the director is the audience." ”
Source: Yangcheng Evening News