A few days ago, the comedy movie "Hello, Li Huanying", produced by "Beijing Bowl Entertainment", self-directed and self-acted by Jia Ling, and assisted by Shen Teng, Zhang Xiaofei and Chen He, released a pilot trailer.
This "Hello, Li Huanying" was originally a sketch created by Jia Ling in the 2016 variety show "Comedy Story Season 1".
Now, with Jia Ling's transformation into a director, this sketch story has also been enlarged and expanded into a movie, and it is set on the first day of the Chinese New Year in 2021.
"Hello, Li Huanying" tells the heroine of the story, because of an accident, she traveled to the era before her mother's unmarried marriage, and witnessed the process of her parents meeting and falling in love.
Seeing this story structure, many viewers who love movies may think of "Riding the Wind and Waves" directed by Han Han and starring Peng Yuyan and Deng Chao in 2017.
One is the son crossing, witnessing the father's young years and starting a family; the other is the daughter crossing, witnessing the mother's youth and love past.
The similar story structure can't help but make people think about these two works.
In fact, on the big Screen in Chinese, stories like this "children travel through time and space and witness the green years of their parents" are not only "Hello, Li Huanying" and "Riding the Wind and Waves".
If you trace back to the roots, the starting point of this kind of story probably starts from the "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers" directed by Chen Kexin and starring Liang Jiahui and Liang Chaowei in 1993.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >01: Learn Wang Jing's Chen Kexin</h1>
This "New Brothers and Brothers" is a film work produced by UFO Filmmaker Production Co., Ltd. in 1993 and co-directed by Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi.
It is also the second film work independently shot after the establishment of UFO Filmmaker Productions Co., Ltd.
In the early 1990s, the development of Hong Kong films entered its final peak. In 1992, Zeng Zhiwei, Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi also co-founded "UFO Filmmaker Production Co., Ltd." and independently created the urban warm comedy "Three Heroes of wind and dust".
After the release of "Three Heroes of the Wind and Dust" in February 1993, although it received good word-of-mouth, its box office performance was not particularly prominent.
Although the Hong Kong film market was prosperous in the early 1990s, there were many film companies of all sizes and a variety of films, and the competition in the industry was very fierce.
In order to stabilize the company's financial operation, after "Three Heroes of wind and dust", Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi decided to cater to the audience market and make a blockbuster film.
At this time, Wang Jing, who was proud of the spring breeze above the box office market, also became the target of Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi to learn to imitate.
In 1989, Cheng Xiaodong and Zhang Yimou cooperated in "Ancient and Modern Wars of Qin Figurines", which set off a wave of cross-over film boom in the Hong Kong film market.
Later, Wang Jing and Zhou Xingchi cooperated in "Gambler 2: Shanghai Beach Gambling Saint", which also achieved great success in the box office market.
After "Three Heroes of Wind and Dust", Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi also focused on the "crossing theme" and hoped to create a comedy full of spoofs and nonsense styles like Wang Jing.
The prototype of "New Difficult Brothers" was also preliminarily finalized at this time.
Directors with pursuits have their own ideas for the creation of film works, and Chen Kexin is no exception.
In the process of conceiving New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers, Chen Kexin believes that he can't play Wang Jing's kind of and joke, and UFO should not lose his true color.
So under the balance of both parties, this "New Difficult Brother" has become a film work with both spoofs and nonsense, and full of urban warmth.
In 1993, when Chen Kexin was interviewed by Film Biweek, he also talked about his experience of learning Wang Jing and conceiving this "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers".
It is precisely because it retains the "film essence of UFO Company", this "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers" has a little more deep thinking and understanding of "father-son affection" under the appearance of "Wang Jing Comedy Movie" that laughs and spoofs continuously.
It is precisely because of this bit of deep thinking and understanding that "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers" has become a classic that is frequently imitated, but has not been surpassed.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >02: "Father-son warmth" through time and space</h1>
"Chu Yuan" (played by Liang Chaowei), who lived in the 90s, is a young man who "hates his father and does not become steel". Everyone else lives the life of the second generation of the rich because of their father's hard work.
And because he has a father who only knows how to teach morality and relief friends, and does not know how to make money hard, he is now destitute and full of ambitions.
On this day, Chu Yuan's father ,"Chu Fan" (played by Liang Jiahui), lent money to a friend again, which caused a family conflict. During the quarrel, Chu Yuan scolded his father, did not know how to take care of his family, and lived a lifetime in vain.
After an argument with his father, Chu Yuan went out for a walk to ease his mood. Not long after leaving home, his CALL machine suddenly received a short message.
It turned out that after the quarrel, the father was also depressed and went out for a walk, only to be attacked by gangsters and fall into a coma.
Chu Yuan rushed to the hospital to visit his unconscious father and tried to soothe his mother's emotions with words.
In the conversation with his mother, Chu Yuan learned some of his father's past when he was young. He gradually discovered that he did not understand his father's inner world.
There is a dry well on Chunfeng Street, and children often throw coins into the dry well to make a wish when Jupiter and the moon meet. When he was a child, Chu Yuan also often went to the dry well to play.
Chu Yuan saw in the newspaper that Jupiter and the moon would meet tonight, so he remembered the dry well and wanted to go there to make a wish to bless his father with peace.
However, because he accidentally fell into a dry well while making a wish, Chu Yuan accidentally traveled to the 50s and met his father when he was young in Chunfeng Street at that time.
In Chunfeng Street in the 1950s, Chu Yuan saw how his father helped his friends, how he fell in love with his mother, and how he helped his neighbors against real estate developers.
After a series of twists and turns, Chu Yuan and his father in the 50s became "good friends" who talked about everything. And the knot between father and son is gradually unraveling.
Chu Yuan, who experienced an adventure in the 50s, encountered jupiter and moon again. Taking advantage of the opportunity of the "two stars meeting", Chu Yuan crossed back from the dry well back to modern times.
The father, who fell into a coma, also woke up at this time. The father and son who abandon the knot, at the end of the story, offer us a happy ending ending.
In the arrangement of the story, the core of this "New Difficult Brother" is still the old plot design of father and son to experience twists and turns together and eliminate inner barriers.
However, the integration of nonsensical elements, the laying out of orderly story details, and the spoofed and interesting movie sections have made this traditional and old-fashioned "father and son story" sprout a new era of vitality.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >03: "New Brothers and Sisters" full of small details</h1>
In this "New Difficult Brother", Chen Kexin played Wang Jing's "spoof" feature to the extreme, and the large and small fan plots in the film were dazzling.
First of all, the title of the movie "New Difficult Brother" is a very stalked IP.
In 1942, the Shanghai "Star Film Company" filmed the movie "Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers". In this work, director Han Langen focuses on two small people in the city, and through the bumpy experience of the two people working in a foreign country, he reveals the hard living environment of the working people at the bottom and their optimistic attitude to life in misery.
The tenacious and optimistic grassroots spirit in "Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers" has had a great impact on the development of Hong Kong films later.
In 1960, Hong Kong film director Qin Jian created a film that reflected the lives of small people through a pair of friends who loved and killed each other, which was also named after "Difficult Brothers".
In 1982, Mai Jia, Shi Tian, and Xu Ke also collaborated on a comedy film that reflected the lives of small people, also titled "Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers".
Under the influence of several generations of filmmakers, the term "difficult brother and difficult brother" has also become the classic title of "Hong Kong-style small-person movies".
In 1993, Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi, in order to pay tribute to the forerunners of these "Hong Kong-style small character films", also named the film "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers".
At the end of "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers", Chen and Li also specially paid tribute to those predecessors.
In addition to the title, the story section and character naming of this "New Difficult Brother" are also full of details.
In "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers", Leung Ka Fai plays a character called "Chu Fan", who was a tram driver in the 50s, living in a shared apartment, living next to the poor Gao Laoquan, the snobbish and greedy chartered public, the college student Zhang Myopia, and the nightclub dancer Violet Lotus.
This plot setting is a spoof of the 1953 black-and-white Cantonese film "Spring Dawn in the Dangerous Building". In this "Dangerous Building Spring Dawn", it is wu Chufan, an older generation of film actors, who played the "tram driver".
The role "Chu Fan" played by Liang Jiahui is exactly the name of "Wu Chufan".
In the middle of the film, Watsons buys the property and intends to evict the tenants. The design of this story is obviously a spoof of the classic old film "Seventy-Two Tenants".
At first, "Seventy-Two Tenants" was a play in Shanghai burlesque. In 1963, Director Wang Weiyi of Pearl River Film Studio put "Seventy-Two Tenants" on the screen, which attracted acclaim after its release and became a milestone in the history of Chinese film development.
In 1973, Hong Kong film director Chu Yuan remade "Seventy-Two Tenants" in the form of a Cantonese film. And this remake has also become the last peak of the Cantonese film era.
In 1993's "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers", Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi once again made a prank on "Seventy-Two Tenants", and the role played by Liang Chaowei was also named "Chu Yuan".
Interestingly, Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi also specially invited the real Chu Yuan to participate in the cameo of "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers".
When Liang Chaowei introduced himself to Chu Yuan, the joyful dialogue and subtle expressions of the two also added a lot of fun to the movie story.
In addition to spoofing colleagues in the film industry, this "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers" also made a mockery of Li Ka-shing, Fok Ying-tung and Sir Watson, three business tycoons.
Chu Yuan's grandfather was the famous "Sir Watson", and Chu Fan's neighbor who made plastic flowers was Li Ka-shing.
These two directly thrown out the stem, I believe most fans have noticed, but the hidden "real estate tycoon" Fok Yingdong in the story plot, I don't know if there is any audience to find.
When Watsons bought the real estate to drive away the tenants, Chu Yuan found Prince Ji's father and wanted to buy a house by installment payment.
The father of Prince Ji became the first person to implement the "installment purchase policy".
In fact, the strategy of "buying a house in installments" first appeared in Hong Kong in the 50s. At that time, Hong Kong ushered in a wave of immigration, a doubling of the population, and the shortage of housing resources, creating a warm spring in the real estate industry.
However, most of these new populations are working people at the bottom and simply do not have the ability to buy houses. In order to promote the market, Fok Yingdong came up with a "installment payment" method. And this set of sales ideas has also made Fok Yingdong a "real estate tycoon" in Hong Kong.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >04: Leung Ka Fai of the transformation of the music scene</h1>
In addition to these spoofs of Cantonese old films and business tycoons, the unique nonsense comedy bridge design has also added a lot of highlights to this "New Difficult Brother".
As soon as Liang Chaowei saw the female doctor, he would unconsciously discharge both eyes. Every time a tragic event occurs, the sky will be inexplicably thundered. These old-fashioned Cantonese films with their own sense of contrast add a lot of joy to "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers".
And the slogan of "believing in Jesus to get the buffalo" also coldly poked at the laughter of many fans.
It is worth mentioning that in this "New Difficult Brothers and Difficult Brothers", Chen Kexin and Li Zhiyi created an English meme of "Fujian University".
And this terrier, for some reason, was loved by Wang Jing. Later, when Wang Jing filmed works such as "Red Light District" and "Gambler 1999", the English meme of "Fujian University" also appeared in the film section many times.
In 1992's "92 Black Roses vs. Black Roses", Leung Ka-fai sang a song called "Old Joy Like a Dream".
Since then, performing songs and dances on the big screen seems to have become a necessary bridge for Leung Ka Fai to star in comedy. In 1993's "East becomes West", Liang Jiahui's "Kaishan Monster" version of "Double Flying Swallow" impressed fans.
And the same 1993 comedy work, Leung Ka Fai's affectionate performance of "Tell Laura I Love Her" in this "New Brothers and Sisters", also echoed in the minds of many viewers.
I don't know if it is because of the market heat caused by these song and dance performances on the big screen.
After 1993, Leung Ka Fai really won the support of "Rolling Stone Records", transformed into a singer, and released the music album "Tempt Me for a Lifetime".
However, compared with acting, Leung Ka Fai's performance in the record market is obviously somewhat inadequate. "Tempt Me For a Lifetime" is Leung Ka Fai's first solo album, and it has also become his only album.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" >05: Summary</h1>
In December 1993, this "New Difficult Brother" officially entered the Hong Kong film market. In the end, the film ranked 13th in the annual box office list with a box office performance of more than 21 million.
The double popularity of word-of-mouth and box office of "New Difficult Brothers" has made Chen Kexin's "UFO Filmmaker Production Co., Ltd." embark on a career pioneer.
And this "warm story of father and son through time and space" has also become a classic on the big screen of Hong Kong films, and has been followed and imitated by many film and television creators after it.
Original 丨 Article Copyright Genus: Magical Blush Lake
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