Talk about the recently launched "Big World Gacha Machine", which currently has four independent short films.
The first is "The Last Director of the Earth" directed by Xu Lei and starring Jia Zhangke and Ning Hao.
When this short film was screened at the Pingyao Film Festival last year, it caused quite a stir, with rave reviews and fame.
Under the fame, I did not disappoint when I came to see it, and I liked "The Last Director of the Earth" too much.
The main line of black humor and irony, the core of love and warmth.
I. "The Last Director on Earth"
1. Ridicule and irony
Ning Hao and Jia Zhangke, the two directors, are not soft on self-deprecation.
The background is set in 2065, the film has declined, completely disappeared from daily life, the old two who have been in the past, the hero twilight, is forgotten in the corner of no one.
Beautiful girls were seen in the bar, and they quickly began to tout each other and try to get attention.
Hearing that they had the opportunity to participate in the film application and become the section chief, the two riveting gifts who pretended not to care were full of energy.
The main line is common in ordinary sketch passages, but these two people have made up a lot of "movies".
Self-deprecating, self-deprecating, but also mocking movies, ridiculing various phenomena.
Borrowing from the children, what is the movie, "a bunch of people sitting in a dark room staring at a screen, they can only look at it stupidly, they can't manipulate anything."
Hey, not really.
In "Sherlock on the Plain", director Xu Lei has that sense of humor that is not deliberate and effortless, and this time telling the director's story is even more funny.
2. Black humor.
For the future development of technology, the two paragraphs in the story are very interesting.
One is That Jia Zhangke's robot gave him noodles and insisted on the "golden ratio of data", and the two poured water and powder one by one, resulting in a table of hundreds of bowls of noodles.
As for the remote playback function, it was used by Jia Zhangke to disgust Ning Hao.
Ning Hao hung up his phone, refused his request for help, and then received a ghost cry wolf howl (not) art singing section from him
Jia Zhangke's big head appeared in Ning Hao's caravan, and then the magic sound penetrated his ears, oh, the wrong aftersound around the beam, it was so funny!
Technology and human nature, data rationality and gentle memory perception, new technical means and usage, all kinds of problems are carefully sewn into funny paragraphs, and lightly brushed over.
(Here should be Director Jia Zhangke's face full of bitter emoji: don't over-interpret my movie)
The big director is useless, director Ning Hao's skills were finally used to teach the four children to "eat and cry", really listen to the real feelings, funny and absurd, and a little bit of people sigh.
3. Dense Easter eggs everywhere
Ning Hao appeared, the soundtrack, the shots, the picture, the western hero is full of visual sense.
The wine next to me is marlon brandy (manual hahaha).
The Easter eggs in the short film are particularly dense, and my favorite place is not "implanting easter eggs", but "planting" easter eggs, and the style of those easter eggs, the meaning behind them, and the story narrative are integrated.
4. Love movies
The reason why I like this small short film is because no matter how ridiculous and ironic how to dissolve, the final landing point is "but I still love movies."
You don't even need to say it directly in words and lines.
People who have dedicated most of their lives to movies satirize the fly camp dogs in the movie Vanity Fair, the interests are smoked, and even self-deprecating themselves may not be exempt from vulgarity.
But in the end, on the unmanned beach, against the movie projector for five dollars, I chose to scold and scold, I love movies.
We are here, through the "platform" to send away "Xiao Wu", "the world" is very big, we "jianghu (children)" goodbye, friends, let us "swim until the sea turns blue".
(In the English subtitles, the title part of the film is in italics)
The part I like very much is that Ning Hao saw the drama next door being carried away from the hospital bed, saying that there were several movies he wanted to see that he had not yet watched, Jia Zhangke said, and grasped it.
There are a few movies you want to see that you haven't seen yet, so watch them.
Second, each has its own highlights.
The remaining three short films also have their own highlights.
"Hello, Goodbye" starring Zhang Zifeng and Guo Qilin has given the director a keen sense in that it accurately captures the difficulty and powerlessness of communication in various different social fields.
Before there was no open permission, only a few fixed words could be set.
It is related to occupation, scenario, and need.
The heroine played by Zhang Zifeng met someone on the subway to comfort her "don't be too sad", and the male protagonist played by Guo Qilin disliked "a serious person who would set such a sentence", and finally he held the ashes of the heroine and met him in the other party's workplace.
Eyebrows are warm, the money is comforting, you don't have to be too sad.
The words that once comforted her in the dark, made her feel happy and even thrilled, turned out to be just the other party's professional clichés.
Whether this is a matter of sincerity or inertia, whether there has ever been a hint of warmth or "even this warmth is an illusion", there is a lot of room for interpretation.
The short film creates a suffocating atmosphere in which people are alienated and disciplined, and even dismembered as humanoid parts in a highly social division of labor.
Formatting language is like a black allegory of the context of the moment, of the "uselessness of its function" of language.
The scene is virtual, the despair is real.
The famous kiss scene in "Kill Time" is amazing!
In contrast, "One By One Holiday" is more conventional, (changing the language, not time travel) the grandson returns to his grandfather's childhood and plays marbles together.
Technology is developing, but human time and energy have been compressed, and they are not richer, but they seem to be poorer at all levels, from material money to psychological feelings.
The film uses love and affection to crack such a dilemma, the picture is very warm, the texture is not bad, but where is such a dilemma can be cracked by a sentence of "love".
The settings of "Hello, Goodbye" and "Killing Time" have a very strong apocalyptic texture.
This kind of apocalyptic texture is not the destruction caused by geological disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes, nor is it an alien invasion, or even the epidemic of infectious diseases, but the sense of doomsday that "material abundance, social development, but the meaning and value of human beings are universally deprived".
The former sets people to struggle to survive, like a drop of precarious dew in the vast city, which will be replaced, dried up, and disappear at any time;
The latter sets the idea that people have a lot of time to kill "the pursuit of meaning itself is meaningless".
Whether it is the compulsion of the survival situation or the exhaustion of the pursuit of visual value, there is a deep despair behind it, and a struggle to try to break through this despair.
That 360-degree turn of the super long kiss scene is a desperate dance against death.
In the end, it is the story of "The Last Director of the Earth" that sets the "film dead hero twilight", which makes people feel that there is a hope that will never be blown away, and it has always been there.