NO.531 "Chunjiao Saves Zhiming" 76 points
Movie location: Broadway Cinema Guorui City Store
Attendance: 15
On April 28, Peng Haoxiang saved a bunch of meat strips, small rough mouths, chicken and dog fragments of love pieces, and even horror monsters and alien science fiction to the big screen, and presented the audience with the third bullet of the "Zhiming Chunjiao" series - "Chunjiao Save Zhiming". The so-called "Zhiming" or "Chunjiao" are all generic references to men and women in love, who carry a strong Hong Kong flavor, release the aura of small citizens, and achieve the "Romeo and Juliet" exclusive to Hong Kong with a low-key and witty interpretation. Since the release of "Zhiming and Chunjiao" in 2010, Yu Wenle's version of Zhiming and Miriam Yeung's Chunjiao has become a synonym for local couples in Hong Kong. In 2012, "Chunjiao and Zhiming", as a continuation of this Hong Kong-style love, pushed it to another time and space in the north. After five years, "Chunjiao Saves Zhiming" returned to Hong Kong, and the two classic Hong Kong people's male and female love journey also embarked on another fork in the road that must be faced.
As a "life observer", Peng Haoxiang, through the emotional road of Zhiming and Chunjiao' microwaves, confuses the love attitude and reality of modern Hong Kong urban men and women, especially the line part, but also analyzes the essence of ordinary people's love cleanly.
(Editor's note: Due to the film's strong regional atmosphere in Hong Kong, the film's rating is only for the Cantonese version of ChunJiao Saves Zhiming.) ）
"I like her because, I think she's good, she's good at everything"
As we all know, the "Zhiming Chunjiao" series is built from a large number of life details extracted by Peng Haoxiang from his surrounding relatives and friends, and the angle is biased, neither the black madness of "Buying Murder and Shooting People", nor as sharp and spicy as "Big Husband"; the stories of ordinary people have to be grounded, so they choose a group of smokers who are forced into a dead corner by the "smoking ban" as the main perspective, so that they can release their addiction while wiping out the small spark of love. The "Zhiming Chunjiao" series is almost from beginning to end is a large summary of love anecdotes, the temptation of ambiguous text messages, the misunderstanding of yin and yang, the collision with a little bit of anger in the sullenness, there is no profound truth, but it is loved with taste and resonates with the audience.
"I'm older than you" "But I'm taller than you"
As the theme of "sister-brother love" that is not strange today, the theme of the story of Zhiming and Chunjiao always goes straight to the difference in mentality and situation of mature men and women, pointing out the eternal childishness of men and women due to lack of security caused by "work". As Peng Haoxiang himself said: "When a person reaches a certain age, he is not only facing the problem of fertility, but also the problem of returning to the core, that is, whether the person who is with you in front of you is worth entrusting for life." So like the embarrassing situation in "Chunjiao Saves Zhiming", Chunjiao's red face is getting older and more and more inferior; Zhiming is in his prime, and when he goes out to walk his dog, there will be beautiful women to talk to. The title and ending song reveal that "Chunjiao saves Zhiming", but in fact, it is the mature and comprehensible Zhiming who saves Chunjiao from the myth of "marriage" and "procreation".
"We can't be kids anymore, it's time to grow up"
"Chunjiao Saves Zhiming" starts with a strange story like the first; then play the "toilet dry ice" game in the second part; the classic Hong Kong-style yellow cavity and laughing stem are indispensable, and inevitably involve the "fertility crisis". Although there are heavy taste topics such as pubic hair dyeing, "uniform temptation", and borrowing sperm to have children, they always revolve around "growth". This line of Jiang Mengjie in the film is an exhortation to Zhiming and Chunjiao, and it is also a advice to all men and women in love. Especially at the end, Zhiming uses a song "Legend" to retrace the love process with Chunjiao, saying that the two are sweet and sour on the road of love, singing warmly and tearfully. "Chunjiao Saves Zhiming" lets us know that some movies are "evil fates" that ordinary people can never get around, and it is also a declaration of love written to themselves and constantly corrected.
■ Director's interpretation
Title
"Love in a puff" ("Zhiming and Chunjiao"), "Love in the buff" ("Chunjiao and Zhiming" English name), and the third "Love off the cuff" ("Chunjiao Save Zhiming" English name) are all from the same staff. When he finished reading the entire script of "Chunjiao Saves Zhiming", the whole story, he felt that what he wanted to express was that when a relationship reached a position, it was necessary to break through a fixed shackle. Only by breaking free of this shackle can we continue to move forward.
"Save"
Because I think when two people are in love for a long time, you will need someone to rescue you, a kind of spiritual rescue, to help you grow, so that the relationship continues. This part tells the story of Chunjiao's rescue of some shortcomings in Zhiming's feelings, a story that makes him change.
Chinese song
In fact, I like to choose the songs that I loved when I was growing up in the early 1990s, and "Dream" is such a song. Because in Hong Kong, it was not necessary to listen to Cantonese songs, but there were also Chinese songs, just like Wang Xinping's "Don't Ask Me Who I Am" (which appeared in "Chunjiao and Zhiming").
New role
I think Jiang Mengjie's performance in "Dream of the Red Chamber" is very cute, and I especially like it. Seeing Mengjie, discovering the real person is the same, and the process of filming also makes everyone very happy. It's like once after the shoot, we invited us to dinner together, and she said yes, but Causeway Bay is very congested, and she doesn't mind walking with me all the way to the restaurant in costume and then walking back to the set, completely without a shelf.
The horror film opens
Every opening shows a horror story, this time a story about monsters, which I particularly like. The monster in this episode is the story told by my wife before she went to bed when she was a child, and I listened to it for a while and felt that how could I tell such a terrible story before going to bed, and then I thought that the story of the monster eating the child was quite interesting, and after filming, I even thought that I would have the opportunity to shoot this monster independently in the future.
Sci-fi elements
Because I myself prefer the elements of science fiction and horror, I especially like to watch science fiction movies and monster movies. So I often think, why can't you add these elements to a love movie?
For me, my favorite thing to eat when I was a kid was the buffet, because there was a little bit of everything, so by the time I was making movies, I often liked to mix and match different types of things to see what interesting things they would bump into. The way the horror film "Zhiming and Chunjiao" opened, I liked it and thought it was very interesting.
Do you still make a sequel?
At present, there is no such plan, I think it has been three episodes, and I want to stop this thing. But it's hard to say, because when I made the second episode, I didn't expect to shoot the third episode, and maybe after a few years, I will have different ideas. I think this is also a kind of fate, maybe in a few years to think of other interesting stories, everyone can get together again.
Dictation: Peng Haoxiang
Written by Beijing News reporter An Ying