Dapeng's "Keep You Safe" is another step forward for him.
From "Pancake Man" to "Sewing Machine Band" to "Good Luck" and "Keep You Safe", the ratings have risen all the way, 5.8, 6.6, 7.7, 7.8.
Although the box office of "Keep You Safe" will not be as high as "Pancake Man", the debt owed by "Pancake Man" is repaid after the commercial films "Sewing Machine Band" and "Keep You Safe".
In terms of film genre, "Keep You Safe" belongs to social reasoning comedy.
The form of comedy, the cloak of reasoning, the core of society, tells the harm of rumors in a witty nested way, and then shows social phenomena and connections between people.
How did the rumors come about?
People have a mentality of curiosity and excitement, the stick does not fall on themselves, as a bystander, they are all regardless of the frost of others.
When someone takes things out of context and attacks them in small essays, people are more willing to believe in things that have no lower limit and hearsay than the truth, and there will be people who do not care about themselves.
They watch the fire from afar, treat the fire as fireworks, and treat it as a festival, which may not be bad, but when a group of people follow, the joke also evolves into an event, and the event then becomes a long-term secular perception that is difficult to eliminate, and rumors arise.
If you simply talk about this process and exaggerate the harm in it, the movie is too bitter, and there is also a suspicion of selling miserable and preaching.
In terms of favorability, the audience is likely to be disgusted, because movies are pastimes for many people, and entering the cinema is not for classes, but to relax.
Dapeng knows this well, so he chooses to educate and entertain.
First let "Keep You Safe" have a comedy factor to enhance the friendliness of the audience, and then add suspense elements, focus the audience's attention on rumors and rumors, and finally think naturally through the focus.
In terms of comedy elements, "Keep You Safe" mainly adopts contrasting funny.
By going against the audience's expectations in a way that exceeds expectations, so that the jokes burst out, this method is the safest, but it is also the easiest to overturn.
So Dapeng let Jia Bing, Qiao Shan, Li Xueqin, Wang Xun, Ma Li, and Yang Di appear in turn, because they, as comedians, got a license that was recognized by the audience.
A joke that is funny in itself may not be funny when it comes out of other people's mouths, but it is more comedic when it comes out of their mouths.
For example, Dapeng's trunk is broken, Qiao Shan equips him with a lock, Jia Bing is frightened by the letter detective, and Dapeng is looking for Li Xueqin and others in the haunted house.
If you look at these bridges alone, there is nothing new, and it may be more embarrassing to bring out these comedians alone, after all, they are all old terriers and have lost their freshness.
But let each of them appear in a short segment, and all arranged in the right position, plus the contrast with Dapeng's rivalry, even the old-fashioned comedy baggage, can shake.
Underneath the comedy is reasoning, and "Keep You Safe" is transported to classic suspense elements, MacGuffin and the bomb theory.
A thunder is planted at the beginning of the film, and Wei Pingan's customer, Han Lu, is rumored to be a lady sitting on the platform, and Feng always wants to move her grave so as not to affect their family's feng shui.
Wei Pingan knew that Han Lu went because of a brain tumor, and chose their cemetery in order to bury it with his boyfriend Feng Mingming, who was the younger brother of Mr. Feng, and Mr. Feng did not want to ruin his brother's reputation because of Han Lu.
Han Lu's grave is the thunder in the film, and then as the story progresses, the audience will worry about whether Han Lu's grave will be moved, and always worry about when the bomb will explode.
And the way to tear down this thunder is to find the rumor-monger, thereby leading to MacGuffin in "Keep You Safe", who is the rumor-monger, is Han Lu innocent in the end, and can Dapeng succeed?
Once the positive spiral puzzle is complete, perform the reverse spiral puzzle and have MacGuffin jump back and forth between several characters.
This twists and turns of deconstruction makes the audience relentlessly search for answers, falling into one trap after another preset by the director, and the suspense atmosphere follows.
With theory to back on, the next step is implementation.
Dapeng controls the rhythm of "Keep You Safe" relatively well, always letting the audience follow the plot, letting the film be in a dominant position, and showing the good places frequently and intensively to the audience, so that the audience does not have a moment to stop.
This kind of "fast" can allow the audience to temporarily ignore the "slow" of the movie, forget some loopholes in the logic of the movie, and be fascinated by "Keep You Safe" at the moment of watching the movie.
For example, Wei Pingan discussed with President Feng, gave him four days to find out the truth, and then decided whether to move Han Lu's grave.
President Feng had already promised to let Wei Pingan do it, but Wei Pingan's sister Wei Ruyi became self-defeating, causing Wei Pingan to turn from an investigator to a victim, and it was reported online that he was Han Lu's customer and contracted the disease.
Before one rumor could be ascertained, another rumor smelled, and Feng Zong no longer waited for Wei Pingan's results, and turned around to dig a grave, but it was his younger brother who moved away, so that a lover could not end up as a dependant underground.
Han Lu's grave was still there, President Feng did not break his promise, and Wei Pingan was not ashamed of Han Lu, and it seemed that finding the source of the rumor was not so important.
Wei Pingan has a daughter and a job, Han Lu is just a customer, this idle matter stops, Wei Pingan's life is still as usual, no matter how you look at it, it seems that there is no harm.
But Dapeng did not give the audience time to weigh the pros and cons, immediately took action, and was taken away by another story line before he had time to think, always addicted to the direction of the plot.
Comedy and reasoning are there, and the core that sublimates these two elements comes out.
Dapeng came to the conclusion in the movie that it is necessary to have a bottom line to be a person, spread rumors with a mouth, refute rumors and break legs, and adopt a contrasting performance method.
In society, Wei Pingan ran forward and after Han Lu was rumored to be a young lady sitting on the platform, in school, his daughter Wei Mo was entangled in not telling the truth about stealing pens to the teacher.
One big and one small, two kinds of rumors, expose the dereliction of duty in family education, school supervision, and social supervision, and call on people to pay attention to every link.
Maybe your casual words can bring three spring warmth, but also can cause June cold.
Don't do evil for the small, don't do the good small, it's not scary, it's scary that people don't believe the truth.
Because onlookers always want things to be interesting, but don't want to see the pale after the truth, because the anonymity of the network fuels the darkness in their hearts.
This makes them begin to say nothing, putting on a high posture of "you taste it carefully, you understand everything", so that passers-by who do not know the truth mistakenly think that they really understand, thus causing a big mistake.
Regarding the rumors, the solution given by Dapeng is sincere, but his heart is still pessimistic.
In the movie, Wei Pingan went through thousands of hardships and finally proved Han Lu's innocence, but in the process, rumors are always unsettled, wave after wave, even at the end of the film, the rumors have not stopped.
It can be seen from this that Dapeng's perspective on movies has indeed changed, no longer purely for money-making commercial films like "Pancake Man", but injected with existential thinking.
This kind of warm sketch with both inside and face is exactly the waist movie that the domestic film market lacks.
Now domestic films are roughly divided into two types, one is a large investment such as "The Wandering Earth 2", and the other is a small cost such as "Rattle", and medium-investment films seem to have disappeared from the audience's field of vision.
Now any movie, the declared cost is often 200 million or 500 million.
For example, "Chinese Table Tennis Jedi Strikes Back" and "Manjiang Hong", and real tens of millions of investments like "Keep You Safe" seem to have become the lower layer of the contempt chain.
This deformed ecological environment is extremely unhealthy, a benign market structure, must be the middle class accounted for the majority, the head to play a leading role, so as to revitalize the entire market.
Therefore, I hope that "Keep You Safe" is a beginning, so that the mainland film market is no longer a single one-liner, but a hundred schools of thought contending with a hundred flowers.
Note: There are two Easter eggs in "Keep You Safe", the first after the first credits roll over at the end of the credits, and the second after the credits roll over in the second section.