Last week, the peach group held a "Great Night" viewing group activity in Chengdu. The scene of more than a hundred friends laughing and shouting in the theater is impressive.
Some people say that this movie made him laugh in the cinema for a long time, others said that the suspense in the film was unexpectedly surprised by the transfer, and some friends were deeply poked in tears by the feelings behind the story.
Simply put, this is a story of a self-media blogger shooting on a thriller set and encountering a "ghost".
The film starts with a short video company on the verge of bankruptcy: short video blogger Leopards (played by Fan Chengcheng) and his good brother partners Gouzi (played by Gan Yunchen) and Monkey (played by Jiang Yi) received a good business before breaking up - to secretly shoot the thriller crew and hype the male protagonist Xiaoshan (played by Jiang Long).
Three "interlopers" make a big fuss about the thriller crew, they are sometimes clumsy and hidden and sometimes add chaos for no reason, and the story is strongly dramatic from the beginning.
Jiang Yi's whole film is mostly shown as a "female ghost", and the creativity of male pretending to be a female ghost is not only full of jokes in appearance, but also uses the information difference of the characters in the film to create a dual experience of surprise and shock.
Many friends are impressed by the scene is Jiang Yi in the middle of the night stomach, in the toilet with a hoarse voice to borrow paper from the eldest brother next to him, when he leaned out to get the paper - the famous scene that made people laugh and laugh appeared!
The "female ghost" with a hair and cracked skin stretched out her sharp claws to her eldest brother who was squatting in the men's toilet.
The eldest brother was so frightened that he slipped out of the cigarette. Everyone laughed and laughed. Only Jiang Yi, who had no paper on the screen, looked ignorant. This is a joke created by the poor information between people and the audience in the play, and of course, it is also a surprise brought by excellent comedians like Jiang Yi.
"Ignorance" is Jiang Yi's character trait on the stage of the "Annual Comedy Competition". In the "Liu Guanzhang" series of works he and his partner, this ignorance and mindlessness are an important source of comedy in "trap comedy". In this film, he continued this "ignorant" character, combining the character temperament with the temperament of the film, bringing more room for jokes.
In this play, the familiar and surprising actor is by no means Jiang Yi. Like him, Jiang Long and Jiang Shimeng are also well-known actors on the stage of the "Annual Comedy Competition".
Xiaoshan played by Jiang Long is an actor who wants to be popular but does not have enough strength, seems to be quite literate, and can drag a few words of "Stanislavsky" from time to time, but in fact has no acting skills at all.
The reason for being chosen as the male number one was "I invested in this play with the salary of this play".
It seems absurd, but it has some real insinuation.
Such a character with a play within a play space is enough for Jiang Long to infuse all his unique skills into it.
On the stage of the "Comedy Competition", we have seen Jiang Long's acting skills and parody skills, as well as his super facial features and body control ability. In this movie, Jiang Long, who can act, wants to perform "can't act", he squeezes his eyebrows, stiffly and embarrassed, and reproduces a disastrous performance of flying facial features.
Reproduction and irony, the comedy effect is constantly amplified in Xiaoshan, played by Jiang Long. He retained his dominance on the stage of the "comedy competition", recreating this comedic power with sarcasm and ridicule on the big screen.
Also continuing the original comedy advantage is Jiang Shimeng, in the audience's heart, Jiang Shimeng is the kind of actress who plays very steadily, she can connect the comedy points like a lead, ironing the gap between the baggage and the baggage. In "The Great Night", she still perfectly completed the lead task of comedy, connecting the play within a play and one reversal after another.
Jiang Shimeng plays the executive director of a play within a play in the film. She follows the director (played by Liang Long), not provocative, but very necessary. She continued her stable performance, but took a step further and became the "needle of the sea god" of the entire film - when everyone was chaotic into a pot of porridge and didn't know what to do, the executive director played by Jiang Shimeng took the lead.
This time, Jiang Shimeng strung together not only comedy in the play, but also completed the transformation of the entire film from the drama space within the play to the real space.
It can be said that from this film, we clearly see that every actor maximizes his comedy ability in his or her best comedy field, and strives to find the greatest common divisor of comedy.
What's more worth mentioning is that there are not only faces from the "comedy competition" in the film, but also the first generation of netizen comedians such as Yi Xiaoxing and Kong Lianshun, and this almost buff-style comedy combination makes the whole drama have enough guarantee in "laughter".
The story of the little people and the creativity of the brain hole show director Ma Kai's determination to try more comedy genres, and it also makes the whole film more interesting in addition to laughter - it not only makes you laugh, but also makes people scream.
Friends who have been paying attention to new domestic films should be no strangers to the name of the film's director Ma Kai, before this film, he had a so-called "most terrifying domestic film" debut "Zhongxie" that had set off layers of noise among fans.
After the twists and turns of "Zhong Evil", in this "Great Night", we see Ma Kai's bold attempt at genre hybrid innovation: comedy and thriller, what he is good at and what he wants to do, are all in this story.
The wonderful thing is that its horror is not deliberate, but wrapped in a comedy atmosphere, inadvertently, so that you can't tell whether it is true or false, and then layers of fine horror.
Fan Chengcheng and Gan Yunchen hurriedly looked around the film and television city for Jiang Yi, who was dressed as a female ghost. In the distance, Fan Chengcheng saw the female ghost walking by the street, and he ran over and kicked the female ghost to the ground.
Under normal logic, the female ghost is pretended by Jiang Yi, which is a farce in which three brothers fight. However, gradually, the two discovered that the female ghost seemed to be really a female ghost, so it was not as simple as a brother fighting, but became "how can I save my life if I accidentally kick the female ghost".
Under the dislocation of this character relationship, the comedy effect and the thriller effect were naturally born at the same time. From the audience's point of view, kicking down the female ghost is indeed a bit mad, and the two unaware "mindless" scolding and scolding the female ghost naturally has a bit of ridiculousness, and with the confirmation of the female ghost's identity, the ridiculous is gradually replaced by horror. In the same scene, several transformations of laughter and surprise are completed.
Reading this scene, you can see the comedy and thriller tone of the entire film. Under the layered structure of the entire film's play-within-a-play, the story constantly encounters reversals, and this reversal triggers a change in suspense and tone, so that laughter and shouts overlap.
It is indeed not easy to do horror in this land, but this film uses a plot reversal to resolve this difficulty.
On the first layer of narrative, the three brothers of the short video are joke makers; In the second layer of narrative, in the play "The Legend of Concubine Li", Jiang Long's embarrassing performance is the main source of comedy. The hidden third layer of narrative provides a thriller color for the entire film: the three brothers secretly laid out a thriller for the gimmick, and the director of "The Legend of Concubine" secretly laid out in order to hone the actors' acting skills. The two waves of people were intimidated by each other's confusion without knowing each other. Horror and jokes are fully stimulated in the third layer of narrative.
This narrative method is more complicated, and the control of the director is more demanding, and there is a risk of "not being able to hold back" if you are not careful. Of course, this risk also gives us greater pleasure in watching movies to some extent, always with a curiosity of "I want to see how round it is". Fortunately, Ma Kai completed the closure of each of his plot reversals.
From "Evil" to "The Great Night", we can say that this is a bold attempt at comedy and thriller, and Ma Kai has also moved from his initial stylized images to a more complex and elaborate genre hybrid. A lot of things have changed, but there is a very moving core that has not changed. Even, it became the most moving stroke of the entire film.
At the end of the story, the three-layer narrative boundary is completely broken, and the dreams of the two groups of people merge into one. The executive director played by Jiang Shimeng was ordered to reshape "The Legend of Concubine Li" into a new film. The people in the film once again break the boundary between drama and reality. Those absurd and unrelated stories and ideas have all come true in the new film reimagined.
Producer: Can you implant this motorcycle into our play?
Director: This is a costume drama...
The film begins this absurd dialogue, and there is really a response in the final film, and the cool scene of the female ghost riding a motorcycle appears reasonably.
Even at the beginning of the filming of "The Legend of Concubine Li", the "fourth wall" pushed by Xiaoshan (played by Jiang Long), who couldn't play what fear was, was really broken at the end of the film. It breaks the boundary between film and short video, and reality, and has already had some meta-movie meanings in the teardown and reconstruction again and again.
The power that penetrates movies, short videos and reality is the spiritual core of this film - the dreams and persistence of small people. This is the hardest and most poking place in Ma Kai's movie.
When Jiang Shimeng used the walkie-talkie to ask "whether the crew brothers are there", even though we had predicted that there would be a group of staff gathering at the door in the next second, when this picture appeared, it still gave us more details.
That detail is the gaffer responding in Henan dialect "Light group, in." ”
This sound, seemingly idle, actually hides all the power and background of this movie. Friends who are familiar with the crew know that 80% of the crew lighting engineers in China come from Zhangbei Village, Yanling County, Xuchang County, Henan. A village, not big, even the people do not have much culture, but they light up the light of domestic film and television.
This response is the common answer of Ma Kai and his brothers to the film and television industry over the years - in, still in.
In the end, you will find that this "Great Night" is a dream in Ma Kai's heart, and it is also a dream that each of us has had sooner or later.
From group performances, dragon sets, scene management to screenwriters and directors, Ma Kai's path is the path that many people want to take. With brotherhood, with a human touch, but also with some rough cultural texture. Those imperfections, the roughness of those ravines, are just a bit of real vitality outside the assembly line, imperfect but clumsy and moving.