On the third day of the Spring Festival, the top three pattern was almost decided, and Sir wrote them one by one.
The rest of the movies that are not squeezed in, do you have any unease?
Sir has one.
Originally, this is the most anticipated movie by fans during this Spring Festival, it talks about the film industry, filming in the play, and satirizes everyone and satirizes themselves, it can be said that this is a movie with the strongest movie elements in this Spring Festival file.
However, after 3 days of release, the box office was 60 million, and the Douban score was 7.0, which became an obscure little transparent.
Did you shoot badly?
Not necessarily.
Sir thinks that this is the most underrated movie in this Spring Festival file-
Mr. Red Carpet
Director Ning Hao, who has been sharpening his sword for five years, also brought his "benefactor" Andy Lau this time, and the "stakes" are very big.
But many viewers feel that this is just a comedy that satirizes the entertainment industry.
Some people even wonder: Why is there such a movie that is not "family-friendly" during the Spring Festival?
If it were another director, after reading this plot synopsis, Sir might also suspect that it was a problem with the director's ability, or that he had made a mistake in the schedule, but this is Ning Hao, who can kill all sides through basic experiences such as reversal and stool dropping, but is still unwilling to give up "film expression" in order to cater to the trend.
So much so that Sir kept thinking about it after watching the movie.
Is it possible that now this evaluation and popularity have formed a perfect closed loop with the film?
01
Let's start with Ning Hao.
In our impression, he can almost be regarded as the most successful comedy director in China since the beginning of the new century.
In 2006, Ning Hao filmed "Crazy Stone" with a budget of 3 million, which not only had a big reputation, but also received a box office of 25.3 million, which became an instant hit.
The movie has a strong ability to create memes.
Golden sentences such as "Don't touch me (BMW)", "Nike camera" and "Baleno, brand" are endless, so that when people see Ning Hao's name, they associate it with "hilarious".
And after that.
He "intensified", and even completed his box office breakthrough step by step with works such as "Crazy Racing", "Gold Robbery", "Heart Flower Road", "Crazy Alien" and other works.
At present, the cumulative box office of individual directors is 9.8 billion.
But.
Is Ning Hao really just a comedian who makes the audience happy?
Looking back at those hilarious works, we find that it seems that defining him in this way is too narrow.
Because for him.
"Making people laugh" won't be the first purpose of the movie.
For example:
There are two impressive laughs in Ning Hao's early "Crazy Series", one is the end of "Crazy Stone", where Black Skin steals bread and runs wildly on the elevated shelf, and the other is in "Crazy Racing", where gangsters engage in drug trading and buy ashes.
You will find that the laughter in Ning Hao's movies is not a sensory stimulation that breaks expectations and then tickles.
Instead, it focuses on the helpless madness of ordinary people who are bullied by the absurd and coincidental reality and tossed so that they have no temper.
can only face the miserable laughter of life and sigh.
Therefore, when he filmed "No Man's Land", "Heart Flower Road" and "Crazy Alien", it was an extension of this theme, and the kind of difficulty of the character could not be hidden.
And what about "Mr. Red Carpet"?
That's right.
It also has some ironic passages that we would think are "laughs" at first glance.
For example, actor candidate Liu Weichi looked at the roll-up banner behind him in a daze in the preparation room.
And then quietly.
I put my own photo in the C position by myself.
or complained that Chen Long won the actor with the role of a farmer: "A Hong Kong person playing a farmer is unreliable."
As a result, the hind foot took on the role of a farmer at the speed of light.
There is even a scene in the film where he stays in a three-star hotel in order to experience the life of a farmer.
The front foot staff checks the room for eavesdropping equipment.
He stayed in the hotel on the back foot, but he developed a huge curiosity about the squeaky spring mount and spring bed.
However, when you think that this is in line with the trend of the times, when you are satirizing 2.08 million, you will find that the more you look at it, the more wrong it becomes, why is it satirized by everyone from investors to directors to actors to media and netizens?
Even more outrageous.
When you think this is a "satirical comedy", but you vaguely feel, how can it reveal sympathy and sadness?
Many people have "different frequencies" because of this.
If it doesn't match your expectations, you will inevitably give a "mediocre" evaluation.
But.
Is it possible that our expectation that it is a "satirical comedy" is the same as our expectation of Ning Hao's "hilarious master", which is just wishful thinking?
"Mr. Red Carpet" may not be trying to make you laugh.
02
If you understand "Mr. Red Carpet" from another angle, maybe you will suddenly be enlightened.
One word: communication.
That's right, this Spring Festival comedy actually hides a very serious core.
At the beginning of the movie, Ning Hao revealed a clear signal to us.
First scenario:
A vertical line is measuring the size of the red carpet, and then the festive red carpet slowly opens in a marching posture, conveying a sense of sacredness, which is the highest award for the art of cinema in a certain territory, and everyone is looking forward to the results of the year.
Meantime.
A car passed by, scraped off a red carpet, and had no communication with the staff who laid out the red carpet.
Second scenario:
Liu Weichi and his wife divorced after a hidden marriage, and his ex-wife accused him of various problems.
And what about him.
When encountering an argument, he never faces it, but squats down and avoids the problem at hand by packing up his things.
Communication is ineffective.
These two scenes have actually clearly told us that if you expect this to be a movie that exposes the privacy of gossip in the entertainment industry, you may be disappointed, and its original intention is not to satisfy the audience's voyeuristic desires, but to present the state to provoke broader thinking.
It is a high-density work that treats the audience as a good opponent and a good bosom friend in a game of chess, and it is a high-density work that invites the audience to enter the game and immerse itself with the considerable intellectual accumulation of life so far.
Let's talk about the details that Sir thinks has a key guiding effect for understanding the whole film.
Without a doubt, the most important thing to talk about is a pig.
After Liu Weichi entered the crew, he couldn't find the feeling, and he acted in the scene of being bullied, and was pointed out by the director that the real farmer is very "rough", where can he be bullied so well, and he will not resist at all?
The implication is that the actor is not grounded and has no taste, and to put it more profoundly, it is anti-human. From Liu's point of view, all the "lower-level" people should be as submissive as his agent and assistant, and dare not say anything.
The actor also has professional self-esteem, so he asked the team to arrange to go to the countryside to experience life.
Avoiding the routine, the local cadres entertained, and he broke into the pig farmer's pig shed.
Excited, he took a photo of all kinds of pigs with his mobile phone, and felt that this was the texture of life.
Brotherly brother to pig farmer, receive a pig-killing knife.
As a result, not long after the car drove out of the village, the roundworm-like agent in his stomach threw the knife and stuck it straight into the roof of the vegetable shed, which in itself was a metaphor for the naked arrogance of the class.
And the pig he brought was praised by the director, which was real and natural. As a result, a pig ascended to heaven and became a "pet" that the five-star hotel was forced to accept helplessly.
In the words of Internet blackmail, the pig was empowered by the aura and status of the actor, and everything made great strides towards the absurd road.
But the director cleverly came back at the end:
The pig is still the same pig, and it will not become a pet that everyone loves because of "empowerment".
But in the end, this pig will "frighten" everyone in and out of the play, it is crazy, it is very appropriate to describe it as "wolf rushing", and its ending is like a pig-killing knife that falls down and goes straight to the roof of the shed.
Why crazy?
From the pig's point of view, it is elevated, bears pressure, and becomes a "tool pig";
But on the other hand, it is partly a projection of Liu Weichi's anxiety and panic, and he has nowhere to say aggrieved and uncomfortable.
This is a pig.
The second very important "role" is the horse.
In order to win the favor of the chairman of the international film festival curator, Lau Weichi took Leonardo's "Survival in the Wilderness" as an example, and carefully planned a "highlight scene" that the judges could see and touch, that is, there was no need for a stand-in, and the horseback riding really fell.
He passed it on to the chairman and uploaded it to the Internet to attract praise. As a result, living in a glass house, he underestimated the treacherous mood of the crowd.
He became the "bad guy" who abused horses, the film was boycotted, and he was also disqualified from being shortlisted.
He was wronged, obviously he was hard working and serious, how could he become an immoral and bad star.
Do you want to apologize? Rely on public relations thinking or conscience to solve the problem, or go to the cinema to see it.
To reveal, the fallen horse finally appeared in the yard of Stephen Lau's Hong Kong mansion, pacing on the ground where the tree was cut down.
It seems to imply that in the era of entertainment to death, the other side of "social death" on the Internet, in the unknown gaps, the truth hides in it to breathe.
The third is the "tree".
At the beginning of the movie, a tree is cut down.
That's the emotional projection of the actor and his ex-wife when they argue.
He lived so divided and anxious.
From marriage to divorce is invisible, so the ability to love in intimate relationships has long been lost, and even children's birthdays can be forgotten. Even if they meet in Pingshui, they are eager to get a little short-term warmth, but they are nervous and can use the sweeping robot in the girl's room as a camera to take candid photos.
The tree was cut down, and the "everyday" and "normal" also cut down a lot from the actor.
At the end, he sees several wagons pulling the felled trees in the tunnel.
This picture also shows that the red carpet is everywhere, and the actor is everywhere.
As long as the cart is turned upside down and chasing a false sense of identity, the inevitability of being pruned by the rules of the game is chosen.
Just like after watching the movie, Sir's mind kept spinning "Bolero", and the composer Ravel once introduced it himself:
Its melody, harmony and rhythm are consistent, and the rhythm of the snare drum is continuously emphasized, and the variation of one factor contributes to the orchestral crescendo.
The same goes for films.
Combined with the protagonist and theme of the film, it is not difficult to feel that this song is actually suggesting an ambiguous state between "change and change", "absurd and real", just like the Internet world that is difficult to define and the consensus is absent.
So you see, is "Mr. Red Carpet" easy to understand?
It's also easy.
As long as you grasp the theme of "communication", you can understand that this is a movie about the "ineffectiveness of communication", which is of great significance to the present reality.
But at the same time, it is not so easy to "understand".
Because it's really not like our common Spring Festival movies, which will bring the meal to your mouth and feed you, it is just like the big and small good movies in this world, only showing the state, without judgment, so that any audience who goes to the movie with a position and prejudice will not get the satisfaction of "cool film".
But Sir thinks.
Compared with commercial blockbusters that are large and small, they strive to be simple and understandable.
Movies like "Mr. Red Carpet" seem to be even more commendable.
03
So back to the question at the beginning, in this year's Spring Festival file, Sir has seen similar comments more than once:
Why do you want to watch such a "not family-friendly" work during the Spring Festival?
On the surface.
This is Ning Hao's "willfulness".
For example:
We all know that in today's movies, in order to attract the audience's more and more easily distracted attention, the number of shots is increasing, as far as the general commercial film is concerned, it is basically 2000 shots to start, and action movies are far more than that.
The length of a single shot is getting shorter and shorter.
And what about "Mr. Red Carpet"? Ning Hao admitted frankly that the number of shots in the whole film is less than 400.
Not only is it far less than the 2,000 shots of "Crazy Racing", but it is not even 1/4 of "Crazy Stone".
Maybe.
This is Ning Hao's serious competition about comedy and the tradition of family carnival during the Spring Festival.
But.
When I think about it, I don't think it's necessarily capricious.
For Sir, such a movie released during the Spring Festival is an attempt to connect from the screen to reality, its box office, its reputation, people's understanding of it at different latitudes and directions, and at the same time constitutes a perfect closed loop.
How so?
Let's take an example.
Not long after the opening of the film, Liu Weichi received a notice from Station D to make a short video for him, under the camera, he reproduced the classic actions in "Five Tigers Break Up" (1991) in the short video, parroting "Everyone, old iron", and accidentally said "666" as "liao liao liao".
As a result, the choreographer praised him for saying well:
666很土,liao liao liao很棒
What do you think this paragraph is about?
A tribute?
As we all know, in 2006, it was Andy Lau's help that gave Ning Hao the opportunity to shoot "Crazy Stone", so this time Ning Hao tailor-made a movie for him.
Reasonable.
A complaint?
"666" and "Lao Tie" are not dirty? Of course, but why did the choreographer ask him to do such a dirty thing? And when Liu Weichi just wants to act seriously, but because of the wrong pronunciation, he wants to correct it but can't correct it, is this the sadness of being an actor or the sorrow of the audience?
It makes sense to think that way.
But if you look back and think about it, this is not about the current environment that we all know:
Movies are no longer movies, and stories are no longer important.
When the creator is calculating the audience's G-spot in seconds, he forgets that a good movie itself can become particularly "heavy" because of multiple interpretations.
Yes.
Rather than saying that "Mr. Red Carpet" is a "feast" of non-routine comedy, it is better to say that this is Ning Hao's thinking about the present, which raises questions and presents contradictions, but is not in a hurry to give the audience answers, but leaves the final interpretation in the hands of the audience.
You can have a variety of answers.
There is no right answer.
And this is Ning Hao's real intention, even if you criticize, even if you don't feel it, but as long as you participate in this thinking, this discussion is enough.
Because—
It's not important to force people to take a stand and take sides, it's important to be seen and stimulate the process of communication.
It's a pity.
Both in the film itself and outside the film.
Communication is becoming inappropriate, unbalanced, and ineffective.
Just like the voiceover of "international conflict" that often appears in the film, or the constant saying of the management "the story of the movie is nothing to me", from the big countries to the film industry, and even the pig that rushed out and fell to his death at the end of the film, all tell us that communication is powerless.
Everyone is on the same page.
Everyone is irritable and explosive, and at the same time prone to dedicate their so-called compassion.
But they never think about it, even if it's really a communication.
And so the film ends.
Liu Weichi stepped on the balance bike, he opened his arms, walked on thin ice, and tried to maintain his balance, in fact, he has already told us the director's choice:
Accept.
Even if no one applauds, you have to adapt and accept it silently.
It's just that in Sir's view, in the fiercely competitive and lively Spring Festival stalls in 2024, live broadcast marketing is strongly inserted, how much of its expression can be accurately delivered to the audience, and it can be picked up by someone with a heart like a drifting bottle thrown in the ocean, and it will be loved and recognized.
became the final suspense of the movie.
Cinema is the art of communication.
Sir doesn't want to see the irony of communication on the screen.
got off the screen, and was constantly verified and slapped in the face.
Therefore, if "Mr. Red Carpet" is drowned in the choice of inertia, initiating communication in exchange for silence.
That's true—
It is Sir's biggest difficulty in this year's Spring Festival.
The picture in this article comes from the Internet
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