The FIRST Youth Film Festival, held every year in Xining, Qinghai Province, has become one of the important positions for new artists in China. The suspense crime masterpiece "Heart Labyrinth", "Spring River Plumbing", which was selected as one of the top ten in 2020 by the French "Film Manual", and the pseudo-documentary horror film "The Evil", are all from this film festival.
Recently, there is another film festival of this film, which will meet the audience through theaters. On the first weekend of the film's release, although the cumulative box office was only 3.65 million, the word-of-mouth has quietly risen in the fan circle.
Galaxy Writer
This comedy, which focuses on the screenwriters of Beipiao, won the Jury Prize (second place) and the Best Screenplay Award at the 17th FIRST Film Festival in 2023.
This is a movie with very strong fan attributes, and it also reflects the diversity of the development of domestic comedies.
North Drift
The main creator of "Galaxy Writer" is a rookie team, but this team is very interesting. Director and screenwriter Li Kuo and Shan Dandan are a fan couple (there is also a newcomer Gao Qun among the screenwriters), and the two met and fell in love through the Nolan movie "Batman: The Dark Knight".
The two also wrote about this experience in the film.
Director couple
In the film, screenwriter Zhang Yi (played by Song Muzi) grabbed two tickets for the "Dark Knight" film festival, so he asked "What is the first line of the clown in "The Dark Knight". The first fan who answered correctly and nicknamed "AKA Cannon" got one of the tickets.
AKA Cannon is a girl named Zhou Keke (played by Li Wenru), Zhang Yi and Zhou Keke became lovers. In reality, this incident has been widely circulated in the fan circle, although it is somewhat incredible, but it proves the magical power of movies and similar tastes.
The starring role of the film is Song Muzi, He Wenjun, and Li Fei, who are known as "One Joy and Three Dogs". In the past two years, the variety actors of the "Annual Comedy Competition" have entered the film and drama industry and become one of the domestic comedy trends.
The high-scoring movie "Annual Meeting Can't Stop!", the drama "Don't Panic the King" and other works can be called the works of Yixi actors' team building.
In addition, Shen Teng also made a cameo appearance in the ending easter egg, playing a "former superstar who was restored by AI", which is quite interesting.
The story of the film is not complicated. The Beipiao screenwriting duo Zhang Yi and Sun Tan (played by He Wenjun) wrote a feature film script called "Seven Seconds Man", and the two felt that this book was talented, and the film would be able to achieve a bumper harvest at the box office and word of mouth. So, under the "instigation" of their friends, the two began to attack the film company in Beijing.
The experience of the next two people, those who have been grassroots screenwriters should all feel the same. If the core authorship is taken away by another person step by step, the script intermediary takes a high proportion, and Party A asks for revisions over and over again until the story is unrecognizable......
The most terrible thing is that after a series of painful experiences, the script was finally invalidated and could not be made into a film. In this process, the relationship between Zhang Yi and Zhou Keke also experienced a rout from ideal to reality, and Zhang Yi and Sun Tan, the working partners, also had a serious rift for a time.
The friends who drifted north together were also unhappy, or suffered emotional betrayal, or accompanied by physical illness.
"Galaxy Writer" uses the position of screenwriter to radiate the suffering of film and television practitioners, and it can be clearly felt that the director and his wife have drawn a lot of inspiration from their own experience.
Shadow
"Galaxy Writer" is a movie about movies, and the director and his wife are also fans themselves, so the film is full of fan elements. Geographically, the film refers to Beijing Changying as the "center of the universe" of the domestic film and television industry. The restaurants and cafes here have gathered countless film and television people, and director Shan Dandan called it "Chang Laiwood".
In the play, Zhang Yi and Sun Tan chose to work here, and outside the play, the filmmaker chose to premiere here.
Visually, the walls of a room are covered with pictorial magazines of Godard ("Exhausted") in different colors;
When Zhang Yi and Sun Tan fantasized about "Seven Seconds Man" landing on the big screen, their eyes reflected a huge dragon mark;
and before Zhou Keke left, he gave Zhang a Hamilton watch of the same model as Murphy, the protagonist of "Interstellar......
These, from different levels such as decoration, illusion, and imagery, present the fascination of "Galaxy Writer".
From the perspective of the screenwriter himself, the film mentions and shows the "metronome" theory in "Save the Cat" (by Blake Snyder), "one of the scriptwriting bibles". The "metronome" divides genre films into strictly three-act plays, and then subdivides them into "fifteen beats" in three acts, including the beginning, climax, and ending of a story.
"Galaxy Writer" first used the form of "play within a play", combined with the current popular "Xiaomei Xiaoshuai" short video commentary, and explained clearly what a "metronome" is through a story of burglary. Then, in the script revision and pulling of "Seven Seconds", he explores the complex relationship between genre film writing and realistic rationality.
In the process of Zhang Yiyi and Sun Tan pulling Party A, the core disagreement is whether all plots need to be reasonable. For example, the delivery of food is delayed, in the eyes of Zhang and Sun, he will eat the meal directly. However, in Party A's view, the delivery person will choose to eat it himself after contacting the ordering and serving party respectively, otherwise the audience will not be able to understand his behavior.
But in many cases, the logic is actually hidden behind the behavior, and it is not clearly revealed in front of the audience. In other words, the act of eating a meal directly is not without logic, but the logic is deeper.
Here is the "character fan" in the film. There is a young actor Zheng Fei in the film. Zhang Yi and Sun Tan saw him at a friend's birthday party, and their impression of him was that he was smiling, friendly, and sunny, but he didn't expect him to commit suicide the next day without any warning.
This role and this setting are likely to refer to the role of Ah Hao played by Xu Guanghan in "The Sun Shines" (2019). Is it reasonable for a young man with no shadow and eternal peace of mind to suddenly commit suicide?
"The Sun Shines"
It seems to others that life and the rationality of life disappear in them. But from their own point of view, it is so reasonable -
Everyone has a shadow for them to hide and rest, but Ah Hao and Zheng Fei have no shadow, so they can't rest, so they are naturally prone to break and self-destruct. "Galaxy Writer" uses the role of Zheng Fei to explore whether the script/story needs to be reasonable and full of life.
comedy
"Galaxy Writer" is a very typical comedy.
Most of its comedy scenes are laid on the background of tragedy.
For example, the "masking" technique. Zhang Yi and Sun Tan have a friend nicknamed "pest", the pest changed careers, and the narrator said that he became a judge, which is called a tall man. The camera showed the pest, and sure enough, it was the judge's head, but unexpectedly, the picture was pulled forward, and a werewolf bureau appeared.
It turns out that the so-called judge is the judge in the werewolf killing, and there is no "class leap" at all. This kind of gap is admittedly comedy, but it makes people laugh and have a bitter and bitter taste.
This kind of "masking" has been a comedic technique for a long time. For example, in the 1984 Oscar-winning film "Mother and Daughter Love" (one of the director's favorite films of "The Falling Trial"), the main character Emma discovers that her husband, who teaches at a university, is flirting with a female student.
She rushed over angrily, her husband turned his head, from the back to the front, but he didn't expect that his husband was still carrying his little daughter in his arms. flirting with children is not only ridiculous, but also sad about the weakness of this marriage.
Another example is the "emotional transfer" technique. At the birthday banquet, the host, Boss Cai, lost control of his emotions and cried that he was sick with the wine, but the project was zero. Seeing that everyone couldn't persuade him, Da Liu, who "intervened in the feelings of others" among his friends, suddenly cried even more fiercely, bitterly expressing his unwillingness to lose his friends because of love.
Now Boss Cai didn't want to cry anymore, and everyone persuaded Da Liu again. Whether Da Liu has it intentionally or unintentionally, this Shura scene is full of joy, but what is revealed from this joy is the frustration of the Northern Drifters in their careers and emotions.
Of course, most of the comedy scenes in the film still revolve around "Shadow". For example, Sun Tan told Zhang Yi a story about finding bloodstone, and when the two of them were proposing a name for the story, you might have thought it would be "Crazy Stone".
But the two shook off their burdens, and the original name was "Crazy Bloodstone", which did not involve copyright, and it was reminiscent.
In addition to the comedy, many details in the film are also worth touching. The film ends in the year 2100, when the "manuscript" of the script for "Seven Seconds" is presented as a human script rather than an AI script, and a child touches the script, and the child's fingers glue and tremble.
Does this action correspond to the illusion that Zhang Yi's thumb and index finger have a loud noise as long as they are glued due to frequent typing? Does it imply that the child is related to Zhang Yi, and thus imply the inheritance of "human creativity"?
is also a "worker's comedy", "Galaxy Writer" is also compared with "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!". But there is an essential difference between the two.
Compared with the universality of "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!" in the domestic workplace, "Galaxy Writer" is confined to the circle of fans and film and television practitioners because of its subject matter, which is difficult to resonate with migrant workers outside the circle. Even if you are not careful, you will get a criticism of excessive self-awareness and over-expression.
"The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!" (2023)
Because for most audiences, it doesn't matter how you write the script, how you make the movie, how much you suffer, how much you suffer, how much you suffer. There is only one thing that matters – whether the movie you make is good or not.
Therefore, no matter how difficult the output of the drama "Seven Seconds Man" is, it is not as moving as this is a real good drama. The same is true for "Galaxy Writer".
Author: County Hao
Editor: Donnie Yen