Text | Entertainment Pioneer, Author | Rain over the smoke, edit | Simcere Editorial Department
The happiness of this year's summer file is given by "Catching the Doll".
For the audience, watching "Catching the Doll" can laugh in the cinema for two hours without any worries; For the market, the box office of "Catching a Doll" exceeded 1.3 billion within 5 days of its release, which played an immediate rescue effect. Moreover, 189,000 people on Douban scored 7.4 points for this movie. As a commercial film, the results of "Catching the Doll" are already on the passing line.
But director Lu Chuan just wants to break a basin of cold water for "Catching the Doll". On July 17, he unceremoniously diss "Catching the Doll" on the Toutiao platform as a low-quality and strong alkaline comedy, and even rose to the level of cultural pathos.
Subsequently, Lu Chuan's next operation was to direct and act in a Rashomon. His company, Ape Power Culture, posted on Weibo that Lu Chuan's account in Toutiao was stolen, and Lu Chuan quickly forwarded Weibo, saying that Shen Teng was a buddy and Shi Pengyuan was his younger brother.
I thought that the matter could come to an end here, but I never thought that Toutiao personally slapped the face in person, proving that it was the user who deleted the content by himself, and Lu Chuan's remarks can be regarded as igniting the long-dormant film market, and contributing a wave of popularity to "Catching the Doll" for free.
And "Catching the Doll", as the first hit movie in the summer file, has indeed created a lot of topics worth discussing due to its polarized word-of-mouth, such as Chinese-style thrillers, all-round control of education, and no hard work.
But then again, is it really necessary to judge a commercial film with a magnifying glass frame by frame for a commercial film that laughs and forgets?
How did "Catching the Doll" become the sadness of culture?
"Those who don't understand have gone to make movies, and those who understand have gone to write film reviews."
Netizens once used this sentence to vent their dissatisfaction with the random comments of film critics, but Lu Chuan's identity was quite embarrassing. After all, he is in between, not only controlling film shooting as a director, but also guiding the country as a semi-senior film critic, saying that other people's works are low-quality and strong alkaline films, but he has never thought about the "Nine-Story Demon Tower" he has made.
Netizens interpreted Lu Chuan's move as revenge for the box office failure that year. You must know that when "Nine-Story Demon Tower" and "Charlotte's Troubles" fought against each other, it could be described as an all-round rout.
At the box office, "Charlotte's Troubles" won 1.447 billion at the box office, and "Nine-Story Demon Tower" was only 682 million, not even half of it. On the word-of-mouth side, "Charlotte's Troubles" scored 7.9 points on Douban, and "Nine-Story Demon Tower" scored only 4.4 points on Douban. In Director Lu's heart, "Charlotte's Troubles" may also be a low-quality and strong alkaline comedy, behind the strong alkaline, it is full of acidity.
Let's talk about the concept of low-quality and strong alkaline comedy films. After all, it's a noun coin, and ChatGPT interprets it as "a film that contains a lot of spoofs, exaggerations, and nonsensical funny elements." If you look at it according to this standard, Lu Chuan's words can be said to have offended most of the film industry, and even indiscriminately swept a large number of commercial films with high box office and low reputation. Of course, it also includes his own works that are double at the box office and word of mouth.
It is true that ordinary audiences can think that any movie is not good-looking, but Lu Chuan is criticized for daring to do things that he doesn't dare to do. But in any case, Lu Chuan also invisibly promoted the box office of "Catching the Doll" to continue to rise.
So, is the movie "Catching the Doll" really a low-quality and strong alkaline comedy? Just as there are a thousand Hamlets for a thousand readers, the question is equally divisive.
But according to the perception of Entertainment Xiansheng, before entering the theater, if you don't want to think about it at all, "Catching the Doll" can indeed make the audience laugh for two hours, and at the same time, the film will also be appropriately valuable. For example, when Ma Chenggang taught Ma Jiye to pick up bottles, he discussed with education experts: "When people have nothing, their self-esteem is worthless." At the end, Ma Chenggang shouted the sentence: "You think it's just us controlling your life, and you are also controlling our life!" It is also the epitome of Chinese-style parent-child relationship.
In addition, "Catching the Doll" also has tears. In the film, when the grandmother who entered the play was forced to separate from her grandson because of goofs, she recalled the past and accidentally defrauded the corpse, which is really tear-jerking. A commercial film does this, in fact, it is enough.
As for Lu Chuan's mention that the happy twist dominates the Chinese film market, it is the sadness of culture, which seems to be even more impossible. First of all, Happy Twist is not a panacea, and movies with low reputation such as "Super Family", "Li Cha's Aunt", and "Demon Bell" have not leveraged too much box office. Secondly, the film market has always been all-encompassing, not only tolerating bad movies on the table, but also reducing the share of word-of-mouth movies with low box office, but some high-quality movies will also be dark horses and win box office that exceeds expectations.
Because of this, the sadness of culture is far from the height that can be raised by the explosion of a few movies.
Taking a magnifying glass to examine it is not the right way to open a commercial film
"Catching the Doll" is positioned as both a sketch movie and a satirical comedy.
The film is still based on the "Xihong City Universe", but unlike the setting of "The Richest Man in Xihong City", where the poor get rich, "Catching the Doll" tells the story of a rich man pretending to be a poor chicken baby. Although Ma Jiye seems to be poor, there are various NPCs around him to help him repeatedly learn mathematics, physics, English and other knowledge, and the goal of the whole family for many years is just to send the child to the Department of Business Administration of Qingbei University to inherit the family business.
But this process actually reflects two completely different views of education: on the one hand, there are many tricks of rich people's chicken babies, and on the other hand, there are psychological problems caused by poor children, which basically covers the disadvantages of Chinese education. It is precisely because of this that "Catching the Doll" has been interpreted as a Chinese-style thriller by netizens from all walks of life.
However, "Catching the Doll" itself is a commercial film, and the funny scenes presented in the film are more like irony for black humor.
For example, the airborne foreign teacher needs to help Ma Jiye practice speaking completely according to the textbook, and cannot play blindly by himself; When Ma Chenggang contracted the stadium to help Ma Jiye pick up bottles, people who really needed to make money from bottles could only sigh: "There are no resources and you can't even pick up bottles"; Even when grandma pretended to die, the last words left to Ma Jiye were "Grandma's soul is waiting for you in the sky above the Department of Business Administration of Qingbei University", and the lines are both poignant and funny.
Sure enough, the core of comedy is still tragedy.
For commercial films, whether they can realize commerciality is the first criterion. According to this standard, this year's "Hot and Hot", "Article 20", and "Flying Life 2" all combine comedy and commerciality, setting a film and television box office record, which is a successful commercial film case. As for the plot, there is really no need to over-interpret it with a magnifying glass.
After all, the primary function of commercial films is to make the audience relaxed and happy, and enjoy a rare popcorn time in addition to 996.
This is to mention the "Tang Detective" series of movies (except for the third part), Tang Detective Universe takes the route of comedy reasoning, just like Chen Sicheng once put forward the "peach movie" theory, that is, the appearance is easy to enter, and the inside is wrapped in a hard core. In "Tang Detective 1", after the murderer Si Nuo was exposed, Qin Feng stood up the origami in front of her, and the film was left blank so far; In "Tang Detective 2", the murderer Song Yi was also not brought to justice, and Qin Feng's image of being both righteous and evil stood up, but the film's large number of comedy elements were enough to make the audience laugh.
In essence, the brilliance of the "Tang Detective" series is actually to make some viewers who pursue relaxation laugh, and let other viewers who want to think interpret the details.
The same is true of "Catching the Doll". People who want to reflect on Chinese education can review their own growth process through Ma Jiye's experience, and parents can also look in the mirror for themselves through Ma Chenggang's education method. And migrant workers who have lost their cultural physical strength and don't want to use their brains to think at all can indeed get more than two hours of happiness through this movie.
From this point of view, "Catching the Doll" is already a successful commercial film.
How to make a good black humor movie?
This year's black humor movie seems to have turned the tide against the tide.
"Mr. Red Carpet" directed by Ning Hao and starring Andy Lau failed at the box office during the Spring Festival, and after the withdrawal and rescheduling, the box office was only 94.073 million; In contrast, "Catching the Doll" is a black humor movie that finally managed to break out of the encirclement.
However, "Catching the Doll" is still slightly inferior to the previous works. The earliest film noir in China may be traced back to Ning Hao's work "Crazy Stone", in which the little people of all parties compete for jade, and the plot of secretly wrestling is ridiculous. After the box office and word-of-mouth of the film set a record, Chinese black humor movies emerged in an endless stream, such as "Let the Bullets Fly", "The Piano of Steel", "Donkey Gets Water" and other films, these movies all focus on the bitter life of the little people, and the heavy content in the film is also invisibly dissolved with jokes, and finally still brings people hope for life.
Later, black humor movies began to combine comedy elements with crime elements, such as "The Murder Chaser", "The Nameless", "The Crowd", "I Am Not the God of Medicine", etc., these movies more sharply analyze the difficulty of survival of small people through crime plots. For example, in "The Nameless", two stupid thieves robbed their relatives in order to raise money for treatment, and they ended up grabbing a bunch of mobile phone models, which made people laugh and cry; "I Am Not the God of Medicine" will be determined to resell drugs from abroad in order to save more people.
The black humor series of movies in Xihong City Universe focuses on the direction of money. "Charlotte's Troubles" tells the story of Charlotte's dream of traveling back to high school, and after achieving success with the help of poor information, she misses the happy life when she had no money; "The Richest Man in Xihong City" made the audience come to the conclusion that "it is not money that moves Xia Zhu, but no surprise can leave money"; "Catching the Doll" is a huge rich pretending to be poor, but the setting of not having to eat hard is not in the category of the audience's dreams, and it cannot bring a strong emotional impact to the audience.
It can be seen that black humor movies often show the bitterness of small people, and reflect the suffering of all beings by creating a group portrait with distinct personalities, and finally create an ending with laughter and tears.
But what "Catching the Doll" lacks is precisely the group portrait shaping, this movie can only see a bunch of NPC education experts playing cosplay around the young master all day long, and the character image is too flat. Of course, there are also some shots in "Catching Dolls" that reflect the difficulties of the survival of little people, such as people who really want to make money by picking up bottles, can only look at the entire stadium that is chartered, but the flashing shots are really not profound enough.
In short, "Catching the Doll" is like a prism, you can see what you hope to gain through this movie.
I'm sure anyone who has played the game of catching dolls knows that when you especially want to grab your favorite doll from the glass case, you often can't catch anything. But the biggest gain is to enjoy the experience in the process of catching dolls.