The Dragon Boat Festival has reached a new low at the box office.
The total box office in three days was 460 million, falling back to the level of 2014 (in 2020, there was no Dragon Boat Festival due to the epidemic).
△ Source lighthouse data
The results were dismal, but the competition was fierce.
In several important schedules this year, the number of new films scheduled is:
There are 7 Spring Festival stalls, 10 Qingming stalls, 13 May Day stalls, and 15 Dragon Boat Stalls.
This string of numbers can well echo the inner volume of the times.
On the one hand, due to the backlog of the epidemic, the inventory of films needs to be withdrawn as soon as possible; on the other hand, in the previous few slots, there have been unexpected winners:
△ The box office of the above three films is: 340 million, 790 million, and 500 million
Each film represents a gambler who wants to compete for a place to survive Battle Royale.
But contrary to expectations, this Dragon Boat Festival has not had a single movie with a box office of more than 100 million yuan so far.
What the hell is going on?
The Guangzhou theater line is closed, and Sir who is staying at home did not see it, so he had to ask his friend in Beijing @ Li Buyun to open the wheat.
After listening to him, I successfully dispelled sir's idea of post-holiday patches.
This is indeed a period when a short man cannot pull out the general.
Hello everyone, I was ordered by Sir to watch 4 films of Li Buyan.
Make this short holiday worse.
After watching it, I plan to select four new Chinese films in this slot to try to analyze the crux of the collective dud in this slot.
Beyond
The first thing to talk about is the box office champion "Beyond" in this period.
Named champion, in fact, its box office has only just exceeded 100 million so far, and Douban only has 5.4 points.
For various objective or subjective reasons, making sports genre films is an extremely thankless thing in China, and the fate of "Win the Championship" is uncertain, and "Li Na" is still unsettled, which is an example.
The good looks of sports genre films are based on the athlete's victory over their own physical limitations and the transcendence of limits, which is the core of its genre and the source of its blood.
In other words, a sports genre film is a superhero film in a real context.
The movie "Beyond" thanked China's sprinter Su Bingtian, but it finally chose to fictionalize a 100-meter runner Hao Chaoyue.
Because it does not rely on specific archetypes, it has gained a certain degree of narrative freedom, telling the story of a national athlete Hao Chaoyue who fell from the peak of his life to the trough.
As soon as the film opens, it is the peak of Hao's sports career, he won the gold medal at the Asian Games, and his life has been going all the way since.
He thought he could not achieve results in training at home, so he went abroad, which made him label a defector.
Spent a lot of money on training abroad, but because of the decline in physical function and other reasons, he could not even complete the internal test, discouraged to the point of drunk driving a car accident, helpless to return to China, planning to go to the sea to do business, the result was lost.
To sum up, the trajectory of his life is ups and downs.
At the end of the movie, Hao Chaoyue, who was already desperate to self-abandonment, suddenly ran up for no reason after receiving the gold medal handed by his wife, and shouted at his master and disciple, "Run! Don't stop! ”
However, Hao Chaochao has never run since he retired, and running is the thing he resists the most.
So what is his running for?
Venting to a bad fate?
Ignite the boring life of middle age?
We don't see his core motivations.
Running has become a dog blood act of burning for the sake of burning, and blood for the blood of chickens.
It is as if Hao Chaochao constantly emphasizes that he is pursuing the first, but never answers what the first means, nor does he answer who the first is for, and whether this first is worth overdrawing a person's life.
What's even more frightening is that you can't even feel Hao Chaoyue's love for running itself, as if he loves only success and fame, and running is just the "ladder to the shore" of his life.
The trajectory of Hao Chaochao's fate is reminiscent of the news that Zhang Shangwu, a former national gymnast, fell to the point of selling on the streets a decade ago.
Such a group, in fact, has always existed under this national system, but it has been ignored.
This movie, which had the opportunity to make the so-called "one will make a thousand bones dry", but it did not.
Hao Chaoyue is caught up in a simple obsession with speed, honor, and success, which is essentially the projection of the success-only values of our society in the movie.
At the end of the film, Li Ning's cameo, the last scene is Hao Chaoyue's running like a lost dog falling into the wilderness, and in the next scene, he will become famous to the point where he can talk about cooperation with Li Ning.
The two scenes before and after instantly exposed the essence of this movie to beat chicken blood first and then pour chicken soup.
Unfortunately, all it can ultimately offer the viewer is a weak excitement.
Once Upon a Time in the Tropics
Zheng Kai gained 40 pounds for "Beyond", and Peng Yuyan lost 30 pounds for "Tropical Past".
"Tropical Past", a crime suspense literary film, the feature film debut of newcomer director Wen Shipei, produced by Ning Hao, and the fourth film launched by Bad Monkey 72 Change Film.
The story of this movie is very simple, the air conditioning repairman Wang Xueming (Peng Yuyan) accidentally hit and killed a man while driving, he went out of guilt to approach the deceased's widow, Liang Ma (Zhang Aijia), and in the process, he found that the deceased did not seem to die because of him...
Although the story is simple, the director uses his unique narrative strategy and audiovisual techniques to give this simple story more dimensional layers.
The general film is audiovisual service story, "Tropical Past" is the opposite, it is essentially an "atmosphere film", the story is unremarkable, but the photography, art, sound effects are not forgotten .
Watching this film, it is important that you follow the audiovisual system that the director has built through sound and video, and enter into the emotions he wants to convey to you, which is the summer of 1997 in Guangzhou that is clearly pointed out in the film - wet, hot, lonely.
Therefore, even though it is cloaked in film noir, it does not make the in-depth exploration of the dark side of human nature that is usually found in film noir, but focuses on the psychological process of Wang Xueming and Liang Ma, two lonely people, who are tempting and approaching each other.
The opening points out that the film is based on real events, but in a behind-the-scenes interview, the lead actor Wang Yanhui said that this is not a realistic movie.
In terms of narrative strategy and audiovisual techniques, Once Upon a Time in the Tropics is like a mashup of Last Night on Earth and The Party at South Station.
But its weakness in theme, or the vagueness of the text, that is, the portrayal of the psychological state of the heavy characters, and the hints of the confusion revealed by the male and female protagonists in the contact, make me think that director Wen Shipei is trying to look at Wong Kar-wai, and the ambiguous process of a pair of men and women with partners is the same as that of "Fancy Years".
In the two movies "Tropical Past" and "Fancy Years", the male and female protagonists have not had intimate physical contact, "Fancy Years" is good that it does not use the way of not going to bed, expressing all the passion after the two people go to bed, while "Tropical Past" is empty under the sense of distance between the two people respecting each other.
A more obvious example is that the film constantly renders the heat of the weather, everyone in it is sweaty, the clothes have never dried, but this hot and sticky only stays on the visual surface, in fact, you can feel that everyone in the film is extremely calm, even cold.
It's a film that is divided inside and out.
In the film, you can't piece together the complete closed loop of crime, you can't know the real psychological state of the main characters, and you can't understand what the director, as the first author, in addition to being dazzling and scratching, he also wants to express something through this work.
"Sunshine Sisters Tao"
In this period, not only is "Once Upon a Time in the Tropics" related to the year 1997, but the Chinese version of "Sunshine Sister Tao" directed by Bao Bell also focuses on this year.
Exactly 10 years ago, the original Korean version of "Sunshine Sister Tao" was released, and on Douban, 500,000 people scored a high score of 8.8 for this story about women.
Since then, Japan and Vietnam have remade, and 10 years later, it is finally China's turn.
Only this time, this one-size-fits-all story does not work, douban evaluation is currently only 5.0 points (the lowest score in four films), and the box office is in the early sixty million.
What's the problem?
The name Director Bao Bell is the direct reason.
On the surface, some viewers will have a bad impression of the works he participated in creating out of disgust for him.
In fact, Bauber chose a pleasing story, but consumed almost all the cute places in this story.
In an interview, Bauber made it clear that he downloaded the original and other versions to his iPad, and that he would keep playing back and comparing versions from various countries and his own adaptations on set.
He didn't think it was as good as the original, so how do I tell it in terms of China.
Rather, I am constantly figuring out how to copy and reproduce.
Therefore, it is reasonable that the Chinese version and the Korean version are highly similar from plot to camera.
Since there is the original version as the bottom, the Chinese version of "Sunshine Sister Tao" is actually not so bad, after all, the content of the two versions is extremely different.
The story is all about the friendship of seven sisters, told in two lines, a reality line, and a memory line. The reality lines are all contemporary, and the memory lines are very different.
The Korean version of the memoir line takes place in the 1980s after the Gwangju incident, and the Chinese version takes place in 1997.
The original version is good, in addition to excellent character building and touching sisterhood, on the other hand, it is closely connected with the reality of Korean society. For Koreans, it was a rebellious and turbulent era, and it was their daily routine that students did not go to school well, smoked and drank, and ganged up.
However, in the Chinese version, 1997 did not provide any other functions except a background board for hong Kong's return to china.
There was a lot of smoking, fighting, kissing, swearing, and even drug abuse in the original version, which basically disappeared from the Chinese version.
Compared to the youth of Koreans, our youth stories are sterile and uninteresting.
But what is even more fatal is that the Chinese version is low and boring in terms of aesthetic taste.
For example, unlike the original version, one of the ways the Chinese version portrays the heroine as a child is to install two rabbit teeth on her, and when the heroine first meets her crush, she laughs because of the vegetable leaves stuck to her teeth. This kind of clown playing ugly runs through the Chinese version in a way that adds memory points to the audience.
The same is a female theme, this year there are two phenomenal movies "Hello, Li Huanying" and "My Sister", combined with the "Sunshine Sister Tao" that talks about sisterhood.
Once again, the theme of women is not the wealth code.
If there is, it can only be opened by people with hearts and feelings.
"When a Man Is in Love"
This Dragon Boat Festival, in addition to "Sunshine Sister Tao", there is a new film from Taiwan that is also adapted from the Korean movie "When Men Are in Love".
The original version of "When a Man Is in Love" was released in South Korea in 2014 and was the 14th highest grossing film in South Korea that year.
This year's Taiwan version was released in Taiwan, selling more than 400 million New Taiwan dollars (about 91 million yuan), winning the top position in the Box Office of Taiwan movies this year, if it were not for the epidemic, more than "Those Years, the Girl We Chased Together" and "My Girlhood" should not be a problem.
But when the film was released in the mainland, the box office has just reached 55 million, ranking 6th in the Dragon Boat Festival.
Why the cold?
Some people say that the plot is too bloody.
But it did become very popular in Taiwan.
Some people say that we have stopped eating the set of Taiwanese romance films.
But "Those Years" was a box office hit that year and is still known as yyds.
The key to this problem, perhaps, is not in love.
If you look at When a Man Is in Love as a romance film, you will find that the story of such a small chasing a woman in debt presents things that are very conventional, even very vulgar, 1202 years old, and it is still playing terminally ill.
Compared with love, the most worthwhile thing to watch in "When a Man Is in Love" is actually the taste of the stage.
But how the low-level people in Taiwan represented by the male protagonist Ah Cheng (qiu Ze) struggle to survive and take their lives is not enough to live an ordinary life.
How Ah Cheng and his girlfriend Hao Ting (Xu Weining) give unreservedly for each other's families.
The place where the two people date is the dilapidated roof; the two people eat, all are roadside stalls; the male protagonist lives in the attic of his brother's house, and the female protagonist lives in the "old and broken"...
So much so that those who watch movies can't help but sigh that the poor in domestic films are all in Taiwan.
But don't mistake "Being a Man" with reality as a backdrop.
In fact, the film deliberately confuses and integrates many senses of age.
Forming an "ancient early Taiwanese universe".
Flower shirts, bowling alleys, dance halls.
The nostalgic retro style of the 80s is blowing in.
There are also powerful Japanese people, and it is so old that most viewers are not yet born.
This is the difference between the viewing gap between mainland audiences and Taiwanese audiences.
You have to experience that kind of social atmosphere to be hit by one emotional element after another.
Just like Feng Gong's cameo in "Li Huanying", when he said the phrase "I want to die you" with his iconic smile, in the eyes of people who have not watched the Spring Festival Gala for many years, it can only be a joke that does not know the so-called.
It is different from the useless "Sunshine Sister Tao".
"When a Man Is in Love" is not as convincing as the original.
But at least it has "one gain"—
Excellent localization.
In the Taiwanese version of the story, there is an important adaptation.
The Korean version did not point out the reason why the male protagonist chose to collect debts for the black boss, and the Taiwan version clearly stated that the reason why the male protagonist helped the black boss to collect debts was to repay the debts to his brother who failed in business.
In other words, he was voluntarily mortgaged in the hands of the black boss, he was not for himself, he was for his relatives.
The male protagonist is involuntary and willing to sacrifice.
There are also viewers who criticize the male protagonist for being self-moved to lick the dog, while the female protagonist is completely reduced to a tool person without autonomy, and has to send his father, the male protagonist, and the male protagonist's father to the end.
It seems that the heroine is too "virgin" and tool man.
This is difficult to resonate with today's young people who emphasize themselves and are afraid of family constraints.
But looking back at recent Taiwanese films, similar characters are actually very common.
"Lonely Taste".
A mother who raised three daughters by selling shrimp rolls gave everything for the family.
Even in the end, he gave up his name to Xiao San.
"Dear Tenant".
The male protagonist is a dead same-sex partner, taking care of the old mother and young son, has no name, is resented by the "family", even if he finally has to bear the crime of murder, there is no complaint or regret.
"Dog Blood"?
One may be, but if such a plot can be repeated and can be understood and welcomed, then there must be a deep mass base behind it.
Back to the male protagonist's personality.
It is also one of the most common types in Taiwan in the past.
prodigal.
Here's a song called "The Mood of the Prodigal Son."
The father in "Lonely Taste", burdened with huge debts, left Taipei, and never returned to his hometown or home.
Chen Jialing's uncle in "The Cultivation of Ordinary Women", the business was not done, and he never appeared again.
The prodigal sons have no permanent property, no "Taipei Hukou", no head start, and can only mix the rivers and lakes.
Just like the female boss Cai Jie in the film said to Ah Cheng: "Taking the right path is the right of a good person!" ”
This line echoes the lyrics of a song by Cai Zhennan, the actor of Ah Cheng's father-
Hou Xiaoxian used this music in "Good Man Good Woman".
And Hou Xiaoxian also sang a song called "Drunk taipei city" -
The prodigal sons are lonely and hopeless, and at any time they may be drunk on the streets or hacked to death, and they cannot see the sun of tomorrow.
Therefore, once in the impermanent fate, unexpectedly encounter a true feeling.
They will cherish it extra much and give up their lives.
"When a Man Is in Love" may be dog blood, but its dog blood has a reason that can be understood in Taiwanese audiences.
But when the film Dragon Boat Festival was released in the mainland, it was regarded as a complete dog blood.
This is the reason why "When a Man Is in Love" has two different encounters.
The above are the four Dragon Boat Festivals that are still worth talking about, but none of them have the potential to be called bellwethers.
And other new Films of the Dragon Boat Festival, it can only be said that even talking about it seems redundant.
The film that bets on the Dragon Boat Festival probably has a small abacus of "you don't have to run faster than a lion, as long as you run faster than others, you can survive two".
But the result of losing all the games should be able to warn the domestic film -
No confidence to superstitious schedule.
Good movies create slots.
The picture in this article comes from the network