In 2007, the number of Internet users in China reached 130 million, and more and more young people began to get used to surfing the Internet, Chinese the Internet entered an era of barbaric growth. At that time, Tianya, Maopu, Renren, Douban and the follow-up Tieba occupied and led the community culture of the Chinese Internet.
Among them, the cat poker forum is known as the birthplace of the first batch of online pop culture in China. The early cat pounce out of many Internet celebrities, such as: PS spoofed xiao fat, controversial Furong sister, now expensive as Mrs. Jingdong's milk tea MM, writing novels Zhao Chai donkey, network PUA school representative cat poker goddess ayawawa, etc., are the first generation of Internet celebrities on the Internet.
In the wave after wave of Internet celebrity iterations, the beast Yi Xiaoxing is one of the representatives. He became famous for his homemade podcast videos, always wearing a mask made of A4 paper and a huge "獣" written on the door of his head. In the shot, he, all kinds of laughter and anger, extremely spoofing, is regarded as a representative of the Internet KUSO culture, the representative work "Call the Beast to Teach You XXX" series quickly swept the Internet, five years into the video site of the popular celebrity.
In the first few years of his fame, during the day he was a supervising engineer Yi Zhenxing, carrying hundreds of thousands of tools on the construction site to make measurements, and at night, he transformed into a hot video blogger on the Internet " Howling Beast" . In 2011, he resolutely quit his stable job in the eyes of his parents and went to Beijing to start a business and establish Wanhe Tianyi. Two years later, "Never Expected" came out, and the beast also completed the successful transformation from a grassroots short video creator to a cutting-edge director.
"Never Expected" has become a phenomenon-level work in the initial period of the domestic web drama market, with a total of more than 1.6 billion hits in the first two seasons, an average of more than 40 million single episodes, and then the Wanhe Tianyi creative team with the beast as the core has successively launched "Report Boss", "Detective Di Renjie" and other dramas, all of which are very successful and highly sought after by young audiences.
The twist took place in 2015, when the beast directed the big movie version of "Never Expected". This was originally the debut of the first theatrical feature film in which the beast himself had high hopes, but after the release, the word of mouth encountered Waterloo, and the problem with the film was that the beast still cobbled together a 90-minute extended short video collection in the way of shooting short videos, and the worst thing was that the stems and baggage in the creative exhaustion did not appear more advanced.
For Yi Xiaoxing, who aspires to become a director, this attempt to "go from short to long" is somewhat unsatisfactory. Since then, Wanhe Tianyi seems to have begun to enter the bottleneck period of creation, and has never launched a phenomenon-level blockbuster work again. He also reflected on the problems of the film, and put down his body at the "Spit Conference" to spit himself:
Some people say that the big movie "Never Expected" is the worst movie he has ever seen, and I would say that this friend is so naïve, because you haven't seen my next movie.
In July of this year, the 36-year-old Beast announced on Weibo that he had withdrawn from Wanhe Tianyi and set up a new label: Poke Culture. And just recently, Yi Xiaoxing's second feature film also met with the audience, the title is called "The King of Bathing", the current Douban score of 6.4, only 0.8 points higher than the previous cinema film "Never Expected", the first day box office of 50 million, and the final box office is expected to be 300 million yuan.
The Bath King
Bath Buddy
Part 1
In this movie, Yi Xiaoxing did not use the team of Wanhe Tianyi as the protagonist, but chose Peng Yuchang and Qiao Shan, two actors who have achieved certain results in comedy movies.
The former has had a brilliant performance in "Take My Brother Away" and "The Sky of the Wind Dog Boy", and itself has a certain amount of traffic, while the latter needless to say is a comedian who has grown his style on his face.
Coupled with the cameos of Wanhe Tianyi's old acquaintances Bai Ke, Kodak and others, it can be seen that Yi Xiaoxing attaches great importance to this movie.
As the name suggests, "The Bath King" shows the bath culture of Chinese, to put it bluntly, bathing.
More than 20 years ago, the sixth generation of director Zhang Yang made a movie called "Bathing", which showed the bathhouse culture in the north in detail. The bathhouse in the north is not only used for bathing, but also for rest and entertainment, just like a foggy river.
In "The King of Bathing", it mainly shows the bathing culture, more precisely, the southern scrubbing represented by the Yangzhou scrubbing bath.
It is no wonder that the film will choose Qiao Shan to star, after all, he has the reputation of the king of great health care in the web drama "Di Si Men" series, and is an absolute authentic spokesperson for the big screen of the bathhouse. In this film, Qiao Shan finally realized his career ideals, became the owner of a bathhouse, and was also a senior senior in the bathing class, and also won the championship of the competition.
Part 2
The story revolves around a bathhouse on the brink of closure.
Zhou Donghai, the owner of the bathhouse, won the championship of the bathing competition when he was young with a magical bathing magic skill, but now his bathhouse is about to face the fate of being acquired due to poor management.
One day, he received a big order to go and scrub a bath for Xiao Xiang, the second generation of the rich. Unexpectedly, the arrogant Xiao Xiang couldn't look at the traditional bathing technique of the East China Sea last week, and a dispute broke out between the two sides. However, no one expected that not long after, Xiao Xiang had an accident while playing high-altitude wing flight, hit his head when landing, and suffered from temporary amnesia.
Xiao Xiang's cousin Zhong Shaochu deliberately took advantage of Xiao Xiang's amnesia and wanted to plot the company's property under Xiao Xiang's name, so he deliberately pretended not to know and threw Xiao Xiang alone in the hospital. It was also at this time that the amnesiac rich second-generation brother was led home by the bathhouse owner Zhou Donghai.
Zhou Donghai's bathhouse was on the verge of closure, and he couldn't even recruit a bather. At present, some wealthy businessmen have proposed to buy the bathhouse, and Zhou Donghai wants to maintain the business of the bathhouse so that he can ask for more compensation when he buys it. But at present, he was in debt and could not afford to hire employees, so he hit the idea on Xiao Xiang, who had lost his memory, and let the other party act as a free labor force in the bathhouse.
To this end, Zhou Donghai painstakingly fabricated a lie, falsely claiming that Xiao Xiang, who had lost his memory, was his younger brother, and began to teach his unique bathing skills, and the two halfway brothers began to run the bathhouse again.
In this process, Xiao Xiang, who originally had great contempt for traditional bathing skills, gradually understood Zhou Donghai's persistence and ideals, and Zhou Donghai also learned from Xiao Xiang how to make traditional crafts glow with new vitality.
Under the management of the brothers, the original dilapidated and deserted bathhouse has actually become a holy place for Internet celebrities to punch cards.
However, just when the bathing business was booming, Xiao Xiang recovered his memory, the lie was punctured, and the bathhouse brothers parted ways. But when he returned to his original life of the second generation of the rich, Xiao Xiang found that his side was full of deceit and intrigue, but the time when he was doing a bather in Zhou Donghai's bathhouse was the happiest day of his life.
Therefore, he decided to complete his unfinished mission and participate in the bathing competition for Zhou Donghai. And finally in the final, relying on the bathing skills taught to him by Zhou Donghai, he defeated the Korean bath master, and also gained the true meaning of life.
At this point, Xiao Xiang, the second generation of the rich and the unskilled, became a veritable bath king.
Part 3
As a commercial comedy with a clear genre, "The Bath King" undoubtedly maintains the creative standard of Yi Xiaoxing in the "Never Expected" period.
If you talk about the intensity of the baggage, the design of the funny lines and the creation of the sense of absurdity, the film is undoubtedly very successful, and the rare thing is that the beast is called the representative of the grassroots era of the Internet, and his laugh point design is never a fart or a low-level comedy baggage that pretends to be crazy and stupid.
The most impressive passage of the author is that in order to attract young customers, Peng Yuchang transformed the bathhouse into a bath bar bungee, the bathhouse became a livehouse, and the bathhouse opened a concert, this bold transformation created a contrasting comedic effect, making the movie both novel and interesting.
In the demonstration of the skill of scrubbing, it is completely exaggerated to show the superb skill, using a large number of shots and special effects to shoot the scrubbing very hot and bloody.
When Peng Yuchang practiced the bathing shengong, he had to knead the dough, break the stick, cut the potatoes, and change the bucket, just like the martial arts master practiced the shengong hard, after learning, wrapping a towel, tapping, massaging, each step is exquisite, and the minutes are reminiscent of the kung fu film masters to test martial arts. In terms of entertainment alone, the film is quite impressive.
In particular, the profound dialogue and witty words about the bath culture in the film are exquisitely written, which is very suitable for Qiao Shan to play, and the filming is full of fun. From the beginning of the film, the director popularized various bathing professional knowledge, and even used a lot of terms for the mud that was frustrated by the bath: Jiangsu and Zhejiang are called qi, northeast is called 皴, Hunan is called man, and Guangdong is called old mud.
Stripped of the presentation of bath culture, the film is essentially a standard grassroots little-character inspirational comedy.
The moving part of the film lies in the personality transformation of the two protagonists between Peng Yuchang and Qiao Shan. From the crazy mutual hatred between the two when they first met, to Peng Yuchang's amnesia and was deceived by Qiao Shan's various tricks, to the gradual integration into the bathhouse family in the process of getting along, and then to the laughter and hatred of the two brothers in the bathing competition, the character arc of the whole story was constructed quite completely.
The bath itself is an act, and behind the act is a deep bond between people.
In the process of this bathhouse brothers chasing their dreams hand in hand, the former bath king has found the ideals and inheritances that have been lost due to the pressure of life, and Xiao Xiang has gradually felt the long-lost affection and warmth from an arrogant and clumsy brother. The experience of the two running the brother's bathhouse is also the process of infecting each other and encouraging each other to find the direction of life again.
To be fair, "The Bath King" has made great progress compared to the last movie called the beast, "Never Expected", at least the film has been relatively complete in terms of story structure, and it is no longer a short video slapstick.d'aisle. The whole film is very good at the beginning and end of the work, the funny place is working hard to create laughter, the sensational place also has a lot of tear point design, and some plot design has done back and forth, you can see that a lot of effort has been put into the script.
Part 4
However, it must be admitted that there are many shortcomings of the film.
The most obvious problem is that the story and script of the film are at a glance, the screenwriter traces are very heavy, the grandmother with Alzheimer's disease is used to stir up emotions, the cousin who is greedy and greedy is used for betrayal, and it suddenly appears when it should appear, and it disappears completely when it does not appear.
As for the most successful part of the whole film, in fact, it is precisely the flaws of the film -
We have reason to believe that The Beast is definitely a veteran Hong Kong film fan and a fan of Stephen Chow, otherwise it would be impossible to carry a lot of Hong Kong-style classic comedy shadows from head to toe in the movies he wrote.
In the first half of the film, the rich second generation of amnesia incarnated as a civilian to carry out inspirational struggle to chase dreams, which is the same as the movie "Dumb Guy Baishou" starring Liu Qingyun, and even the characters in the film are completely consistent, all of them are arrogant and rich second generation accidentally amnesiac after becoming a stupid and cute male protagonist, and the protagonist has a black and cunning brother around him who wants to seize the family property.
In the second half of the story, the protagonist practiced hard to scrub the bath, finally participated in the bathing competition, and faced a disadvantage in the final, completed the bridge section of the self-sublimation Jedi counterattack, which is obviously copied from the setting in Zhou Xingchi's "God Eater".
"God Eater" fights cooking, and "The King of Bathing" is better than scrubbing baths. The similarity is that the protagonists are all elites in a certain field, after falling down or amnesia, etc., experiencing the taste of ordinary people, understanding the meaning of life, and finding the true meaning of skills, and finally ending the whole film with a championship game.
It is worth mentioning that the details of Zhou Xingchi's imitation and reference in the film are everywhere, such as: reading "The Self-cultivation of the Bather" like "The King of Comedy", Peng Yuchang sighed "Who said that one-handed can't knock on the back" when the bathing competition was defeated and won, which is also very similar to Xingye's sigh of "who said that no gun head can not be inserted".
In addition, the strangest thing about the film is the perception, the art design of the bathhouse and the accent of Qiao Shan are completely northeast characteristics, the exterior is the flowing water of the Small Bridge in Jiangnan, and the final story telling method is imitating the Hong Kong-style comedy of the god of food Man Han full seat, the whole one or four is different, there is no sense of regional substitution.
Just before the post, the fan saw the film and fell into the plagiarism controversy.
According to Korean media reports: "The King of Bath" infringed on the popular Korean comic "God of Bath", as early as 2018, South Korea's Wangyueren Company had reached a cooperation intention with domestic Wanda Film and Television, and Yi Xiaoxing was also selected as a director. However, in 2019, Wanda did not sign an investment contract, and Yi Xiaoxing also said that because the story content was modified a lot, the title of the film was changed from "God of Bath" to "King of Bath", and also said that it could be seen as a different movie, and decided to shoot it himself.
The beast previously posted a denial of plagiarism, and said that "the movie "King of the Bath" and the Korean comic "God of the Bath" do not have any similarities in terms of content, storyline, and character settings", and there is no plagiarism.
Fan Yingjun has not seen the comic of "God of bath", nor is he a professional legal person, and he does not comment too much on the plagiarism controversy.
As far as the film itself is concerned, this "Bath King" is a sincere but imperfect work.
The film is a little better in every way than the big movie "Never Expected", but it is only a little better. As a non-professional director, the beast seems to be adapted to the big screen, but if you want to make a good comedy movie, it is certainly not enough to rely on funny!