Dr. Qi Ai's review of "The Thief"
Recently, it is close to the Lunar New Year, blockbusters have not yet begun to fight, and some medium-cost movies have concentrated on the market. In order to participate in the "Shadow Vane" score, Ge Ge has already watched "Inconceivable", "Sudden Star Movement" and so on.
The naming of Chinese films has basically entered the same mode, and the above two films are based on idioms for transformation.
In fact, foreign countries are similar, And Ge Ge also watched this week's supposedly last Hollywood blockbuster "Extreme Thief", which is actually a remake of the work, adapted from the 1991 female director Catherine. Bigelow's film of the same name. The film of that year was also translated as "Breaking Point", which was still quite influential in the action fan group.
"Extreme Thief" this movie, if you look back, you know that it does not have any big stars, the actors I do not know, but the scene is really quite exciting, in fact, the crime theme and extreme sports combined together, in the world's ten countries eleven extreme challenge shooting, according to bragging that more than 90% are live-action shooting (not computer synthesis). Therefore, when you look at it, the heavens are in the underground sea, basically you can think of all kinds of thrilling and exciting flower work, and everyone has played it out.
Compared with the very dazzling and exciting action scenes, the narrative story of "Extreme Thief" is relatively inferior. It is probably about a former extreme enthusiast who enters the police force, is ordered to investigate the crime group, and makes a love and murder with the crime leader.
This story is a very simple Hollywood undercover genre movie! There's nothing to be said about that.
However, it is these seemingly "nothing to tell", Gog, I tell you, in fact, is the really great place in Hollywood, and it is also the starting point for me to write this little article.
Our current film critics, many times lack the care of film history, and the film reviews that are good at writing are those films that "seem to be suitable for writing film reviews", such as so-and-so masters and so-and-so art films. But Hollywood's genre work, and how it's grounded, is something we often overlook—we always treat it as a simple instant consumer and instinctively feel that it's "uncultured."
This is not the case. A small film like "Extreme Thief", in my opinion, is the representative of Hollywood's "stability maintenance movie".
If you pay attention, you will find that in this movie, except for the male protagonist, almost all of them are all ethnic minorities. This white male protagonist, mixed into a multi-ethnic criminal group, not only solved the case in the end, but also seemed to have established an extraordinary friendship with the multi-ethnic groups. What does this mean?
In recent years, a very important research area in American academies, especially in the field of cultural studies, is the "disintegration of ethnicity" in Hollywood movies, which is called racelessness in English.
In 1991's "Breaking Point", you can see that the actors selected by Bigelow, one is Keanu Levis, and the other is Swazi, who played "Man's Ghost", is basically a white man with a white man, although Levi's still has a multi-ethnic pedigree.
However, from the mid-to-late 1990s onwards, diverse ethnic groups, especially Asians, Mexicans, and Italians, began to appear frequently in mainstream American blockbusters. For example, "Rush Hour", it is actually similar to "Sky Cannon", but the use of Jackie Chan and black actors actually allows Jackie Chan to replace the traditional white hero position.
This is a way of "maintaining stability" with culture, and it also subtly makes money in various places.
You will find that when the entire European art film is still highlighting the real "disease problem" of multi-ethnic groups, the "melting pot" of lao mei plays a lot more shrewdly than the Europeans.
On the one hand, the ethnic contradictions and mud that are crowding in the country have been eliminated, and on the other hand, they still have to make money.
This is directly related to the rise in the proportion of diverse ethnic groups in the United States, especially in Hollywood and California, where the Left is dominated, where whites are said to have long since become a "minority." I recently watched Gao Xiaosong's "Xiaosong Strange Talk", and I always mentioned how California is, because that place really can be regarded as the world of traditional non-white people.
In addition to the setting of the character narrative, the racial dissolution of the minority is more important than the "mainstream" and "fashion" of the subculture of the minority.
This can't help but remind me of another big hit series, the Fast and Furious series that is the same as "Extreme Thieves". "Rapid Shock" is written about the extreme sport of underground racing, and "Extreme Thief" is all about everything, everything comes at once.
My classmate, an avid car enthusiast, once wrote an "obscene book" called "The Underground Castle: The Driver and His World at Night." He describes in the book: "Looking down, I could faintly see the orange aperture in the center—an extremely sparse bright spot moving on the enclosed loop of the city's core, two of which were cold spots flying at several times faster than the others, and from where these two spots of light were, came the roar of the racing engine wave higher than the other." Just so-called: the second ring road in the early morning, the sparse traffic, the speed of the red zone, the roar of the engine, the beautiful sound of unloading the pressure, the wild soul playing in the steel machine. ”
A small intellectual who has studied graduate school actually has this gene of "wild crime" in his bones!
Here, without evaluating the right and wrong of the driver from a moral level, in terms of the above-mentioned text description alone, it is definitely the most suitable language to be filmed. The Fast And The Furious is a film centered around underground racing, but the resulting discussion goes far beyond the car itself.
According to Rob Cohen, the director of the first episode, "Fast and Furious" was inspired by an article by a journalist named Lee Ken about illegal racing on the East and West coasts. Since the campaign began in Southern California in the early 1990s, young Asian-American men have been at the forefront of this frenzied movement.
Cohen chose to set the story in Los Angeles because, in terms of the setting of human relations, many see it as a centralized repository of the American dream and the urban nightmare. In the film, we can see that there is a clear distinction between racing drivers, racing teams and enthusiasts, and the number of Asian Americans, Latinos and black Americans in the real street racing players is far greater than that of whites. To this end, Cohen also hired Asian street racing driver R. J. DeWara as a professional technical consultant, and also let him play a small role.
So "Quick Shock" is not only a movie about racing, but also a movie about multiple ethnic groups. Most of the actors in the film are ethnic minorities, including the mixed-race star Van Diesel, who shows his power through speed and captures the hearts of women. In contrast is Brian Spearne (Paul Volker), a mysterious white boy with a fresh feel.
Set up in The Thief, Walker is also an outstanding undercover officer (the racers know nothing about his identity) and a bold racing driver, whose exclusive White Anglo-Saxon ancestry does not give him much of an innate advantage in this multicultural land. The "rocket car" he spent heavily on modifications did not immediately earn him respect. As the film progressed, however, Spearner's leadership skills were gradually demonstrated—and this, as many scholars have apparently interpreted as the innate racial superiority of whites, ultimately played a decisive role.
If you compare "Extreme Thieves", you can figure it out: white heroes can love and kill multiple races, but in the end they must return to the conservative positive energy setting. Because white people represent the legitimacy of the state apparatus, this is the "political correctness" that Hollywood cannot subvert.
Even if the multi-ethnic protagonist is still set up to represent the values of white people, he can lead a more diversified fashion trend - in "Extreme Thieves", all fashion trends are guided by multiple ethnic groups, and the main villain is actually from Venezuela, which Americans hate, but the white hero extends a hand of friendship to him, and finally watches him get involved in the raging waves - this kind of complex political science outside the movie is really intriguing!
Finally, in a movie, white people can play villains, but they also need to set up another positive character of the same ethnic group to offset it, even if some of the mainstream action movies in Europe in recent years, such as Luc Besson's parkour extreme crime movie "Runaway 13", which I personally like very much, are also the same model.
Only in this way can the sensitive and tense ethnic relations be dissolved and the film become a reasonable and legitimate successful business.
Do Chinese movies dare to play like this? I don't think so.