Before the release of "Sewing Machine Band", Dapeng did a very "rock" thing, and "exchanged fears" with a netizen who was certified as a film critic on Weibo who gave the movie a bad review, setting off a small war of words.
A few days after the film was released, it attracted nearly 20,000 user ratings on the Douban page, and the comprehensive score remained above and below 6.9 points, compared with Dapeng's self-written, self-directed, and self-acted predecessor "Pancake Man" (Douban score of 6.0 points), the progress is obvious, and it is also above the general level of domestic comedy movies. However, perhaps still dragged down by this incident, coupled with the overall good quality of many new films in the National Day slot, the scheduling rate of "Sewing Machine Band" has fallen below 10%, and it is impossible for the box office to replicate the 1.159 billion yuan miracle created by "Pancake Man" in the summer vacation of 2015.
Domestic comedy films continue to evolve and improve, but audiences' appreciation tastes and preferences are faster with the times. "The Sewing Machine Band" is half a beat slower, the speed of innovation has not caught up, although the overall quality is not bad, new bottles of old wine, but also let the audience who watch more similar theme films aesthetic fatigue, in the completion of the task of "continue to save unhappy" is not satisfactory.
The plot of the movie is still the routine of small people forming a "grass platform team", self-struggle, "vigorous miracles", and achieving counterattacks, but from "making movies" in "Pancake Man" to "group bands" in "Sewing Machine Band". In terms of intention, the collision of the American animated film "The Voice of Joy", but reduced the musical composition, increased the comedy factor, and overall still in the main creative team to master the old creative ideas.
"Pancake Man" has been accused of being a collection comedy film that saves strips, a problem that has changed a lot in "The Sewing Machine Band", but it has not been completely stopped. The first half hour of the film always gives the audience the illusion of being in the scene of the sketch performance of the Spring Festival Gala, or the northeast rural duo turning to a big stage theater. Although dense jokes emerge endlessly, a large proportion is using the semantic polysemy of the lines to play with the gimmicks of the relationship between the sexes. Cheng Gong, played by Dapeng, and Hu Liang, played by Qiao Shan, coexist in a dialogue scene in the forced bedroom, which is somewhat vulgar and easy to arouse the audience's disgust.
Although like "Pancake Man", the script of "The Sewing Machine Band" also bears the shadow of Dapeng's own experience, and Dapeng wisely chooses to retire to male number two and replace it with Qiao Shan as the protagonist. The audience is accustomed to watching a series of vicious "non-mainstream" supporting roles played by Qiao Shan in the past, and the natural favorability of the simple and straightforward Hu Liang in "Sewing Machine Band" has increased. Qiao Shan's overall treatment of the character is moderate, no longer crazy and overheated.
Roles such as Hu Liang are common in domestic comedies in recent years. The audience was most impressed by Wang Baoqiang's performances in "Tai 囧" and "Big Trouble Tianzhu". However, the farce component of these two films is greater than the comedy component, and Wang Baoqiang's own accent and voice line are also amplified without moderation, which is easy to bring the audience a noisy and noisy discomfort. Qiao Shan is more generous in appearance, and although he also has a rural tone, the volume of the lines is moderate, the voice line is softer, and he must work harder to produce the effect when playing the and comedy, which is just right when playing the harmonic drama of life. However, the aforementioned "bed scene" with Dapeng in the bedroom is "feminine" excessive, or the result of the bad habit of subconsciously "teasing" the audience during the previous performance.
"The Sewing Machine Band" does not create laughter with "abusive" protagonist supporting roles, and is much higher than the "heavy taste" comedy movies such as "Breakup Master" and "Villain Angel" that flooded a few years ago. The background of the plot is not a "suspended" city that is divorced from reality, directly set in Ji'an City, Jilin Province, Dapeng's hometown, and the audience lacks understanding of this third-tier city that lacks distinct regional characteristics, but can have a sense of substitution and intimacy. For the two actors, Dapeng and Qiao Shan, they do not have to suppress their accents like in "Father and Son Soldiers" set in Beijing, but can complete the performance with a more relaxed and natural attitude.
In terms of character relationship setting, "Sewing Machine Band" is still a simple protagonist with an inorganic heart, with another intention of the "belly black" supporting role, plus a group of "inhumans" or "crooked dates" responsible for "grouping". Cheng Gong, the agent played by Dapeng, the character name implies that the character's success is oriented to the goal of life, and it is not surprising that in the plot, he completes the whole process from having a different child, to being imperceptibly infected by the protagonist, to going astray, and then to getting lost, which is another Xu Lang in "Tai 囧" and Tang Sen in "Big Trouble Tianzhu". Dapeng's middle-part gray hair style, whether coincidental or deliberate, is similar to Zhou Xingchi in the public eye in recent years, and also makes people associate the character with the movie "Kung Fu Football" with a similar plot structure.
The film leaves the scene space for the drummer Dynamite (Played by Li Hongqi), bassist Ding Jianguo (played by Naza), guitarist Yang Shuangshu (played by Han Tongsheng), keyboardist Xi Xi (played by Qu Junxi) and other characters, which is still driven by the manufacture of jokes, and does not value the biography of the characters, for such a comedy film, it is not a big problem. The film enters the middle stage, gradually enters a better state, the rhythm control of the transition, through the actors really play and really sing a few songs to achieve the transition, smooth and natural. The audience also does not mind whether the songs in the movie are mostly rock and roll components or pop components in terms of musical attributes, and the lyrics and melody are smooth anyway.
Like Dapeng's other two works, "Pancake Man" and "Father and Son Soldier", the film creates contradictions between the characters, or uses the embarrassment of material life as a starting point. Ding Jianguo's father, Ding Wei (Wang Jinsong), became the fuse for the band's disintegration as a developer, and this external resistance factor appeared in the movie, or showed the deliberateness and artificiality of the script. The derivative of the scene of Zhang Facai (Yu Yang), the small leader of the demolition team, has a weak connection with the main plot, gags, and uses it to fill in the time on the stage of the duo, which appears in the movie is a drag play. The language of playing erotic edge ball is old and embarrassing. The audience's mentality of watching a movie is not necessarily that the longer the time, the longer it laughs, the more "earned". "The Sewing Machine Band" is nearly two hours long, and it is completely possible to cut off the water injection jokes for a small half hour, or move to the tidbits and Easter egg links after the subtitles at the end of the film to compact and focus on the plot.
After a slightly dull band break-up scene, the film arranges a lively brawl scene to drive the atmosphere. Even if it works, it is still a deviation in the tone of the movie. This scene is the same as the Macau casino fight scene in "Father and Son", just as noisy and chaotic.
As the final climactic plot, the reunited band members sing on the ruins of the demolition of the guitar sculpture, which is similar to "The Voice of Joy", but the logic is slightly understood. Arrange two songs to sing together, the first original song, sad and insufficient, "dry" lack; the second track is covered by the beyond band, mobilizing the audience's nostalgia, but the "awkward shake" that does not agree with each other is a lazy practice of elevating the theme near the end of the evening skit, and also turning the rock music festival into a carnival of bunting, although it is lively and lively, but it is not "rock" in essence.
As an Easter egg, the film introduces many rock veterans with cameos at the end of the film. The truth is that if you don't go through this "business card", the general audience will not know or recognize these famous characters in the rock circle. Essentially, The Sewing Machine Band is a mass film for a mass audience who knows nothing about rock music or knows nothing about it, and is not responsible for playing chicken blood, but only for feeding chicken soup.
In the era of material scarcity, chicken soup was a nutrient used by everyone; with the improvement of the national material living standard, chicken soup was slightly fatter. "Sewing Machine Band" and another comedy movie released at the same time, "Shy Iron Fist", both have the ingredient of feeding chicken soup, and the chicken soup of "Sewing Machine Band" is too thick, which increases the audience's digestive burden. While it's not all chicken soup's fault, in the spirit of diners is God's service, Dapeng's next comedy film may wish to consider a fresher recipe and a leaner container. In the age of overnutrition, subtraction is a plus.