【Domestic】The Fallen "Shanghai Fortress"
On Friday, typhoon-ravaged Shanghai ushered in an alien invasion on the big screen, becoming the last hope of mankind, and the good news is that even if Shanghai sinks, Jing'an Temple is still safe.
"Shanghai Fortress" starring Lu Han and Shu Qi struggled to exceed 100 million yuan at the box office on the third day of release, the cinema schedule fell by the waist, the Douban score fell to 3.3, and the predicted box office was lowered by Maoyan Film from 204 million to 138 million. The film also spawned a new Internet buzzword, "Battlestar Galactica," meaning "the act of a person who is too idle and bored to watch Shanghai Fortress."
"Obviously, the explosion shots were all given to the Jing'an Temple, and the Jing'an Temple was like the Buddha's light, and there was not even a little damage." You're all shooting Shanghai disaster movies don't take the opportunity...? This made the Shanghai film critic "Zhong Luo" the most intolerable, and resolutely gave a one-star bad review on Douban.
On August 10, the official micro of "Shanghai Fortress" posted on Weibo that it "has received feedback from the audience one after another, saying that there has been a phenomenon of paid low scores" and said that it will be dealt with seriously, but the corrugated fortress has obviously been unable to stop the menacing bad reviews, and the double collapse of box office reputation has basically become a fact. This film, which claims to have invested more than 300 million yuan and took six years to build, is "China's first science fiction war movie" or the film with the worst cost loss in the year.
The spearhead of the bad reviews focuses on the starring Lu Han and the traffic star movies he represents. The film review published by "Mr. Xia Duo" on Douban called "Shanghai Fortress" "an epoch-making film in a sense". In his view: "In the past few years, because the fans of traffic stars are good at making lists and making data, they have created a false prosperity illusion of popularity, and even fooled the producers into it, thinking that the traffic has a strong market appeal." As a result, many kinds of god films with small fresh meat with no acting experience as the protagonist have emerged on the market, and as a result, we all know that one bad film after another that has refreshed the lower limit of the rating and the lower limit of our viewing experience has been born. ”
And it is the turning point of the offensive and defensive situation, "Shanghai Fortress" came out, "almost a backwater battle for small fresh meat film genre films", large productions and summer files, coupled with overwhelming publicity, occupying all resources. Douban netizens sorted out the list of movies that touted "Shanghai Fortress" before the screening, and more than a dozen well-known film critics such as "Poison Sir Movie" and "Iris" were prominently listed, revealing a corner of the traffic industry chain. In contrast to the large number of bad reviews on platforms such as Douban and Zhihu, Weibo is still the basic disk of star fans, and through means such as brushing hot searches and controlling reviews, praise still has a battle. In the pre-sale stage of the movie, some of the scenes attended by Lu Han adopted a "divisional ticket sales" model similar to the concert, brushing out a ticket price of more than 900 yuan, which caused some people to ridicule: "If the production of this movie can have one-tenth of the efforts of fans, it will definitely succeed!" Although Lu Han has more than 60 million book fans on Weibo, after wringing out the water, as "Stark sir" said: "The box office supported by fans is far from making up for the word-of-mouth and box office impact brought about by passers-by's disgust." ”
There are also many film critics who believe that lu Han's public image and acting skills cannot be pushed all the responsibility, the flawed setting, the lack of logic of the plot, the mixed and abusive genre elements, the chaotic and bad costume and aesthetic style, and even the director's original good romance is quite embarrassing, which is the internal reason for the failure of "Shanghai Fortress".
At the beginning of this year, "The Wandering Earth" opened the "first year of Chinese science fiction films", creating a new record for the box office of Chinese films and raising the audience's expectations for domestic science fiction films. In the past, "Shanghai Fortress" is difficult not to be compared, not to mention that this film also has many hitchhiking moves in the publicity. However, the audience of "science fiction movies" and the fans of traffic stars have a low degree of overlap, and even have a certain degree of opposition. When the audience asked for the movie with "science fiction", Teng Huatao, the director who had made "33 Days of Lost Love", was obviously difficult to hand over a passing answer, so the two science fiction films with an investment of more than 300 million yuan had a diametrically opposite fate.
As the WeChat public account of the Beijing News said: "The audience expects "Shanghai Fortress" to take another big step in Chinese science fiction on the basis of "The Wandering Earth". Unfortunately, it is a step backwards. The review believes that science fiction films require scientific principles as the logical basis, facing the future, and using the expression of film and television to describe a possible world picture to people. "Shanghai Fortress" is not in the "self-consistent, scientific worldview setting" that is related to the success or failure of a science fiction film, and simply treats the visual effects of science fiction as a pile of fights. Although the special effects are a relatively unsatisfactory part of "Shanghai Fortress", due to the lack of logic, many special effects and fights are meaningless, and finally dilute the audience's excitement, and when the decisive battle and Shanghai Land Sink, the audience is aesthetically tired.
In the face of criticism that ""The Wandering Earth" opened a door to Chinese science fiction, and "Shanghai Fortress" was closed again", Teng Huatao, whose online name "Butter Bear", issued an apology on Weibo on the 11th: "This is not only dissatisfaction with the movie, but also the expectation of Chinese science fiction movies has been disappointed, as a director, I have an unshirkable responsibility." I'm really sorry, because I believe that no one wants to close this shining door. ”
Although "The Wandering Earth" ignited the audience's enthusiasm for domestic science fiction films, "Shanghai Fortress" let us see that the prospects of domestic science fiction films are not optimistic. The critics of "Fat House Today" believe that "the root cause of the failure of 'Shanghai Fortress' is that it has a runaway script. "Film script writing is a part of both industrial and artistic creation. It is both an important part of the film industry and a subjective artistic creation. Unfortunately, China's film industry has not been able to cultivate enough excellent science fiction script writers. The long-term lack of science fiction films has left excellent science fiction screenwriters close to zero. Therefore, it is foreseeable that there will be more domestic "science fiction films" in the future to repeat this mistake, and in the short term, we still have the opportunity to see more "science fiction works" under the passing line in the cinema.
Toni Morrison in the film Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019).
The Death of Toni Morrison: The Meaning of Great Writers in Our Time
On the evening of August 5, 2019 local time, American writer Toni Morrison died of illness in New York. Born in 1931, the American writer Toni Morrison did not finally realize her "talent" as a writer until she was nearly 40 years old, and she published "The Bluest Eye" in 1970, a novel by the writer Morrison, which began to sell well until it was included in the black research book list of the City University of New York, and attracted the attention of the famous literary editor Gottlieb, who then began a long-term collaboration with Morrison. Helped publish the vast majority of Morrison's works.
Before Bluest Eye, Morrison's identity was many more. She was born into a working family in Lorain, Ohio, to the second-oldest parent of black workers from the American South. When she was two years old, her landlord set fire to one of her houses while they were in the room, in an attempt to evict the family, which could no longer afford the rent. In the face of the landlord's move, the Morrison family did not complain or fall into despair, but responded by making jokes about the landlord. Morrison later said that the integrity and generosity of her family had a profound impact on her life. Morrison was later educated at Howard University, but in Washington, D.C., where the school was located, she felt the insults of apartheid; Morrison went to Cornell University in graduate school to pursue a master's degree in arts, studying Virginia Woolf and Faulkner. She then became a university teacher, teaching English at Southern University in Texas and Howard University, and in 1958 her marriage to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison made her a mother of two, but after the marriage broke down in 1964, Morrison became a single mother, raising two children and making her into the habit of writing before dawn. Morrison has since taught at the State University of New York and Rutgers. She began becoming an editor at Random House in the mid-1960s, translating the works of great African writers including Soyinka and Achebe, and discovering a number of African-American writers.
As she said in an interview with the Paris Review, Morrison initially did not position herself as a writer, but as a reader, and it was her readership that allowed her to accumulate a large reading reserve during her teaching english literature and working as a literary editor. As a black female writer, in her future writing, she not only pays attention to the injustices encountered by the black community, but also makes the words and stories full of reality, and at the same time, she has a good grasp of the classic chapters and writing methods in the history of literature, making her novels full of literature and praise "poetic". After The Bluest Eye, her novels Sula and Song of Solomon began to earn her national fame: "Sheura" was nominated for the National Book Award, while "Solomon's Song" won the National Book Critics Award. It was also after Solomon's Song that Toni Morrison, who was accustomed to writing on paper with a pencil before dawn, finally realized that writing would be the "core" work of her life.
As an intellectual, an editor, a single mother, and a black man, Morrison began to use her expertise as a writer, writing many social commentaries with a stroke of her pen. In terms of literary creation, her Beloved and Jazz were published, especially the former being Morrison's most important works. Dedicated to six hundred thousand or more black slaves, this work depicts the tragic experiences of black women during the American Civil War and ultimately earned her the Pulitzer Prize. Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1988, and five years later, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for her rich imagination and poetic expression. But this honor for Morrison was not a "lifetime achievement" recognition that came into her pocket after fame, but only an event in her late-maturing career as a writer. 10 years after winning the award, her work "Love" has once again aroused heated discussion. Her origins, her identity, and, more importantly, her sense of responsibility, have led her to continue to comment on the racial contradictions that have emerged in American society, and now it seems that the vigilance she wrote in her work and in her commentaries is more like a prediction of a society in which identity politics is increasingly tired and political correctness is rife.
The news of tony Morrison's death on this past August 5 left many of her readers feeling regret and even heartbreak. Morrison's exploration of the issue of self-identity of black ethnic groups has enlightened readers in the United States and around the world. In The Atlantic, host Rebecca Carroll tells the story of Pecola, a character from The Bluedest Eye, who has always dreamed of a pair of beautiful white blue eyes. Although Carroll is African-American, she grew up with white adoptive parents, but she still grew up with self-doubt in the face of the "white gaze", and it is Morrison's novel that makes her know how to face the white gaze and become a possibility of herself. The Nation magazine said that Toni Morrison and her work have created a "new universe" in American culture, and that the appeal of the language of her novels, as well as her humble gesture as a writer, is destined to continue to attract more readers.
The word "generosity" also appears in BuzzFeed News' article in honor of Tony Morrison, because she, both as an editor and a writer, strives to broaden the path for more black writers like her, and this move is undoubtedly enriching the spectrum of American literature and contemporary world literature, and allowing readers to read more styles of text. A commemorative article in the New York Times tried to comb through Toni Morrison's "literary legacy": Morrison made more Americans realize that writing black stories freely is not a curious move; stories of different ethnic groups were written and disseminated, and traditional white gaze writing no longer monopolized the American literary scene at that time; more importantly, Morrison did have superb writing skills, she wrote about black people, but she did not express a certain emotion, she treated words seriously and calmly. But the brushstrokes are as poetic as the Nobel Prize speech says.
The New Yorker, which Morrison once contributed, also contained a considerable number of commemorative articles, which also had a fuller realistic orientation for their respective positions and purposes, and also allowed readers to further think about Morrison's significance to our time. One of them mentions the "truth" Morrison provided, that is, that she wrote in the novel many years ago about the madness that people are experiencing in the current era. Another contributor, Doreen St. Félix, mentions the significance of Morrison and his work in that it is important for young Americans to realize why their mothers could not speak in the past and to express for them what they could not have said, and this reference also makes people today feel a certain sense of epic when they read Morrison. David Remnick, editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, cites Morrison's criticism of the culture of prejudice, racism and verbal violence in the United States, targeting President Trump, who is still trying to perfunctory after two serious shootings.
On the other side of the ocean, Britain's Guardian also published quite a few commentaries related to Morrison. Booker Prize-nominated author Chigozie Obioma called Morrison "America's greatest writer," and many of her readers have benefited greatly from her work, saying her writing about the black community is deep enough to urge people to reflect on racial issues in the face of identity politics. In fact, in China's domestic translation of Morrison, some commentators have called Morrison's description of the black community "lamenting his misfortune and angering him"; regardless of whether this statement is accurate or not, Morrison's status to African-Americans, and even to black readers in other parts of the world, is as lu xun to Chinese - of course, some American readers proudly refer to Morrison as "our Shakespeare". Michiko Kakutani, a Japanese-American literary critic who also had many dealings with Morrison, wrote in the Guardian that Morrison's depiction and imagination of history, as well as his exquisite grasp of language, were destined to make her one of the most influential writers of her time. At a time when race issues are being repeated around the world and right-wing populism is on the rise, Morrison's significance may be more important than many readers think.
Poster for the movie Tony Morrison: My Work