Starting from "People on the Road" (2010), Xu Zheng said the word "囧" three times under the banner of comedy. For Chinese comedies, the "囧" series has thus become an important thing.
Although "Hong Kong 囧" (2015), "Tai 囧" (2012), and "People in the Road" are not necessarily more hilarious than one, it is a fact that they are more "explosive" than one. Ten days after the release of "Hong Kong 囧", the box office records just set by the movie "To Catch a Demon" (2015) were all broken this summer; and before "To Catch a Demon", the box office champion of the Chinese film market was still Xu Zheng's "Tai 囧". The "囧" series seems to be proving to us that if Chinese comedy can't make the audience laugh, then making people "囧" can also succeed.
The model of the "囧" series has been formed as early as the film "People on the Road". To sum up: the successful male protagonist, accompanied by his "teammates" and chased by the "bad guys", embarks on a tortuous "home" journey. This is also in line with the usual path of comedy films. On the one hand, the pranks of "teammates" provide jokes, and on the other hand, there are "bad guys" who press forward to create a rhythm. And whether the protagonist played by Xu Zheng is called Li Chenggong, Xu Lang or Qingfeng Xulai; whether he goes out every time he goes out in dignity to catch the Spring Festival, go on a business trip or travel independently; whether he goes to Changsha, Thailand or Hong Kong; in short, the protagonist's destination is all predetermined: he wants to return to the gentle embrace of his wife, the warm harbor of his family, or to return to his middle-class ideals.
Since the role in the play is already standard, and the end of the story is also a foregone conclusion, how to play a new trick during the journey has naturally become Xu Zheng's primary challenge. Perhaps it is to collide with a new dramatic spark, in "Hong Kong 囧", the appearance of the new face Bao Bell, replacing the position of Wang Baoqiang in the previous work, began to go on the road side by side with Xu Zheng, but this also caused the biggest controversy for the film. Regardless of the high and low acting skills of Bao Bell and Wang Baoqiang, the image memories transmitted by the two of them to the audience are clearly different.
In these years of Chinese films, Wang Baoqiang can basically be seen as a spokesperson for the grassroots, and he also formed a tense and contradictory relationship with the middle-class protagonist played by Xu Zheng in "People in the Road" and "Tai 囧", and finally wrote the word "囧" satisfactorily. Xu Zheng in the "囧" series needs Wang Baoqiang from the grassroots, not only because Wang Baoqiang will always "pierce" the former, making him feel like a hundred; more importantly, only by shaking hands with Wang Baoqiang can Xu Zheng understand the true meaning of life from the way to the 囧 road and get the motivation to sprint towards the established finish line.
The rich second-generation brother-in-law played by Bao Bell in "Hong Kong 囧" is different. It can be said that in addition to the lack of heart and eyes, this character has no personality of his own. Although the audience saw him holding a digital video camera all the way and chanting the lines like a repeating machine to follow Xu Zheng away, trying to create resistance for Xu Zheng and add laughter to the film, his significance was only that. Removing the grassroots background on Wang Baoqiang's body, Bao Bell acts as a fully functional prop role in this film, and his essential role is equivalent to the front camera on Xu Zheng's mobile phone, in order to allow Xu Zheng to take selfies in every situation, and then show the audience: You see how funny I am.
This also seems to explain why Xu Zheng needs a bus of tourists holding a camera to accompany him at the moment when the film is most sincere and tells his "dream" - when Bao Bell desperately grabbed the digital video camera and said that making a documentary was his dream, Xu Zheng immediately asked, "Your dream is a dream, isn't my dream?!" In the end, without Wang Baoqiang's "Hong Kong 囧", it has evolved into a one-man show in which Xu Zheng himself competes with himself, and other roles have all become his audience.
Of course, it is also because Xu Zheng does not have to face Wang Baoqiang, who has been begging for salary and saving his mother all the way here, his rhetorical question about dreams will appear more confident; after all, Bao Bell in "Hong Kong 囧" cannot "pierce" Xu Zheng's dream. And this dream, which may not be worth mentioning in the eyes of ordinary people, is expressed in Xu Zheng's own words only, he waited for twenty years and finally waited for an opportunity to meet his first love, "not to prove anything, but to tell myself that my youth years really existed."
In fact, this so-called real youth years, as early as the first ten minutes of the film, have been dramatically displayed to the audience: one Hong Kong film poster after another, one Cantonese old song after another, witnessing the love of Xu Zheng and his first love Cuckoo; and the exaggerated design of rolling sheets and failing again and again, while injecting laughter into the film, maintains the purity of this love. Equating youth with first love was originally the most common grammar in Chinese movies in recent years; in "Hong Kong 囧", the entire 1990s Hong Kong pop culture was also used as a rhetoric for first love. In this way, Xu Zheng's dream can finally be said to be round. Moreover, when Xu Zheng came to Hong Kong twenty years later to meet the cuckoo, he also produced the wonderful effect of this man's own background music along the way.
In addition to Chen Baiqiang, Tan Yonglin, Zhang Guorong, Jacky Cheung... One famous song, the Hong Kong films of Wang Jing, Jackie Chan, Wong Kar Wai, Chow Sing Chi and others were also borrowed one by one in "Hong Kong 囧". It can be seen that for these Hong Kong films, Xu Zheng has obviously done enough homework, even if he is not a family treasure. The interesting thing about "Hong Kong 囧" is that in this movie, the police in the Hong Kong gangster film are still policemen, and the actor who has run the dragon set all his life continues to run the dragon suit; the cameo appearance of Wang Jing is also the true color of the performance, and when Xu Zheng himself goes to battle, the posture is simply The possession of Jackie Chan; and at the moment when Xu Zheng confessed to Cuckoo, he did not forget to present the movie poster of "Sweet Honey" to lyrically... Using Hong Kong film feelings to add color and refreshment to works has long been commonplace in Chinese films, especially comedies, in recent years, and often can get good results. This summer's hit comedy Pancake Man (2015) is one example. But if it is believed that "Hong Kong 囧" only relies on interspersing a few old Cantonese songs and paying tribute to several Hong Kong film classics to pass the test, it is also too underestimating Xu Zheng's efforts. It may be said that Xu Zheng tried to make different types of Hong Kong films have a chemical reaction together in "Hong Kong 囧", which seems chaotic, but in fact, various proportions and scales are all looked at by him. Although the effect is mixed for the audience, "Hong Kong 囧" also makes people feel that Xu Zheng seems to use his method to inadvertently solve the problem of Hong Kong filmmakers going north and the mainland film market in recent years. This is probably also the unexpected contribution and inspiration of the "囧" series to Chinese films in addition to comedy.
It is worth mentioning that the first part of the "囧" series was originally written by Hong Kong director Ip Wai Man, and "People on the Road" can also be seen as an attempt by Hong Kong filmmakers to go north. After Xu Zheng took over the guide tube, the "囧" signboard was made bigger and bigger by him. Using the fish pond of the mainland variety show and fattening the fish fry cast by people in that year may be the root of Xu Zheng's "囧" series that can make people pay today. As mentioned earlier, the Hong Kong pop culture of the 1990s was nothing more than the film rhetoric of "Hong Kong 囧", a false shot of Xu Zheng, under the label of comedy, the "囧" series actually detonated the popularity accumulated by reality SHOWs such as "Where Daddy Goes", "Flowers and Youth", "The Voice of China" and so on. As long as the ratings of such TV programs do not decrease, Xu Zheng's "囧" series can probably sell for a few more years.
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