1905 Movie Network Special Article When "Journey to the West: The Great Haunting of the Heavenly Palace", "Journey to the West of Sun Wukong Three Dozen White Bone Essences" and "Kill the Wolf 2" and "Accident" were put together, would you be surprised that these films with completely different styles were actually from the same director-Zheng Baorui.
Following the film "Journey to the West Daughter Country", he has rarely produced directed works, and has been deeply involved in the creation of films such as "Mai Luren" and "Journey" as a producer
Now, he has finally returned with his directorial work "Wisdom Teeth" and has been shortlisted for the special screening unit of the 71st Berlin International Film Festival.
Since the film was launched in 2017, it has attracted the attention of fans, after all, this work is a crime action film created by director Zheng Baorui after returning to Hong Kong, China after the "Journey to the West" trilogy.
This work also happened to fulfill his wish when he was interviewed in "Journey to the West Daughter Country", "After shooting a blockbuster for a long time, I still want to return to the basics, if there is space and conditions, I would like to go back to make some small films." ”
The film has long been filmed in 2018, but it has not met the audience for a long time, what is the quality?
Fans familiar with Zheng Baorui's previous works know that the biggest feature of his films is fierceness and fierceness. The most unforgettable thing is that in the movie "Kill the Wolf 2", a long-shot fight scene of the prison riot can be called a new standard of Chinese film play.
No, the movie "Wisdom Teeth" officially returned with the vigor he had not seen for a long time. According to the distribution plan recently exposed by Erdong Pictures, one of the film's producers, the film is expected to meet the audience in November.
About Wisdom Teeth
The film is based on the novel of the same name by Remy, author of "Psychological Crimes", which tells the story of Ren Kai (Li Chun), a recent graduate of the police academy, and the newly reinstated detective Liu Zhongxuan (Lin Jiadong), who triggered a series of events in the process of solving the case. Events are interconnected, and all the crises have long been buried in the heart of the city.
It is not difficult to hand over this criminal action theme to Zheng Baorui to complete, and coupled with the writing of The Golden Screenwriter Ou Jian'er and Cen Junqian of Galaxy Image, it makes the whole story more watchable.
The story weakens the original suspense and makes the emotional explosion more concentrated. At the beginning of the film, the director does not give the audience any buffer time, directly hitting the scene of the murder, looking around, the rain, the mud, the ants, all gathered in the garbage heap, and the whistle of the city light rail in the distance. All the text messages are very direct to the audience, and a depressing atmosphere comes directly.
Zheng Baorui is not satisfied with the past, just simply tell a crime story, he maintains the aesthetics of "Dog Bites Dog", but also the image picture to the extreme, the whole film is presented in black and white. But this kind of treatment did not hide the fierce strength in his works, but was infinitely magnified, especially the final fight between Lin Jiadong and Hiroyuki Chi Nei, punching to the flesh, crushing the audience breathlessly.
This processing of black and white images blurs the appearance of the city itself, making people ignore its orientation, more like an apocalyptic prison, in which all the characters struggle. This setting also happens to fit the Film's English name, "Limbo, Prison". But this despair is not the helplessness of the cliff, like "wisdom teeth", waiting to be eradicated and healed.
In the movie, the three main characters of Lin Jiadong, Liu Yaser and Li Chun are charming, seemingly wrapped in darkness, but they are always looking for that glimmer of light in it, they are redeeming, they are also being redeemed, and they are completing the process of self-redemption. Just like the wisdom teeth that Li Chun lost at the end of the movie, the characters have also grown accordingly. In the film, severed limbs and people with sound limbs but "disabled" inside abound, all looking for an outlet to make up for the missing link.
Although "Wisdom Teeth" is a male-dominated movie, I never expected that Liu Yaser's role would be set off extra dramatically. She also contributed to the biggest scale of the film in the film. If Lin Jiadong's brilliant performance lies in the deep display of his extreme emotions and violence, then Liu Yaser's performance is to hollow himself out layer by layer in helplessness, darkness, violence and humiliation.
The real Zheng Baorui
In fact, winning with dazzling scenes and visual effects, and uniquely focusing on grasping the audience's psychology to create an atmosphere, is Zheng Baorui's consistent style.
Compared with Qiu Litao, the director of "Bomb Disposal Expert 2", Zheng Baorui is not a prolific and talented director, and he completely broke into the film circle by mistake, and then met his own film enlightenment teacher Lin Lingdong.
Lin Lingdong is accustomed to amplifying the violent side of reality in genre films, and Zheng Baorui was more or less influenced when he was his assistant director, and showed it in subsequent works such as "Dog Bites Dog".
He later transformed into a director, but at first he did not find a state, nor did he know what movie he wanted to make, and slowly groped, until after 2005's "Monster", he gradually formed his strong personal style.
The subsequent "Dog Bites Dog" has always been considered by fans to be a representative of his image style, but at that time, he also knew very well that he had the impulse to make a movie, "but still did not know how to tell stories." Until, he joined the Galaxy Image.
In the years of Galaxy Image, he handed over "Accident" and "Driver" successively, and also let him start school to look back at himself, "In addition to giving the audience a sense of impact, what else can I give?" I don't deny the dark stuff, but the value is that you can find a little light in the darkness, so that the darkness has value in comparison. ”
But after that, Zheng Baorui left Galaxy Image and directed the "Journey to the West" trilogy. When many viewers questioned that Zheng Baorui's directing standard was only like this, he himself did not think so, because when he took over the project, he also hesitated and told himself that these are definitely not things that belong to Zheng Baorui, "so when shooting these films, I will put myself in the back position, and the personal elements will not be amplified." ”
Even in the early interviews, he was asked by the media more than once about the three or two things with Galaxy Image, and he would say that he would still go back to filming, "I enjoy it, and very few film companies give me the feeling of 'it's just making movies, and it's the movies that taste'. ”
Judging from the current producer of "Wisdom Teeth", he did not see the figure of the galaxy image, but from the perspective of the finished film, the fans were not disappointed, and Zheng Baorui really went back. Especially in the third act of the movie, the cross-editing of the inside and outside of the cabinet seems to make people see the shadow of "Detective" and "Big Man with Great Wisdom" produced by Galaxy Image.
All along, Zheng Baorui's films have been criticized for over-rendering the explosive emotions, and even in the third act, the plot is weakened. However, judging from the finished film of "Wisdom Teeth", this time the problem has also been improved, and it can even be said to be a personal summary of the collection.
With Hong Kong films such as "Bomb Disposal Expert 2", "Sweeping Drugs 2" and "Peerless" repeatedly setting box office records, we also expect this more stylized genre film to achieve eye-catching box office results in the future.