Recently, due to the release of no Spring Festival movies, idle and bored, I watched a Hong Kong New Year movie "The Grandmaster of the Dynasty".
The original intention of watching the movie was still to go to Huang Zihua.
Huang Zihua is an excellent Dong Du laugh performer and an excellent film creator.
Here I would like to say that although "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" has many problems in art, it reflects the heterogeneous face of Hong Kong under the discussion of the film circle.
Huang Zihua said a story of a "stickman" in the early days:
A man with slender limbs and weak fists and feet wants to play a boxing match with a woman in the ring. Men are caught in a dilemma: if they win, they will be criticized for hitting women; if they lose, they will be ridiculed and beaten by women. Others asked him: Why do you still have to fight like this? The man replied that he would be killed because of the male boxer, but he liked to fight so much that he had to fight with women.
Finally the man said, "Although I am a match, if I don't burn, I am a waste of firewood." ”
This story is from Huang Zihuadong's "History of Flesh and Blood in the Entertainment Industry 2".
Huang Zihua said this story in order to lay out the following flag - I am the matchman in the film industry.
In the "Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" staged in Hong Kong's new Year file, Huang Zihua actually turned this flag into the main line of the movie.
The film tells the story of martial arts master Ma Feilong, who is defeated by Chen Zhendang, a Western boxing woman, who is determined to defeat Chen Zhen in the ring in order to revive his strength. However, during this period, he gradually discovered that his ancestral Ma Jia Lei Fist was not a martial arts mastery at all, and his life had been spent in self-deception. In the end, he knew that he had almost no chance of winning, but he still had to fight Chen Zhen.
The film's routine is quite obvious, mainly the inspirational movie formula, and then mixed with elements of comedy, martial arts films and romance films.
But there are many problems in the film, and Huang Zihua, who is very successful on the stage of Dong Du Laughing, obviously cannot have a comparable performance in film creation.
What type of film should "The Grandmaster of the Dynasty" be classified into?
Audiences will ask to see a comedy because of Huang Zihua, and "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" is actually more like an inspirational movie, with the protagonist Ma Feilong recovering from setbacks as the main story line.
Of course, inspiration is the theme of the story, comedy is the style of the film, the two can go hand in hand, for example, Zhou Xingchi's good films around 2000, such as "God Eater", "Shaolin Football", etc., not only have a meticulous portrayal of the protagonist's process of failure, struggle and persistence, but also operate a set of unique comedy styles.
As for Huang Zihua, his film's grasp of these two aspects lacks the rigor of control.
The script story is still well structured, but it is relatively thin, and the character portrayal is not profound. Although the script of "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" is much better than Huang Zihua's first self-written and self-directed old work" "A Mosquito Chicken Bodyguard", at least there is no obvious sense of patchwork.
But the film uses Ma Feilong from self-deception to rediscovery, and the twists are not clear.
The true and false description of Ma Jia Lei Fist in the play is not enough, although the audience finally knows the secret of Ma Jia Lei Fist, but how does Ma Feilong find a way to defeat Chen Zhen in this cruel truth? There are very few stories to describe.
And this is precisely a key element of martial arts films. The central theme of the film is actually a rather abstract concept - good as water.
How does Ma Feilong understand life by borrowing goodness as water? How did he get inspiration from this ancestor's hint and find a way to defeat Chen Zhen? The movies are all unclear.
For the audience who has always been nourished by Huang Zihuadong's laughter, "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" undoubtedly reveals his shallowness in the creation of film stories.
And "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" is labeled as a comedy, and the audience should pay more attention to whether it is funny or not.
Some comments have pointed out that "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" is not funny, and the laughter position is not in place. However, the deeper problem involves Huang Zihua's acting skills.
The comedic sense of the film largely depends on the actor's true color performance, in the supporting roles, the performance may be Ruan Van Tai's slow half-beat performance, there is a shadow of Liu Yida in the past years, as for Yang Shimin, Xu Shaoxiong and other actors who are good at comedy, the performance is not lost.
As the protagonist, Huang Zihua's sense of comedy also depends on his own nature, and he often behaves as clever and self-deceitful in the film, and when he exposes lies to people, he suddenly becomes confused and overwhelmed.
But in the role setting of Ma Feilong, even if his life is based on fraud, he should have a little master style in temperament. Huang Zihua, on the other hand, was completely unable to perform the meticulousness in it, as well as the internal contradiction between the true master and the false life.
This may be Huang Zihua's biggest weakness.
He was unable to master the general approach to film roles, so much so that in his early years of his film career, he could only play some low-budget supporting roles.
He once laughed at himself in Dong Du: he was an actor who "made ghost films" and specialized in low-budget films.
After becoming famous, Huang Zihua often can only rely on the high popularity of his Dong Du Laughing Art to ensure that the box office is undefeated.
Huang Zihua's charm has always been on the stage of Dong Du Laugh, compared to the ridiculous image in the movie, in the thirty years of Dong Du Laugh performance, he has completely established a kind of performance that belongs to the stage, he always appears wise, full of insight into the world, although he often carries out his joke business with self-deprecation, but it is not self-ugly, but more to see his open-mindedness.
As a result, the audience was left behind by an intellectual, proud and proud male god of Dong Du, which could not be performed at all in any of his film performances.
Therefore, when Hong Kong netizens were already pursuing "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" when it was not yet released, they all claimed to support it, relying on Huang Zihua's unique star style, and this style is unique in the Hong Kong film circle.
However, in the great achievements of Dong Duxiao, Huang Zihua still insists on staying in his long-term Waterloo land: the film industry, which is obviously the performance of his expectation of being a "matchman" in the film industry.
This joke in "History of Flesh and Blood in the Entertainment Industry 2" mocks his old work "A Mosquito Chicken Bodyguard" that was tragically destroyed by Waterloo. At that time, "A Mosquito Chicken Bodyguard" was not good," the script plot was clumsy, and the director's skills were rough, which were naturally problems, but more importantly, It was always Huang Zihua who did not look good.
In Dong Du Laugh performances, Huang Zihua often cosplays to interpret jokes, but these roles are completely different from film performances.
According to the method of acting, the actor needs to have a real experience of the role, and then internalize the actor's experience and perform it through the body.
Huang Zihua has talked a lot about how he uses his method of acting to play a movie role in "History of Flesh and Blood in the Entertainment Industry" 30 years ago, but many years later, in "History of Flesh and Blood in the Entertainment Industry 2", he no longer talks about acting, but only talks about his matchmaking theory with great fanfare.
Role playing in Dong Du Laugh does not require method acting, because the audience wants to see Huang Zihua himself, not the role he plays. The audience doesn't ask Huang Zihua to act like that, they need to hear how he evaluates or laughs at the role.
Therefore, acting out and acting out is not only not a problem, but necessary.
Acting badly, not shooting well, and insisting on making movies may be the hidden theme of "The Grandmaster of the Dynasty".
In the play, Ma Feilong is described as deceiving himself for many years, and in Huang Zihua's Dong Du laugh, there was actually a prophecy.
In "The Normal Line of Obtuse Lines", he describes something called "blunt q", which probably refers to an attitude to life that expresses lotte because of being blunt or pretending to be blunt.
"The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" has a plot that has little to do with the main story line, but is quite symbolic:
Ma Feilong was loudly scolded and ridiculed by his ex-wife on the street, who pointed out that he was not a family, she was not his wife, and her son was not his son. But Ma Feilong actually ignored it and kept acting like flirting with his ex-wife.
This is Huang Zihua's deep interpretation of "blunt q": knowing that he can't make a movie, but still not knowing it at first, he continues to invest in filming with his blood.
Thus, "The Grandmaster of the Dynasty" is only a study of film idealists, not a commercial film.
For Huang Zihua, selling houses to invest in filming, the film does not intend to return to the cost, it is really not, not particularly sad, and has nothing to do with other factors to suppress.
At the premiere of "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty", he also specifically clarified with reporters that "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" is not as unscheduled as the rumors on the Internet, and we may not necessarily believe this statement, but it is more noteworthy that online public opinion has pulled "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" into the discussion of the film economic circle, which also shows that under the social atmosphere of serious opposition, some heterogeneous local spirits are also easy to be hidden, or strategically labeled.
This is a rather surprising controversy: some netizens have initiated a boycott of "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" because the film was filmed in Shenzhen.
Expecting Huang Zihua to support Huang Si is the subjective will of many fans, after all, he is one of the founders of Hong Kong culture, and many people also regard him as one of the enlightenment teachers of Hong Kong people's spiritual culture in Dong Du Laugh.
Strictly speaking, this is a misreading of Huang Zihua.
As a Dong Du laugh performer, Huang Zihua has always only expressed his insights rather than dissent, in the period of collective social anxiety, he explains the analysis of the current situation in Dong Du laughs, and the audience will smile and seem to see the dawn of the cognitive world.
But in fact, the most common theme of Huang Zihua's laughter is the macroscopic observation of the times, human nature and life, rather than the judgment of individual events.
Huang Zihua rarely expressed his position on social justice in a clear way.
He once talked about the disparity between the rich and the poor in "Huang Zihuadong's Laughter of Charcoal", which is a topic that should be in line with the current situation.
However, he obviously prefers to lead the conclusion to thinking about the artistic production of Hong Kong films, which is very abnormal in today's film box office situation, which also shows that when Wong Zihua performed "Golden Plate Mouth", he had claimed that this would be his last laugh, because he felt that he could no longer bring joy to the audience in the current Hong Kong environment.
These subtexts of his are not difficult to decipher: he has no ability to make inspiring and in line with the expectations of the audience in a highly antagonistic environment. This year, a very personal film "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" became a life turn for him to re-enter the idealistic "Stickman" after "Golden Plate Mouth".
Huang Zihua is an unattainable insight, which is why many mainland audiences like him.
But limited by his performer temperament, he could not become a successful comedic film actor, let alone to show some kind of dissent in the film.
However, the audience still looks at the Zihua God in their minds, who represents a heterogeneous local temperament before Hong Kong's new co-productions.
He is wise and foolish about the desolate world in front of him, makes the tide of the old Hong Kong film culture without chasing the waves, and has an unrealistic attachment to ideals. This is completely incongruous with the appearance of Hong Kong films in previous years, and it is also incompatible with today's pan-cultural collective Hong Kong culture.
Although "The Grandmaster of the Qi Dynasty" is not a masterpiece, as a Hong Kong cultural phenomenon spanning thirty years, Huang Zihua can still read it carefully.