In Alexander Payne's new film "Skinny", Paul, played by Matt Damon, was at an old friend's family gathering, facing a "skinny man" who "goes first", and explained himself clearly in his complaints. That is the most common "American personal history". At a time when classes are solidified, the economy is stagnant, and even the earth is dying due to an exploding population and a degraded environment, the once seductive "American Dream" seems impossible to realize.
Here's an opportunity to improve lives and save the planet. Norwegian researchers passed several experiments on mice 15 years ago and invented a safe and effective shrinking technology. Together with more than 30 volunteers, they irreversibly shrank into a "little man" with a height of 10 centimeters. A utopian community that is envied by the world has been established. Five years later, when the results were presented to the media in a high-profile manner at the Istanbul Biotechnology Expo, this "Lilliput" not only gave birth to two babies, but also produced less than one normal human kitchen waste. bag of garbage.
Different from Penn's previous works, which expressed the poetic life in the ordinary daily life of the American Midwest, "Science Fiction" "Shrink Up" has a futuristic and interesting beginning. At the expo, the collective appearance of "Lilliput" was broadcast live to the whole world. Koreans in fish markets, West Africans in slums, Americans in bars... Different ethnic groups stared blankly in front of the TV screen. An interesting metaphor is a South Asian man looking at a tablet at the toe of a giant Buddha statue, a picture-in-picture skillfully conveying a scale that only the Creator can scale. In the next scene, the hero's mother only heard that she was invisible, and cried "too hungry" in the room, even though she had just finished eating an hour ago.
Paul, played by Matt Damon, unhurriedly unfolds the theme story in the mundane marriage and work. The geographical selection continues Payne's previous work "Nebraska". The old man stubbornly went to Lincoln City, where he received the award, which is the hometown where Paul was born in "Shrinking Down". In terms of image style and emotional feeling, if the spectacle-style "size comparison" is put aside, it is still a "glass of wine life" that middle-aged people are eager to change themselves. Of course, the spectacle is so pertinently important and significant in Shrinking Down, bringing unprecedented and climactic humor to Payne's film, and it's impossible for audiences to ignore it.
Paul and his wife went to the "sales and real estate center" to inquire about the feasibility of shrinking and immigrating to Lilliput. It is very certain that for only tens of thousands of dollars, they can live in a garden mansion and enjoy super high benefits, far exceeding their willful purchases and purchases in terms of size and consumption. However, is this fair to the vast majority of human beings who are reluctant to part with the real-scale world? A drunk guest in the bar ventured to complain, "When you go over there, can you still count on the same votes as us? You make a paltry wealth and keep us taxpayers like pets. I'm a normal person, have a normal beer!"
In any case, the couple has made up their minds, and the climax of the spectacle is also coming in "Metamorphosis". Paul "goes first", shaved all over his body and pulled his teeth clean - if the hardest part of the human body is not removed, there will be a 1 in 320,000 chance of death, a Mexican man just blew himself up - The collective is propelled into a microwave-style conversion chamber. A few hours later, they were thrust into a new world like indescribable filth on white sheets—the fairy tale world once only read in Gulliver's Adventures in Lilliput. The bad thing is that at the critical moment after the wife was shaved, she actually went back on it and escaped on the same train as the normal person and the villain, leaving Paul alone, facing this "perfect world" with no relatives and no reason.
A year later, Paul moved to a lively apartment and started dating single mothers in order to move forward with a new life. In the large apartment upstairs, there lives a Serbian rich man (Christopher Walz) who spends his days partying. An hour after the movie was out of the spectacle of big and small contrasts, the audience couldn't help but worry for the director, how he should develop such a sudden and good idea. Yes, he has technically solved a series of "shrinking problems" such as biology, transportation, home and even morality, but will the "Utopia" after leaving special effects become another mediocrity that is no different from our lives? What about everyday?
The transitional scene is when Paul is at a neighbors party where he is fed a LSD by a hot chick who seduces him, and the whole scene flies off before falling back to his sober reality. The local tyrants of Serbia promote their timely and entertaining attitude towards life, "The human world should allow a few bastards like me to exist." Then, with the cleaning women who have always cleaned up the mess, the audience saw that even in Utopia, there is still a huge gap between classes. Working-class Americans and eastern European tycoons shrank back to live in coveted mansions, but there were still Mexicans doing the toil, riding cable cars and suburban buses to large slums like Kowloon Walled City on the edge of the miniature world. And the one who led them to live was a Vietnamese refugee girl (Zhou Hong) who was hiding in the TV and fled to the United States in the news a few years ago. This lame girl is still an energetic Virgin Mary in the slums, helping the slums as much as she can. A villager who is dying.
The story of Lilliput, which makes people worry that it will be dull without special effects, has turned into another wonderful "Beijing Folding". The same is to reduce energy consumption and management costs, shrinking technology can be used by ordinary people to pursue happiness in healthy countries, and can be used by dictatorial countries for prison punishment. The reason why Vietnamese girls become "little refugees" is precisely because of their persistent opposition to the construction of dams on the Mekong River, and they are persecuted by stakeholders. Based on a certain principle of environmental political correctness, Alexander Payne and his screenwriter partner Jim Taylor, somewhat simplistic and face-to-face, portrayed the poor "villains" in the Third World led by Vietnamese girls into honest, kind, and mutual help and friendship. valuable crowd. The first Lilliputian led by Norwegian scientists, before Judgment Day, for the belief in Noah's Ark-style salvation, led sheep and horses to the underground bunker that can resist the floods - the "Apocalypse Seed Vault in the Real World" , located in a cave in Svalbard, Norway. Even if the Vietnamese girl can follow Paul to take refuge, but without the vision of human existence, she only cares about her neighbor who needs help in front of her, but instead shows the most precious love. To a certain extent, she is very similar to "Cheng Xin" in "The Three-Body Problem", but in Liu Zhinan's grand writing, she is a "Virgin" who can be dwarfed by readers' anger. The loving heart of Alexander Payne has become a beautiful butterfly flying in the fjords of Norway. The beautiful Vietnamese language: bướm was applied from Paul's mouth.
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