"Bean" first appeared 28 years ago. On January 1, 1990, the BBC series "Mr. Bean" started broadcasting, and the popularity spread from the United Kingdom to Europe, to the East Asian continent. That was the heyday of beans.
Some people say that this series tells the story of an era in the most absurd way.
But when Bean no longer plays Bean, will the film still be interesting?
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old bean
Most of the British hits of the 1990s were adapted from excellent classic literature, and there was not yet a face of a household name comedy star.
In 1990's "Mr. Bean", Rowan Atkinson had a very characteristic face, coupled with unexpected expressions and action performances, he conquered all audiences.
The idea for the series was born during Rowan Atkinson's college days, when he was studying at the University of Edinburgh with "Mr Bean" screenwriter Richard Curtis. Richard Curtis was tired of writing scripts full of dialogue, and Rowan Atkinson was also keen on visual acting, so the two hit it off and thought about using visual acting to present jokes.
After the broadcast, people thought that Bean's performance was a tribute to Chaplin and Buster Keaton, but Rowan Atkinson was actually most influenced by Jacques Tati, especially "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" ".
What he faces in the play are all the little things we face in our daily life, cheating in exams, shopping in shopping malls, swimming at the seaside, in these small fragments of life, he uses a unique and young solution to make people feel his sense of humor .
The single-episode set of this play is 24 minutes, and from 1990 to 1995, only 14 episodes were broadcast in five years. It was this short episode that won the 44th BAFTA. It was also the most-watched show in the UK throughout the 90s.
Now I can even think of England twenty years ago. After dinner, everyone gathered in front of the TV and laughed together watching the grimace made by Bean.
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old-fashioned movies
During the promotional period for [Beanstalker 2], Rowan Atkinson has already said that he wants to create a new character and doesn't want to play Bean anymore.
He did. In fact, the original English name of the [Bean Agent] series is called Johnny English (Johnny English), which is also the name of the character in Rowan Ankinson's film, and has nothing to do with Mr. Bean.
But Chinese propagandists have taken into account the influence of the name, and Rowan Atkinson's face has been labeled as "bean". So the hat was snapped back on his head.
Although the name was changed to Johnny English, but the movie title was translated into [Agents with Bean] can't completely blame the Chinese distributor. After all, this role is really similar to Mr. Bean back then.
Without any new ideas, it has completely become a Hollywood blockbuster, and the ratings have naturally dropped.
In 2003, the first film of [Agent Bean] was released, and Johnny English completely inherited the character of Bean - a child living in the body of an adult. However, "Mr. Bean", which showed jokes from the trivialities of life, became the "Agent Bean" of the Hollywood assembly line blockbuster, and the quality of the film plummeted. The character is still silly, but no longer cute.
The producers just wanted to cash in on Bean's remaining fame and the way the blockbuster was embellished with British humor.
This way they used it until the third part.
In 2018, hackers attacked the UK's national security system and all the agents were exposed, so the British Prime Minister needed a retired agent to find out who was behind it. When the MI6 director gathered a group of elderly agents in an office, one of them pulled out a pen that he said was a bomb pen that would explode if it wasn't snapped back 20 seconds after the cap was pulled out.
The fate of all the other elderly agents being bombed to death is already doomed, and Agent Bean becomes the chosen son, only a few minutes later. with no doubt.
For audiences who are so familiar with comedy routines, Bean's performance is nothing more than those few expressions and actions, which can be copied indefinitely after being cut into animations.
For example, what makes this simple plot structure more insulting to the audience's IQ? It is this trick that has been done once in the first part of [Agent Bean]:
The pen also appeared in the first episode of [Agent Bean], when Bean was appointed as an agent, he went to the secretary to sign the document, he saw a pen on the table and said, "Is this the one I used before? This kind of pen looks ordinary, but it only needs to be pressed twice." While pressing it twice, the poisonous needle in the pen shot the secretary.
Probably the screenwriter is also short of words, and can't think of any other way to make Bean become an agent.
However, the script written in this way makes the similarity between [Agent Bean] and [Agent Bean 3] almost 100%.
A movie can't really be entertaining if all the jokes made in a movie are known to the audience in advance.
The film is full of nostalgia, letting Bean pick a new car for a mission. In front of the new energy car in a garage, Bean chose the shiny red Aston Martin without hesitation.
Handsome is handsome, but when chasing the enemy halfway, this retro car ran out of gas.
When the British technicians wanted to give Bean a mobile phone, Bean solemnly refused, on the grounds that it would reveal his information and location. But at a critical moment, don't you have to use the mobile phone of a Russian female spy to record video?
This nostalgia carries through to the end of the film, when Bean holds the tablet but doesn't know how to turn off the villain's attack system. The villain mocked him for not keeping up with technology, and he couldn't even use a tablet.
Bean stuns the villain with his tablet, smashing his smartphone, which controls the attack system. Others win by fighting, Bean wins by stupidity.
This seems to be a good show in which human primitive instinct overcomes high technology. If you think about it carefully, the logic is full of loopholes, but it is just the wishful thinking of the director and screenwriter.
If this set was presented twenty years ago to people who had just watched commercial movies, it might have been surprising and pleasantly surprised. But in today's view, it is just pitiful and ridiculous.
Once the face of Bean was a business card, he appeared on TV from time to time, telling the stories around him in a childlike way. You think he is the second fool Wang Laowu next door. His IQ may not be online, but he is kind and kind.
He was the talk of the weekend dinner table and the joke on the couch at night. But now he has thrown away the ordinary sense of reality and stepped into a Hollywood blockbuster. In a blockbuster produced by a commercial assembly line, the characteristics of Bean itself have become an incongruous element, and no amount of Rowan Atkinson's hard work can save the film.
Then let Bean stay in the past, and let him become a memory, not a tool for making money.
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Text: Cong Miao
The article was first published on WeChat public account: Movie Detoxification
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