Comedy that takes black people as the protagonist and reflects racial issues is a common genre in Hollywood comedy movies. If you can shoot with a hilarious and warm effect, and finally focus on ethnic issues, this is the best state that this type of film can achieve. Personally, in this genre, the film that can bring me the above-mentioned high-quality look and feel, the last time, may have to be traced back to 2016's " Hidden People ".
Fortunately, at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival that just ended not long ago , there was a movie called "Green Book" that broke into people's sight with a dark horse, and it also brought me no small surprises. , The Hollywood Reporter even listed it as the seed player for next year’s Oscars.
At the premiere of the Toronto Film Festival, the movie "Green Book" drew laughter from the audience every ten minutes. After the movie ended, the audience stood up and applauded. In the final competition for the highest award at the Toronto Film Festival-the People's Choice Award, this little-known feature film won the highest number of votes in one fell swoop and became the biggest winner in Toronto this year .
The People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival has been known as the starting board for the best Oscars in the past few years. The previous " Escape from Tehran " and " Twelve Years as a Slave " started from this award and rushed all the way to the best Oscar. Film. This movie can get such courtesy, naturally there are reasons for it. After I personally watch it, I am willing to count "Green Book" as one of the best comedies and even dramas I have seen in 2018.
The whole movie to the attitude of road movies , at one go zone audience completed a wonderful journey . It not only has the dual effects of joy and touching, but also tells the story full and solid , fills the details to the right degree , and the characters are also three-dimensional and credible . It can be described as a work that meets all-round standards.
This film is adapted from real life. The whole story begins in New York in 1962, when the United States was in the period of the African-American civil rights movement. One of the protagonists of the film, Italian-American Tony, was repeatedly frustrated and had nowhere to work to make money to support his family. He got a job as a driver, and the person he wanted to drive was an African-American black jazz piano. Home Dr. Don Shirley. This is undoubtedly unacceptable to Tony, who is rigid, arrogant, and somewhat resistant to blacks. But under the persuasion of all parties, Tony finally took the job with a good salary. On the way to ride Dr. Shirley all the way down to the piano concert tour, two people with very different personalities and backgrounds started this all-round "competition". From the initial mutual exclusion, the two gradually infected and influenced each other, and finally became good friends.
The film "Green Book" is a very typical road film. The two protagonists drove all the way down from New York, passing through many home-made states in the southern United States-this undoubtedly provided a unique platform for the development of the story. You know, in the United States in the 1960s, the civil rights movement of African-American blacks was in full swing, and the cities in the southern United States were the hinterland of this movement. The more the geographical position is to the south, the more people reject blacks, and the more unfair treatment of blacks becomes.
The two protagonists in the movie went south in this way, witnessing all of this: Dr. Shirley was allowed to live in high-end hotels from the beginning, until Kentucky was not allowed to use "white toilets", and Georgia was not allowed to try on suits. , And it’s not allowed to dine with white people in Alabama...
Under the coat of this road film, what is actually being told is a collision of human nature , but also a self-discovery and self-cognition of the protagonist . The reason for saying this is first of all due to the quite interesting character setting of this movie. Among the two protagonists, the white man is the one who provides services. He is vulgar and has a low level of education. On the contrary, the black man is the one who enjoys services. He is elegant and civilized in everything.
It is based on such an interesting setting that a black man in the film who never eats fried chicken (this kind of delicacy called "black food") eats the first piece of his life under the "recommendation" of white people. Fried chicken; only when blacks help whites polish their home books, let white wives see pears with rain, and so on. The whole movie uses this method to break the stereotypes of ethics. The two protagonists repeatedly touch each other to create different sparks, and eventually change their views on each other and their perceptions of different races. The audience also follows the protagonist's changes in subtle ways, feeling the warmth and humor time and time again .
The details of the movie are very brilliant. The screenwriter not only designed plots such as buying green lucky stones and throwing fried chicken bones to increase the contradictions between the protagonists and promote the development of the plot; they also designed many details to enrich the characters. Take the beginning of the movie as an example. The director threw away the cups used by black maintenance workers through Tony and his tirelessness after seeing the ivory artwork. It is clear at a glance that Tony is vulgar and repulsive to black people.
The success in character creation is not only the setting of the plot and the enrichment of details, but also the performance of the two leading actors . Vigo Mortensen , who plays Tony , did not hesitate to gain 20 kilograms of fat in order to play the rough guy. It is with such a figure, coupled with Vigo’s performance of every detail from tone, movement to expression, that the transformation of this character is more real, from the roughness at the beginning to the loyalty later Full of persuasiveness.
The other protagonist, Dr. Shirley, is played by the black actor Mahsala Ali who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for " Moonlight Boy " . The role of Dr. Shirley is a more complicated character in itself , because he is a stranger in the eyes of white people. Although he is a pianist, because of his different skin color, he has never been treated as a master by white people. In the eyes of blacks, he was also an alien, because he lived an elegant and sophisticated life and never lowered his posture, which was completely contrary to the black public at that time.
Is such a contradictory figure, Mach salad in the interpretation of the time, to see Tony from "bad" behavior angry expression, walking to work in various postures, and then the rain that emotional collapse, both for the performance was even Sophisticated . This character 's attitude of "living proudly" has become one of the biggest highlights of this movie. Finally, I would like to say that in the movie, Mach Sala wore a neat and elegant suit, was covered by stage lights, and played the piano gracefully, it was really eye-catching and ear-catching. It is no exaggeration to say that he is one of the most elegant and most exciting male characters on the big screen in 2018.
After watching "Green Book", it is not difficult to think of two films: one is the Oscar-winning classic " Drive for Miss Daisy ", and the other is the 2011 French comedy " Unreachable ". The stories of these two films both tell the blacks serving the whites, thus establishing a deep friendship that transcends ethnicity and class. Today's "Green Book" not only adjusts the positions of the two protagonists that people are accustomed to seeing, but also puts the story in a special context of the times. It can be said to be the most innovative film that reflects ethnic issues in recent years.
If you have habitually colored eyes on this kind of movies that reflect ethnic issues, then you can treat him as an ordinary comedy and feel the sparks that burst out between completely different people. Kind of fun.
This article was first published on the WeChat public account "Watching a movie and seeing death"
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