As a pure genre film, "King Kong Is Not Bad" was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the Cannes Film Festival, but the evaluation of the film in the mainstream media in Britain and the United States can only be average. Rotten Tomatoes score is 5.8 points, which is a failing score based on the 10-point scale. The unanimous opinion of film critics is that this is Tarantino's insignificant film, and the film has at most some of the advantages of the grindhouse film. The big-name film critic Roger Ebert believes that the film is only worth half the price. The obvious disadvantage is that the dialogue is too long. "The Guardian" full-time film critic Peter Bradshaw (Peter Bradshaw) on the film's negative comments on the film and Ebert converged. The film critics of the French "Cinema Manual" once again stood on the opposite side of the American media critics, and they did not hesitate to choose the film as the runner-up of the top ten of the year.
Tarantino has many die-hard fans and has his own place in film history. In fact, his strengths and shortcomings are more obvious. As a hardcore fanboy youth, Tarantino is best at plagiarism, collage, transformation, play, and subversion of various popular cultural products. His movies are more typical movies about movies, and have a strong self-reflexion. Traits. In this sense, many film critics compare Tarantino and Godard. But as Jonathan Rosenbaum refuted, one must compare the differences between the two quoted texts (classic VS rubbish), and second, what is the purpose of the quotation. The purpose of Tarantino's subversion is to obtain amused sensory pleasure, which is a game mentality. "Pulp Fiction" uses the word "nigger" dozens of times, but Tarantino's original intention has nothing to do with mockery, or even reality. He just wants to try to use the word repeatedly in the film media. What is the unexpected effect. In other words, Tarantino has not made any serious thinking about the use of the word itself, and used the word for fun. It’s fun because it’s impossible or not allowed in reality. Therefore, the sharpest and most critical comment on Tarantino is the words of James Naremore, "Actually, Tarantino gave us Coca-Cola, and there is no Marx in it." (To paraphrase Godard's famous quote in "Male and Female"). The translation of this sentence means that Tarantino's movies are only consumer entertainment without real criticism.
The problem is that it’s not unreasonable to comment on reality and history-related films like "Pulp Fiction" and "Shameless Bastard" from this perspective, but if the movie "King Kong Is Not Bad" is a dialogue with film history, if it still holds this way. Standard, then there is a suspicion of carving a boat for a sword.
The biggest gimmick of "King Kong Is Not Bad" as a genre film is the dialogue with the dying Mill film. The mill movie is a special screening method that once existed in American theaters. These theaters implement a two-film continuous screening system and low ticket prices. The screens are car movies, slasher films, horror films, etc., which are mainly consumer-oriented. And violent exploitation films. Until the 1980s, these theaters still existed. When the video disc market was perfected in the 1990s, this type of cinema completely disappeared. In horizontal comparison, the environment and atmosphere of the film of Moulin Rouge are a bit similar to the video studios in Mainland China in the 1980s and 1990s.
"King Kong Isn't Bad" tells the story of a perverted murderous demon looking for female prey, and then venting his sexual desire by crashing into a car to mutilate the female body. This is a very typical murderous movie. Tarantino is clearly an expert in this area. He carefully designed the film's structure, aesthetics, and the presentation of character identities. The film is divided into two parts (press: this review is only for the 113-minute international release). The first half can be regarded as a review of murderous movies (assuming Tarantino travels to the 1970s, the first half can actually not be filmed). Tarantino filmed the murderous movies that were shown at the Mill Cinemas in the 1970s in a very retro way. The overall visual effect of the film is very traversing, the screen is coarse and full of scratches, and there are even jumps when the opening subtitles are displayed. This is the normal state of the Mill Cinemas that year (the copy was repeatedly shown or transported accidentally causing the copy Damage occurs).
Visual effects are one of them, and more importantly, the narrative rule is to strictly abide by the routine routines of murderous movies. Represented by "Scary", "Moonlight Panic", and "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", this type of film has some tacit understanding between the creator and the audience. The more important one is that the killer is strong, and the victim is weak. This principle is to satisfy the special psychological shock principle of the audience watching such movies. Only when the weaker party is persecuted, the adrenal hormones will be mobilized and compassion will be produced. A more important principle is that the so-called curiosity kills the cat, or that it cannot live by committing sins. Victims were frantically persecuted by murderers, often because of their own mistakes. This is easier for the audience to worry about in terms of perception, and at the same time, it gains a sense of superiority in intelligence. In addition, the United States is a Puritan country, and even low-level horror films have a certain educational intention. The victim makes mistakes first is a disguised reflection of the original sin consciousness of Christianity.
The opening scene of "King Kong Isn't Bad" is to follow the naked thighs of women. In the film, the victims of a group of women, the curse is that they recruit bees and butterflies, and publicly release their seductive appeals on radio broadcasts, which directly leads to the murderous demon following all the way. Caused a huge disaster. One of the white women even took the initiative to ask for a hitchhiker in a bar to be hit by a violent death. And these women all have slutty and licentious personalities, and the only remaining virgin and murderous decisive battle set in the climax scene to avoid previous catastrophes is the prevailing rule in murderous movies. In the climax of the first half of the scene, the murderer drove at a high speed and crashed the car driven by the female protagonist. Tarantino filmed the brutal process of female dismemberment in slow motion repeatedly. Tarantino was also afraid that the contemporary audience would be puzzled, and asked the police to explain at the end of the first half, stating that the purpose of the murderer's crime was to satisfy his perverted sexual desire, and the process of impact was rape and sexual intercourse for the murderer. process.
The real performance of Tarantino's level is the second half of the film. In the second half of the story, the main body of the story is still a group of girls being followed by the same murderer protagonist, but the girls' reactions are completely different, and the ending is completely different. Tarantino also played a trick during the transition between the upper and lower parts. The color of the screen changed from the coarse particles on the upper part with scratches, first to normal black and white with the grainy washed away, and then to color. This is another way to obviously steal Godard's "Contempt". The difference in color leads to a change in the audience's perception of the female body. Godard famously said, "Pushing the track is a moral issue", and color is not it.
A major reform of genre films is to break the contract between the audience and the film, and the motive for breaking is to protest against the staleness of the contract itself. There is nothing that can be repeated countless times forever. Murderer movie What will be the effect if the murderer's side turns from a strong to a weaker or if the strong meets the stronger? This is Tarantino's intention in the second half of the experiment. The character design and behavioral logic of several women in the lower half are obviously different from those in the upper half. They are no longer the bearers of curiosity that killed the cat. They did not take the initiative to seduce the murderer. Their encounter with the murderer is purely accidental. And these four women are not one-sided lesbian groups or male wives, two of them just happen to be machine lovers, but not the kind of women who hate men. The silly white sweet girl played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead who likes to watch girls’ dreams in the movie "Pretty in Pink" has become the object of ridicule.
Both Bradshaw and Ebert criticized the film for too much dialogue, but dialogue has always been a major feature of Tarantino, and it is also an important reason for him to be compared with Godard. Tarantino's dialogues always contain a variety of jokes, but there is never a role-building function, because almost all roles in Tarantino's movies have a virtue-his own incarnation. His dialogue is more of a discussion function, borrowing the shell to lay eggs. The dialogues in this film are all kinds of useful and unused bickers between girls, in fact, they are the revelation of their respective living conditions. In the second half, through the dialogue, Tarantino showed off his film history skills. The two girls reported the name of the car movie for a while, and then strongly expressed their love for the classic car movie "Vanishing Point" (Vanishing Point) of the 1970s. "Broken Body" is a car movie that expresses the individual's ultimate pursuit of freedom. It can also be regarded as the life ambition of the two girls here.
The great subversion and deconstruction pleasure of the film comes from the climax at the end. First, there was a ship's mast (ship's mast) performance which was a little strange to the layman audience but was unexpectedly happy. This is the pleasure of sailing the car as a boat. This passage is a bit like a girl making love to the car, charming and public. But it was also this paragraph that triggered the murder, and the climax paragraph continued. The murderer's protagonist, who thought he was winning, never expected to meet a master. In the usual homicidal movies, even if the persecuted heroine finally escapes, the whole fighting process is extremely fierce. Not to mention the hundreds of rounds of wars, homicides are often undead. The film completely subverted this structure. After the three heroines escaped the collision, they suddenly had the idea of revenge, and the entire revenge process was completed in one go. The murderer of "attempted rape" was "sodious" by two female men. This is the source of the pleasure of the last climax crash scene.
"King Kong is not bad" at least proves that when it has nothing to do with reality, history, and movies, Tarantino's films are truly intellectual and creative.
(The column on the evil of iris public account has been published)
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