There was a lot of cheers on the Internet, cheering for the grand arrival of "Let the Bullets Fly", it seems that the only controversy is left: Does Jiang Wen's dynasty begin here?
For many years, the mainland Chinese film market has been stuck in the "Zhang Fengchen" pattern, and the media and the public have long been impatient. Just as the Hong Kong entertainment circle desperately called the "Fifth King" in the dreary era of the Four Heavenly Kings in the 1990s, Jiang Wen was regarded as the only possibility for Chinese films to break.
The trailer for "Let the Bullets Fly" triumphantly displays Quentin Tarantino's comment: "China's most talented director!" How many eyes are on the "most talented" coronation, and my attention Only on the word "China".
Jiang Wen's talent is beyond doubt, but the talented Jiang Wen also lives in China. The characteristic of Chinese culture is interpersonal relationships. First, we should understand the interpersonal relationships before expressing our talents. Especially something like a movie that requires too much cooperation and compromise. If you want to be a spoiler, artistry, box office, topic disputes, all three are indispensable. The film bureau finally chose "The Orphan of Zhao" instead of "Let the Bullets Fly", but at least Jiang Wen finally became one of the choices. And the box office, the only weakness of Jiang Wen's films in the past, will also be armored by "Let the Bullets Fly", so that this spoiler can confidently request to reset the position of the top spot in Zhongyi Hall.
The problem is that the needle has no two ends, or as some people say, "good things don't have so many friends". In terms of film alone, the advantage of "Let the Bullets Fly" is that it maintains the aggressive style of Jiang's images. What is disappointing is that the film is no longer so muddled, and becomes section by section. The form is scattered and the spirit is scattered, more like a magician's dazzling skills, swallowing swords and breathing fire to climb the ladder, there are no surprises, and it is like Jiang Wen's sketch demonstration class at the drama school. The inner motivation of the film's narrative has become vague. After Master Tang's death, the film suddenly changed from a Sichuan opera-style chaos to a fable of a mass movement. Talented" in front of the word "China".
I always thought that mainland Chinese directors like to put too much personal thinking in their films. It looks like a decent "author's film", but the audience always laughs when the director thinks. This kind of shooting habit comes from the imprint of the era that takes the world as its own responsibility, and also from the national system of drama and film—in this sense, the early films of Feng Xiaogang and Jia Zhangke are anomalous. Once your position is recognized by the players, the paradox will arise: the greater the external pressure forcing the director to compromise, give up and integrate, the more the director will resist, rebel and confess. Qiang, and finally turned into a messy pancake flipping scene: if you don't let me flip it, I want to flip it, and I have to flip it out. Everyone is watching whether or not to flip it and how to flip it. The pancakes use flour or rice, peanut oil or rapeseed oil, poured into the blurred background in the photo.
Frankly speaking, in China, movies have taken on too many topical functions and social emotions. The so-called "topical movie" means that the size of the investment, the cast, the director's style, the circulation of the original book, and the marginal scandal have all become social topics, and the movie has become a social threshold for a topic. A movie or a few movies, you can't chat with people. This state is unique to mainland China. It concentrates all the film resources and even public opinion resources in one to three films at a time. After the magnified greatness of films and directors is the weakness and humility of the times.
From this point of view, Jiang Wen's spoiler is not the breaking of the game, but the entry of another person. "The Devil's Coming" was not released, and "The Sun Also Rises" could not be a topic, but "Let the Bullets Fly" can and is almighty. Jiang Wen, born in 1963, and Chen Kaige, born in 1951, Zhang Yimou, born in 1952, and Feng Xiaogang, born in 1958, are there any fundamental differences? Chen Kaige uses humanity to dissolve morality, Zhang Yimou uses beauty to evade power, and Feng Xiaogang uses human touch to reduce reality. Their obsessions do not regret, and Jiang Wen stubbornly recounts modern and contemporary history with fanaticism, showing heroic loneliness and mediocre carnival. Are you thinking about the same theme over and over again, expressing the same emotion, and singing the same song?
And the market and the audience will not allow you to be like Yasujiro Ozu's fixed position until death, and there is no change. When we took a few steps back and looked at the old owners and new faces of the party again, their gestures were varied and enchanting, sometimes full of old wine, sometimes changing new bottles, but what turned out were fish tanks, rabbits and playing cards.
You have to understand, this is a flat age. The flat age doesn’t need real edges and corners, and the flat age is more popular with little smarts than big ones. There is nothing wrong with Xiao Cai, but when Xiao Cai is misplaced and deduced into a great wisdom, both the performers and the audience indulge in the superficial profound, anemic innocence and profane carnival.
In such an environment, blaming individuals is ineffective, and even wanting to be alone is a luxury. We come from an era of homogeneity, sharing a common legacy and debt. We can understand the subtle innuendo in the lines, we can stitch the details and news events in a way that even the creators may not have imagined, and we will respond to the sensitive points of every dazzling skill and every touch of memory in the movie, singing loudly. We are in such an era of cryptic language and metaphor, groping secretly like a fight at a fork in the road, smiling knowingly for sharing the tacit history and reality.
If you are comfortable with the status quo, I have no problem. But don't think of a fellow man as a heretic. The surging hormones and libidos under Jiang Wen's lens are like giving you a marijuana in the north wind. You forget the cold, but from now on your illness is no feeling.
When I was in college, the teacher who taught contemporary literature was very famous. He talked about the difference between "Red Sun" and "Song of Youth": "There are three differences between the two novels, ahem, one, the background of the times is different; two, the characters are different; three, the plot of the story is different"... They laughed together. Now that I think about it, seventeen years of literature is indeed a melon that grows on a vine. If it is different, it is these differences. In that era, the discussions on novels and poems in newspapers and magazines, without exception, focused on the "theme and typical characters" of the works, and no one paid attention to such things as writing techniques, narrative modes and imagination. If you gave someone a copy of Wang Xiaobo at that time, they would be dumbfounded and silent.
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