This is really well written
. His cruel cognition of the world itself makes him stubborn like an old man, and exaggerated like a child.
Text/Mei Xuefeng
has
already written enough about "The Mermaid" and Stephen Chow, and I'm just superfluous to talk nonsense, but there are some opinions I don't agree with, so I'll say something casually.
Some people say that Zhou Xingchi has become more cruel and not so good. I agree with the first half of the sentence, but absolutely disagree with the second half. In my eyes, Zhou Xingchi's goodness comes from this.
What is the biggest difference between Wang Jing and Zhou Xingchi? It's that Wang Jing's movie characters won't give you pain. Like all comedies, it destroys everything and shows you the meaningless side of the world, but everything is at a safe distance. Besides, you don't feel your connection to what it shows, you are there, like a spectator on a low-end comedy stage, he always makes you feel that you are a consumer, they are sly, all kinds of ugly You don't really respect the characters in the movie, so you don't feel threatened.
And Zhou Xingchi, better than Wang Jing, is that it will do the same at the beginning, using all kinds of teasing to make you relax your vigilance, and then at a certain moment, it shows the really painful side of life, which catches you off guard. Just like "The Mermaid", when the female fish played by Lin Yun has been assassinated and defeated many times, when the big octopus played by Luo Zhixiang is cut off several tentacles, you can feel the tricks of fate and the misfortune of people, but all All of this is an exhibition of human folly. Zhou Xingchi can always let the audience quickly let go of their guards in this crazy self-deprecation of human beings, but when you think that is the case, he puts some kind of truth in you solemnly. In front of you, you have to stare at it. Why is it that when the mermaid was hunted down and fell to the ground, what you saw was an extremely realistic picture, full of wounds on the body, the tail of the fish was blown apart, with a naturalistic bloody and sticky? Zhou Xingchi has a very cynical style here. He doesn't mean it, he just wants to make you fall suddenly like a plane crash, return to the world from fantasy, and let pain pierce your heart like a giant sword. Xiaoqiang, who couldn't be beaten to death, removed his disguise at this moment. He was just an ordinary body that would hurt just like the audience here.
Stephen Chow has always done this. He didn't hesitate to show pain at all, or that all the teasing was accumulating energy for this moment. The tighter and tighter spell in "Journey to the West" made the cynic hapless Zhizunbao finally reveal his true affectionate side. In "Kung Fu", the head of Ah Xing, who was hit to the ground by a fist the size of a sandbag, proves that in his submissive face, he also has a pair of iron bones that never give in. In "Journey to the West to Conquer the Demons", Tang Seng's hair was pulled out one by one, which made him understand his deep love for Miss Duan. Suffering is the Buddha name of Nirvana for Zhou Xingchi, allowing them to break free from the disguise of their own nature and the norms and education of society and return to their true self.
2.
To put it simply, the movies directed by Stephen Chow (note that they are directed by him) all hide a motif of returning to the true self. What is it that stands in the way of this true self? is class.
If you take Stephen Chow as an author, it is rare to see him revolving around the same theme in such a pure and consistent manner. In his films, there is always the opposition between the poor (little people) and the rich (big men), and this division is insurmountable. When the protagonist is the poor poor person (little person), he tells the story of how the protagonist obtains a sense of existence in this unfair world ("Domestic Zero Paint", "Danai Detective Zero Zero Hair", "The King of Comedy", "Shaolin Soccer") "Kung Fu"), when the protagonist is a rich man (big man), he is talking about a rich man who has lost his bottom line, and only when he encounters failure can he truly find the simple humanity that he has lost for a long time. )"Mermaid"). Money and success so dazzlingly become the frame of reference in his films, reflecting the confusion of the rich and the poor in his films, the anxiety that they can't find respect and a sense of security.
Stephen Chow is the real angry youth, but he hides it so well that people forget about it. Ang Lee said that Zhou Xingchi is talking about children's things, and there is some truth to this. but why? The reason why a person is so tirelessly obsessed with fairy tales is that he is too impressed with spiritual and material deprivation. People who know fairy tales are so far away will really like fairy tales, but in the process of making fairy tales, he can't help but mix some kind of tragic bottom life into them.
three
What is the nature of nonsense? In the context of the 1990s, we understand it as a rebellion against authority and a dissolution of nobility. It is not difficult to understand that, based on their own experience, young students and intellectuals in the mainland will naturally think of it as a destruction of hypocrisy and staleness.
But when the rules are really destroyed now and the whole society is re-ordered by the only element of money, combined with Stephen Chow's growth background, I prefer to understand Stephen Chow's nonsense as a kind of feign madness of the bottom people. The damaged respond to stress. When the world doesn't take me seriously, I really don't take myself seriously for you to see.
Since Hong Kong, a former colony, does not have the pain of values as strong as the mainland, it should be more reliable to interpret Stephen Chow's peculiar style from the Kowloon Walled City in this way. His deliberate exaggeration and naivety are Wang Shuo's style, I am a hooligan, and I am afraid that someone will be stingy, but on the other hand, it is also through this self-denigration to achieve self-balance.
This most basic psychological gene penetrates into his casting and plot design. To put it simply, his films are always intertwined between self-abuse and self-abuse, hesitating between self-affirmation and self-loathing.
Give a few simple examples. In "Shaolin Soccer", Zhao Wei, who had pustules on her face, came to Stephen Chow dressed like a plastic model. Stephen Chow rejected her confession. At this time, there were flies wandering in front of Zhao Wei's greased face, and Zhou Xingchi beat the flies. , but slapped Zhao Wei in the face.
Zhou Xingchi , the image of Zhao Wei in "Shaolin Soccer",
wants you to see that it is not enough to reject others, but also to see the flies and slaps that applaud this rejection. How cruel is this, this is all kinds of tricks to sprinkle salt on wounds, but only when we ignore the harm, the harm does not work for us. Zhou Xingchi also showed his ambivalence towards the bottom to a certain extent. They were kind and gentle, but they were also vulgar and ugly. He instinctively praised them, but also rejected them. This is also evident in Stephen Chow's other movie "The God of Cookery". The turkey played by Karen Karen (Weibo) (WeChat: karenmok01), with her wholehearted dedication, was grateful to Stephen Chow, but she couldn't to his love. At the end of the two films, the two women became inexplicably beautiful, and they got Zhou Xingchi's ambiguous favor. From this point of view, Zhou Xingchi did not beautify his protagonists from the bottom of his heart, but did not hesitate to show their snobbery and shallowness.
Another example of Karen Mok playing the turkey in "God of Cookery" . In "The King of Comedy", the unemployed young man and young and dangerous young man who graduated from the University of Hong Kong received protection fees under the guidance of Yin Tianqiu. The boss was moved by his persistence and gave him 20 yuan for pity. At this time, the director Zhou Xingchi dealt with it like this. Yin Tianqiu and Hong Ye came over and said that they did a good job, and then let the poor young man continue to maintain the posture of holding his swords high, and let him continue to experience the anger that was provoked by slap after slap. .
When the insult came, Zhou Xingchi did not use warmth to dissolve it, but replaced it in a more insulting way. This shot revealed Zhou Xingchi's extreme pessimism deep in his innocence, a kind of almost desperate suicide: your Struggle seems so ridiculous that it deserves to be treated like a clown. These seemingly unnecessary slaps are actually a wake-up call to the ruthlessness and ruthlessness of this world.
Fourth
, this kind of cruelty and disillusionment in the bones is what makes Stephen Chow's films truly unique.
It is this unconcealed longing for this world and those ridiculous failures that are shocking and maverick, which complement each other and reflect Stephen Chow's tragicomedy. Comedy is about meaninglessness, and the real pain he does not shy away from in the film tells the real price paid behind meaninglessness. It is precisely because of the tension formed by this desire and sense of failure that Stephen Chow's films have an almost fanatical existential anxiety. When it is not recognized, it feels the malice of the whole world; when it has everything, it is tortured by a deep moral conscience.
If we want to talk about the real change of "The Mermaid", it is the first time Zhou Xingchi (director's work) takes love as the theme. As for "The King of Comedy", which is most like love, it still talks about success, the love between Liu Piaopiao and Yin Tianqiu It's just that he longs for a placebo on the road to success, it keeps Yin Tianqiu's life from being a complete failure. In "The Mermaid", Lin Yun asked Deng Chao to let go of everything. This may be a loosening of Zhou Xingchi's values as an author over the years. Compared with power, love may be more cherished.
But what remains unchanged is his cruel cognition of the world itself, where he is as stubborn as an old man, and exaggerated like a child. In his dualistic world, there are no such words as poverty and happiness, and there are only two paths of destruction and rebirth. There are no gradients in his aesthetic map, only the positive and negative sides, just like the ten-dollar "Tathagata's Palm" is really a peerless martial arts, and "Three Hundred Songs of Children's Songs" is actually a variant of "The Great Sun Tathagata True Sutra" . Because he doesn't really believe in his protagonist's success, he resorts to the illogical tricks of fairy tales.
But fortunately, with this kind of despair, he can find the source of his madness, so that all the jokes are secretly connected with a sense of failure, broken bones and tendons.
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