At the end of "1942", Chiang Kai-shek had a dialogue with Li Peiji. The famine, the government counts, only killed 1,062 people. The actual death toll was 3 million, and 30 million fled and suffered. A life, a living Chinese, they piled up together, and finally turned into a cold, emotionless and truthless number. Anyone with a little brains knows that similar things definitely didn't happen in 1942. Twenty years and forty years later, they have repeated themselves many times, and they have not ceased to this day. Over the past five thousand years, the Chinese have always liked to make a fuss about numbers, either falsifying or covering up. In modern times, this situation has intensified and pervasive. Even the current film industry, whether practitioners or researchers, are all in line with the numbers. I like to talk about data and talk about box office, but at least the basic data are suspicious. There are also many figures behind "1942", which was prepared in 18 years and cost 2. 100 million, more than 10 first-line actors... The implication is that these numbers have become the guarantee of excellent production. In fact, what a movie should be, it is what it is. Someone who makes a film in ten days can win three European awards, and if they give a Chinese director a billion dollars, they can't make a blockbuster Cameron. For the past ten years, Feng Xiaogang has been good at telling jokes, but he has no rules on how to make movies. Compared with "Assembly", "1942" failed to highlight the key points, was sloppy, and lacked a sense of rhythm. The film uses a lot of group images and multi-line narrative, which is very challenging in itself, but when it comes to the back, it can't work, and the actors are reduced to props, leaving only an unfinished road. As a blockbuster, "1942" highlights the great history, great generosity, and multi-angle shooting like a panoramic record. The hungry people include landlords, tenants, servants, etc., and the officials include the chairman, governor, commander, quartermaster, etc. Wait, there are reporters, priests, Japanese soldiers and so on. Each of them has a story, and the results are mostly understated and brushed aside. I have to believe that just now Feng Xiaogang had "a desire like the sea" as Lu Chuan said, and then he couldn't find the direction of the land in the sea. The problem with 1942, it seems to me, is also in the numbers. In the progress of the story with more and more suffering, bombing and bombing, the audience still only sees the final number of suffering, but does not see a vivid protagonist or supporting role, let alone feel their real inner predicament (Li Peiji is slightly better ). Most of those tragic dramatic conflicts are based on the events themselves, rather than relying on actors' performances, especially convincing performances - just like movies can hardly make people feel real hunger and despair. How to express the characters more deeply and have abundant vitality, Feng Xiaogang seems to be helpless after being busy for a long time. Some people will defend him. Faced with such a grand and boundless subject, there will definitely be insufficient space, and one will miss the other. Then I can only say that this is the biggest difference between a craftsman and an artist. Craftsmen will only work hard to complete a job. They can have a big scene that relies on technology, and can restore the life and death from the original work. Otherwise, they can shake a few smarts, just like Churchill's cold. However, he has never been able to really improve the pattern of the film, let alone answer the questions behind it. This is equivalent to that "1942" collected a lot of useful and useless data and information, and then there is no inference summary below, which is a pity. Fortunately, even so, "1942" is still better than I thought... My friend said, you are a high-level black, how bad can you imagine it. In the effort to restore history, in the attempt to step into the restricted area, in the performance of the content involving the Kuomintang, Feng Xiaogang at least did not show hasty and frivolous , and there is no compromise twist. Of course, this is what he should have done. When it comes to the forgotten historical events themselves, the audience can also feel the director's greatest wish: not to forget that history. After all, China has too much to say and too much selective forgetting. When numbers and history become blank, this is the greatest tragedy of a nation.
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