Text / Xiao Guanping
Contents: Chapter 1: The pub culture is still unfinished Chapter 2: The universe begins and the world ends Chapter 3: Where is British humor going?
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1 The bar culture is still unfinished
The film takes the fictional British town being hijacked by aliens of unknown origin as the plot line, and the Hidden Line is the nostalgic journey of five old friends.
The plot of the main line is more common, while the hidden line of "British pub culture" is eye-catching . The author has created 12 bars from real or fictional, and named them with individual names, namely:
1, One Post Office 2, 3 old regular customers , famous rooster 4, cross fork 5 hands, good partner with 6, reliable servant who 7, two-headed dog 8, 9 mermaid , honeycomb 10, national king head 11, the wall holes 12, the end of the world
These bars become various stops on the journey of the five male protagonists. If there are audiences like me who are also interested in the bar culture of this film, please read my other film review "Love These Twelve Bars:
It is said that the name of each bar has a strong connection with the story, but I didn't find it out during the movie watching process. This is a very interesting little fun, it is the director's strategy, and it can attract fans to watch the movie several times. .
It was a good idea to set the "levels" of the journey as various bars, but this gimmick did not achieve the expected effect, leaving people unsatisfied. The director could have designed the interior and exterior of the bar to be more personal, but stopped at the sign (the sign was well designed) .
According to the words in the play, the interior of the bar has been transformed into "Starbucks", losing the unique meaning given by the name, and slightly satirizing the status quo of the commercial assembly line. The director seems to have no intention of showing too much the history or culture of the "bar" in this entertainment film, so that the film's artistic connotation has not been improved to a higher level.
If I were the director, I would make a big fuss here, narrating the legendary story and the bar culture as two parallel lines, so that the audience can read the unique history and customs of British bars while watching the sci-fi comedy. with fashion.
When Haruki Murakami writes novels, his love of American culture (especially jazz, rock and roll) is interspersed into love stories. But it still depends on whether the author really likes this thing. According to the director and screenwriter, they are not men who really like to drink, so the connotation is not excavated enough.
Although I am not a drinker, I really like the combination of business and art, brand endorsement, restaurant culture, etc., such as Disney, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Snoopy, Garfield, etc., so I love the 12 bar names in this film. and signboards, trying to find more cultural connotations from them. The motivation for watching this movie continuously in the future will also be the love of bar culture.
In order to decorate the McDonald's branch run by my friends, I designed and worked with my sister to draw a gouache painting of "Garfield and Snoopy" as a New Year's gift when they endorsed "Garfield". It's a pity that when the gifts were delivered, their contract with "Garfield" expired and they were changed to endorse Warner's "Tom and Jerry". In order not to file a lawsuit with "Garfield", the painting did not meet the large and small customers in Hefei, but hid on the wall of their staff lounge.
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2 The universe begins and the world ends
The beginning and the end of a movie are important, the beginning should attract the audience, and the ending should be thought-provoking. The middle part of the journey of this film is actually quite ordinary, but director Edgar Wright's strength seems to be the beginning and the end, which has been seen from "Shaun of Zombies". Let's not talk about the beautiful and exquisite pictures of this film one after another, and it is also a rare classic only in terms of plot settings.
The fast editing at the beginning and the nostalgic style are perfectly matched, and the actors of the five protagonists when they were young are also very similar. In addition, the "foreshadowing" of the prelude is a masterpiece, which can attract movie lovers to watch it repeatedly.
Because the story of the next 80 minutes has already been hinted in this short five-minute prelude, the search journey in adulthood is actually a re-enactment of youth, which means that in adulthood, you can find your youth back in the experience of deja vu. This is also the deepest connotation of the film - the dazed sadness of middle - aged people and the nostalgia for youth!
The ending was something I didn't expect. The civilization of human beings (at least the British) was destroyed by alien creatures, which led to the British led by several protagonists living a life similar to savages. However, this is not completely primitive society, and modern things appear and disappear from time to time, even in the The "Lovely Mint Ice Cream" wrapping paper appeared on the barren farm that made the fat man think about it.
And this food is the hidden thread of this "Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy" (aka "Lovely Trilogy": "Zombie Shaun", "Blood Detective", "World's End").
And the two protagonists who were "rebeled" by monsters were outlined by the director with two sets of humorous situations, which made people feel a kind of warmth while hilarious.
In line with the importance of the beginning and the end, the director arranged a lot of foreshadowing in the play. For example, the ring that fat Andy Knightley was bitten away by the robot dancer was originally forgotten by the audience, but was lost by Andy at the end of the film. Knightley got it from the belly of a robot dancer.
Another example is the innocuous "How cool it would be if I went straight to a bar full of burly men and only ordered a glass of plain water", which was originally just an excuse for fat Andy Knightley to stop drinking. The audience had already seen it, but at the end, the director put the finishing touches on it, making Gary King really do it (symbolizing his recognition of his friends), and saying it so coolly and doing it so chicly, he recovered his reputation. The forgotten details prove that the director really thought carefully when arranging the story and respected the IQ of the audience.
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3 Where is British humor going?
"British humor" is a word I often talk about, and I really try to use it in my life and creation, showing my tireless pursuit of comedy.
I have mentioned more than once: Hong Kong's "Chou-style humor" and Northeast China's "Zhao-style humor" both share the essence of British humor. Although these three humorous cultures do not originate from the same source, they are surprisingly similar in form.
The representative dramas of British humor are "Mr. Bean" and "IT Madman", and the representative movies are "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Shaun of Zombies". Compared with the series, the performance of "British Humor" in the movie is still slightly inferior, after all, it lacks the laughter of the same period on the set.
Now take the work "The End of the World" as an example, although there are not many laughs.
I'm used to writing film reviews as I want, and I don't read other materials. In the case of only watching it once, I casually talk about the most impressive British jokes in this film:
1. When the protagonists suspect that the surrounding crowd is controlled by robots, their first thought is not to escape or fight, but to find a code name for the word "robot", because they are afraid that the enemy will hear "robot" when talking The word aroused suspicion from the other party, so after their argument, they finally decided to replace the word "robot" with the word "space" (blank).
And they did obey the order very quickly, and quickly changed their tune and said, "We just killed a few blanks." This expression of "not doing the right thing at the right moment" and "confusing childishness with maturity, funny with seriousness, safety with danger" is unquestionably standard British humor.
2. The unintelligible plot setting of "Fat man likes the protagonist's mother very much" has been extended from the first "Zombie Shaun" to the third "World's End". In fact, this setting is absurd, because Fat Man (Nick Frost) has always played a peer of the protagonist (Simon Pegg), so why does he like his best friend's mom? And why is this "sister and brother love" setting necessary to run through?
Obviously, this is an expression of British humor, and this absurd "chicken rib plot" ( tasteless to eat, a pity to abandon) actually symbolizes the director's personal brand, because these works are from the same group of directors, The writers and lead actors, their funny, unique things that happen in real life can be placed in the series as clue-meaning details.
This, like John Woo's "white dove", Wong Kar-wai's "sunglasses", and Liu Zhenwei's "traveling", has become a symbol of the author's brand. The "cute and ice cream" logo might be a little cuter, though.
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British humor is a unique product of British (especially London) culture, but I fell in love with it after reading it. Not only did I chase British sitcoms, but I also boldly compared British humor with Stephen Chow and Zhao Benshan. The three have the same cultural connotation.
"Me and my cousin, cousin", "me and my friends Liu Lin, Yang Fei" also formed two groups of "British humor trio". It should be right to bring this exotic culture into every aspect of life. A larger interpretation and tribute to British humor.
If you want to truly have "British humor", you should not be limited to imitation of language and behavior, but must master the essence and temperament of this humor, and make yourself truly "clumsy" like the British.
2014/2/26First draft2021/8/3Revised
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