Killing the Dead: Breasts and Guns

Amos 2022-03-21 09:01:46

I love breasts, I love guns, I love breasts because I want breasts, I love guns because I want to be a gun, and a world without guns and breasts is boring.
――Han Xi

Many film critics disdain to write too commercial films. The reason is not that they are very high-level, but that commercial film reviews are really difficult to write, the characters are generally more patterned, and the stories are relatively traditional and nothing new , so it seems that there is nothing worth analyzing when writing a review. From the perspective of production, most of these so-called film critics do not have any professional knowledge in film and television. Connoisseur jokes, so most of the film reviews of commercial films do not need to be written.
In fact, there is another reason. In this era of raging online violence, foreign commercial films cannot attract the attention of many netizens even if they are scolded as useless. Therefore, it is better not to do thankless things. If you have time, pay more attention to domestic famous names. The NG in the film is more affordable.
But for people who really watch movies, they will never reject commercial films, because there are two main contents in commercial films that are very attractive, fighting and love. Of course, fighting must be exciting, and love must be naked. "The Killing" fully conforms to the elements of a commercial film. It is almost breathless, and the love is eye-catching enough, and the combination of the two is even more enjoyable.
It is said that the director of this film was extremely impressed by the scene of Zhou Yunfa holding a child and shooting in the hospital in John Woo's "The Detective", so he decided to shoot a film about a cool boy protecting the child. Obviously, this is where the idea of ​​the film lies, and it is also the core part. We immediately found out that the idea was just a scene, and for the whole film, it was just a detail, but the director obviously magnified that detail, and then magnified it, and it made up the whole movie. There is no story, there is just the process of how the cool guy uses a gun to protect the child and shoot each other with the enemy, and this process runs through the whole film, expressing this idea in various paragraphs, the most impressive is the circular staircase. Such as heavy shooting, shooting during sex, ambush in the arsenal and mutual shooting during skydiving, etc.
It can be said that the traces of deliberate design of these scenes are quite serious, but each paragraph is brilliant, it is really dizzying, and there is almost no transition between paragraphs, and the gunfight continues. Obviously, the director just wants to use these shootout scenes to attract the audience, and we also know a kind of thinking behind the director's creativity, which is purely commercial and purely cinematic. Movies are audiovisual art, and gunfights are a direct reflection of audiovisuals, so the movie was born, very simple and direct.
With this formal structure, the director thought of another major element of commercial films, love. Due to the appearance of the baby, the female characters will appear naturally, and now the problem is to plump up the characters in the play.
It is said that the director also has a soft spot for Bond in 007, so he designed an anti-Bond character in this film. The reason for anti-Bond is undoubtedly to highlight the difficulties of the protagonist in protecting the child, and the roughness and brutality of this tramp-like character and the simple kindness of the baby also form the biggest contrast. Of course, the heroine also appeared smoothly as a class brother. It can be said that the design of these characters is not ingenious, and it can even be said that the director randomly pieced it together, but for an action film mainly based on gunfights, which audience will delve into these?
After the performance style of the film and the relationship between the characters have been released, it is necessary to set a story for the film. Although it is a purely commercial film, the story cannot be arbitrarily arranged, especially under the framework of a large number of gunmen chasing and killing a baby, it is obviously difficult to arrange the story. More importantly, the director must Incorporating a few great shootouts that I designed for the film into the story is equally arduous. Fortunately, perhaps because the film has a very good grasp of the rhythm of the shootout transition, the nervous audience simply cannot realize whether the story of the film is reasonable and whether the story is inconsistent.
From the idea to the completion of the script, the pre-preparation for a commercial film is over, and the rest is shooting. It can be seen that, in fact, the creative process of many films is guided by the content, and the form mentioned here does not refer to too professional terms such as color, camera movement, etc., but only the audience's preferences, a kind of audio-visual enjoyment. In fact, these audio-visual enjoyments are still content in essence, such as women exposing their bodies, car chase shootouts, etc. Since many types of bridges almost must appear in the corresponding films, they will become forms over time. The problem of commercial films is how to Present these forms in different ways to the audience in the most wonderful way. And "The Killing" undoubtedly magnifies the form evolved from the content several times, and has become the most important point of the film.
As an ordinary viewer, I still like this kind of formal content to a large extent, and I am still looking forward to the breakthrough of these formal content! As long as it's strong, cool, and dazzling, it doesn't matter if it's a commercial or not!

Han Xi2007-12-24
in Tongzhou

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Extended Reading

Shoot 'Em Up quotes

  • Mr. Hertz: [refering to Mr. Smith's techniques] National sports pistol champion at age 10. Recruited by the army. Sound like black ops got him and trained him.

  • [DQ has just had a quickie with a passing john to raise some quick cash]

    DQ: To buy something for the baby.

    Mr. Smith: Something for the baby?

    [back in the pawnshop, she wraps Baby Oliver in a bulletproof vest]

    DQ: A bulletproof vest is better than a crib.

    Mr. Smith: I hate to think what you'd do to get him into the right school.