If you don't understand what practical jokes mean to Americans, it's easy for serious and sentimental Chinese, who are very different from Americans, to misread this film. The Chinese do a lot of things with a purpose, and only the important things will be done with energy. It can be said that Chinese people do not have the kind of joke cells that Westerners have. A common joke in the United States is that when a colleague returns to the office in the morning, he finds that the huge desk has been moved to another corner of the office. Of course, the telephone line and the light line are also connected. Others would write a fake news piece for each colleague, print it on paper designed like a newspaper, and circulate it triumphantly around the office. Fake news is all articles that target each person's shortcomings to degrade each other, for example if you are short, the news will say find the shortest girl in the world in a certain country and put your name in it... such as. The strange thing is that in the sensitive United States, not only will no one be angry, but everyone will find it very funny. This strange tolerance has to do with the Western tradition of "satire".
Funny people like this are very popular, so Americans enjoy it all the time. People who don't know how to joke are seen as stupid, and even worse if they don't know how to appreciate jokes (or even get angry about it)... However, Chinese people probably find it a little boring to spend so much time and energy on something that is not particularly interesting. I just found out that the Chinese translation of practical joke turns out to be "prank", which itself reflects the difference in culture. In English it's a "joke", which is positive, while in Chinese it's "evil", a boring game only played by naughty kids.
These kinds of common jokes are the same as Andy's jokes in the movie. Americans who are accustomed to this kind of jokes probably didn’t feel as much as the Chinese when they made or watched this film, and they never expected to rise to the realm of “performance art”... Taking the Chinese “heavy” to understand the American “ Light" doesn't work.
It can be said that this is a very American movie. Its limitation comes from the fact that "humor" is so closely related to culture that it must be lost in translation when the film is exported (this translation does not only refer to linguistic translation, as in the movie "lost in translation"). In fact, strictly speaking, there are many Hollywood movies that have been misunderstood by the Chinese. However, is there a so-called "misreading"? ——Isn't the value of a movie in the feelings of the audience, no matter whether it matches the director's original intention or not.
In the end, I came back to the movie...
The most memorable scene is Andy lying in bed, his girlfriend Lynne said: "you are not a bad person. you are a complicated person (you are not a bad person, you are a complicated person) ", Andy said "you don't know the real me" and Lynne giggled "there isn't a real you."
This is the movie the most important sentence.
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