This film review was first published on the public account: Huaguoshan FM.
The 92nd Academy Awards draw today.
The nominated "Parasite", "Joker", "The Irishman", "Jojo Rabbit", "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" and "1917" all have champion appearances and interesting stories.
"Birdman", "Spotlight" and "Moonlight" should be thankful that they have not encountered any of them in the Oscar nominations in the past 5 years, otherwise they may lose very badly.
I had previously guessed that the best picture of the year was 1917.
Although I prefer allegorical movies like "Parasite". The first half of the narrative is as smooth as a commercial film, and the second half is flipped and scuffled with the taste of a Korean film. But once "Parasite" has won too many awards, Oscar is sometimes reluctant to give you another award as the icing on the cake. Second, there has never been a precedent for a foreign language film to win before the Oscars.
So I bet on 1917.
As a result, I was slapped in the face this morning.
While applauding for "Parasite", there are also people who are disputing the defeat of "Joker".
I have never held out much hope for this, and even think that "Joker" should be the one farthest from the best picture, but the closest to the best actor among all the excellent films.
Because "Joker" is almost at the expense of giving up the expression of the theme, trying to serve the acting skills of the starring Joaquin Phoenix.
In a common movie, the scenes should be continuously switched around the development of the plot, but "Joker" mainly has only three scenes: the dark home, the chaotic street and the scene of the talk show.
The director goes to great lengths to use close-ups to show the actors' distorted expressions and frantic gestures in detail, but there is no decent male character in the whole film except Arthur. The role of female characters is also heavily symbolic: the mother is used to dissect the causes of Arthur's borderline personality, while the black neighbor is only used to express Arthur's mental state of indulging in fantasies.
The regret of the whole film is also here. The director left enough space for Phoenix's performance, but almost gave up the shaping of other characters, making the whole film look more like a one-man show with a simple set. The monologue of the quasi-Oscar winner.
The emperor of the film festival mainly relies on dance skills.
Recently, the film industry seems to have suddenly discovered the beauty of dance.
In "Fireworks in the Day", policeman Zhang Zili went to the ballroom to dance disco after solving the case. The spinning dance combined restraint and indulgence, showing a weakness and decadence, which was particularly charming in the Northeast ballroom in the 1980s and 1990s. , and finally helped Liao Fan to become emperor at Cannes.
Every time I watch "Old Man of Mountains and Rivers", I am moved by the song "GO WEST" performed by my mother at the end. The disco in the ice and snow is not only a distant echo of his son dollar, who is separated by oceans, but also a wonderful connection in time with his young years.
When it came to "Joker", Phoenix danced four full paragraphs alone! The director finally used dance, a film language, endlessly and forever, making the audience feel that they are only one step away from the musical.
I really want to use Jacky Cheung's lines in "If Love", pointing to the screen and saying to Batman: "Look, the camera loves him so much."
DC Comics is full of ambitions, and as a result, the director does not know how much he loves Phoenix, and regrettably turned a masterpiece into the latter's personal show.
Of course, Phoenix did offer textbook-level performances to the film industry. He can express Arthur's deliberate effort to fit into mainstream society by smirking along with the rest of the audience. He even threw away his expressions, words, and actions, and only used a back image to express the inner depression and embarrassment of the characters.
It can be said that Phoenix's acting skills are another breakthrough for Heath Ledger's version of the Joker in "Batman Dark Knight", making this villain comic character endowed with richer and more profound connotations.
Todd Philip's Joker is often compared to Nolan's The Dark Knight. Both are produced by DC, and Philip deliberately set up many scenes to echo the "Dark Night Knight", almost becoming the prequel of the latter's villain.
The best realm of a horror film should be "to make the glass windows, corridors, ceilings, and blades that we are familiar with terrifying and unfamiliar, and the sounds of breathing and closing doors that we are used to hearing become extremely evil." For example, Hitchco Gram redefines the bathroom with horror masterpiece Psycho, while the classic "Midnight Bell" turns the habit of turning on the TV into a monstrous charm.
Nolan's "The Dark Knight" knows this and uses it with great restraint, and we can still see bright city halls, lively cocktail parties and crowded office buildings in the guilty Gotham City.
"Joker" brutally blackened Gotham City. There are almost no warm-colored scenes in the whole film, the citizens are almost manic, hypocritical, and full of malice, and after searching the entire Gotham City, there is not a stable elevator, a properly lit corridor, and a rust-free one. 's newspaper box.
Compared with the two, "Dark Knight" deliberately downplays the comic sense of Gotham City, and gives it a rich and realistic texture. But "Joker" almost pulls Gotham City back into the comics.
Many people are keen on politicizing the interpretation of "Joker", praising it as a serious political film, which should beat "Parasite" to win the Oscar.
From this perspective, we do see that the film uses Arthur's mouth to accuse class or political order all the time. But throughout the whole film, the male protagonist is only in the self-constructed "nihilism", and continues to feel the hostility from the whole world and his own pain.
We do see Arthur sighing that "the world sucks", but exactly where it sucks, the movie doesn't seem to intend to delve into it, so Arthur's accusation always seems empty.
When discussing the topic of class, the film even puts on a tone of "poverty is justified, rich is not benevolent", and urgently uses "damn" to conclude all the elites: rogue-like Wall Street elites, arrogant and hypocritical rich people, malicious A talk show host who mocks entertainment to death...
In contrast, Parasite's approach to the issue of the rich and the poor is far more sophisticated. As film critic Zhou Liming said: "Bong Joon-ho's little tricks can lead the audience's sympathy to a certain character, or make another character hateful. But he didn't. Except for Mrs. Park, who is kind and naive To a certain extent, the other characters are all in a gray area, and they are not completely bad or good people. For fables, this is a very bold trick - depicting the complexity of human nature in black and white tones."
When last year's Oscar-winning film "Green Book" explored the issue of racial class, the director also avoided deliberately glorifying or vilifying either.
Instead, try to show that white Tony has his own problems that cannot be ignored, and black Shirley also has his own shortcomings that cannot be concealed.
The 2006 best film "Crash" even involved people of different races and classes in the same car accident. The racially biased white policeman saved the black man, while the sympathetic policeman was overly vigilant and took the hitchhiker. Negro shot manslaughter.
The reason why these films are outstanding is largely due to the director's conscious distance from the "black and white" values, which gives the whole film a sense of complexity and authenticity when facing the topic of "class".
Unfortunately, "Joker" is not a serious film that seriously discusses politics, after all, it is just a popcorn film in a political guise.
View more about Joker reviews
