Almost two years ago, the popular American drama "House of Cards" ended with a slump in its final season. Although the fifth season of the show has shown a trend of weak follow-up, the seriousness of the hip pull and the bloody plot in the sixth season are still staggering. The reason is that the screenwriter is on the one hand, and the absence of President Xiamu on the other hand. To a certain extent, it can be said that Kevin Spacey's divine acting skills propped up the first five seasons of this play. A sense of Shakespeare's play (Spacey had staged Shakespeare's "Richard III") brought a graceful villain to life. Let's not talk about his character and virtue, just in terms of acting skills, the ranking of "top three in Hollywood" is not an exaggeration (Spacey was ranked second in "Time" magazine's selection of the best active Hollywood actors , Daniel Day-Lewis first, Tom Hanks third).
However, "Underwood" is not the first villain played by Spacey. The street experience of being rebellious and dropping out of school when he was young made him handy in acting as a villain. He has a villain, and the work that made him famous is "The Very Suspects". With the role of "Slobber Jinte", Spacey has won many awards, including the most important "Oscar Best Supporting Actor" statuette. Then, he won the "Best Actor Oscar" with "American Beauty" again, provoking Jack Lemmon, a famous actor who was his entrant and mentor, to praise him with jealousy: "I didn't win it until I was 54 years old." Best Supporting Actor Award, he won the Best Actor Award at the age of 72, and Kevin achieved it in four years!
In the past ten years (almost since the release of "Shutter Island" and "Inception"), the term "brain-burning film" has become popular on the Internet, basically referring to those movies with "suspenseful reversals" and "complex narratives" element video. Let's not talk about old-school suspense classics with reversals such as Hitchcock's "Psycho" or Billy Wilder's "Witness for the Prosecution". " is earlier than the same type of "First Degree Fear", "The Sixth Sense", "Memento", "Mulholland Drive", "Butterfly Effect" and other works. Although it may not be on the same level as the latecomers in terms of technology, content, and brain-burning degree, it has created a precedent for this system after all, and has a distinct paradigmatic role.
Generally speaking, those more superb suspense films will avoid a single narrative mode, but use flashbacks, interludes and other means and sequences to intertwine, and place foreshadowing in the flashbacks to make it difficult for the audience to clarify clues and logic as much as possible. Then they guessed the time of the ending. Another method is to use reversal, to reverse the fact that the audience believed before, and then reveal another logical truth. The combination of the two pushes the audience into a maze, and at the same time makes the audience suddenly enlightened or completely desperate.
Both methods are present in The Usual Suspects. The beginning of the film is told in flashbacks, in which Keaton, who looks like the protagonist, is the biggest guise of the whole film. The cowardly and innocent drooling Jinte, through his tongue and lotus, weaves a complex story with reason and evidence. Detective Dave thinks his logic is thorough and his reasoning is correct, and he uses some tricks to lead the audience astray. Obviously you guessed who the big boss is from the beginning, but as the plot develops, you begin to doubt your own judgment and position. And after more than 90 minutes of burning brain cells, when you think you can finally draw a conclusion, the big reversal occurred in the last three minutes. The trap set up by Jinte was slowly revealed, and along with the cup of coffee, the glasses of the audience fell, and they stared blankly as the cripple walked away in a hurry. If you replay the entire movie in your head at this point, you will feel as if you have watched a completely different movie.
It can be said that the success of this film depends on the "deception" of the three people. Screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie and then-rookie director Brian Singer were the two behind the scenes. The film has a very solid script, with rigorous logical reasoning and skilled transitions. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America named "The Usual Suspects" at number 35 on the list of the 101 greatest screenplays of all time. McQuarrie, who was the screenwriter, became a blockbuster because of this film, and now he is almost Tom's royal choreographer (the two have collaborated in "Action Hitler", "Jack Reacher", "Edge of Tomorrow", "Mission Impossible 5" in succession. ", "The New Mummy", and "Mission Impossible 6" and "Mission Impossible 7" in the future). And Singer also showed the talent of the director, with rhythm, tension, especially the ending that is both elegant and unexpected.
And the one who cheated in front of the stage was Kevin Spacey. Without a good performance, no matter how good the script is, it is just waste paper. Interestingly, "Spit Gint" is not the protagonist, Spacey is only a second candidate for the role, and when he got the script (Brian Singer deliberately didn't tell him who he was going to play), he was most interested Instead, there are two other characters. However, the character Gint was almost tailor-made for Spacey, with cerebral palsy, lameness, and a pitiful look on his face, sobbing and cursing at Dave for a while, but behind the mask was a quick-thinking, A wicked, ruthless, and eerie villain who is well versed in psychology.
Not only the script mentioned above, "The Usual Suspects" has a place on many lists, such as "Top 10 Suspense Movies", "Top 100 Villains" by the American Film Institute, and "Must Have" by "Entertainment Weekly". Watch a robbery movie" and so on. It should be said that although Christopher McQuarrie, Brian Singer, and Kevin Spacey were not well-known at the time, they were well-known through their writing (McQuarrie), camera (Singer) and performance (Sspay). The excellent skills on the West) and the chemical reaction in the cooperation maximized the charm of film art, and also influenced a series of brain-burning films later. As for Kevin Spacey, since he played the supporting role as the protagonist, no one will care who the original protagonist is.
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