This movie is so funny, so funny!!!
An Australian who pioneered a film on China's 25-year history of pirated discs!
Every Chinese who has bought pirated discs and eaten pirated movie milk should look at it.
This film, the whole process is full of Beijing films, hutong strings, Beijing compounds, full of memories of the last century.
The film is like Feng Xiaogang's early New Year comedy model, which is broadcast on CCTV-6 at all, which does not violate the harmony at all.
Come, follow me back to the streets of the 90s and go to the video store!
King of Peking (2017)
This movie is called "King of Beijing", which follows the path of the Hollywood blockbuster mainland translation of "King of War", "King of the Streets" and "King of the Hills", which is direct, atmospheric and high-grade.
The red curtain slowly opened————
The story takes place in 1998.
The key words that year were: the Great Flood, the World Cup alle aryalie. It was the first year of pirated DVDs.
Lao Wang, who has just divorced his wife, takes his son Xiao Wang, who is attending elementary school, and makes a living by playing movies in the compound dam.
In the face of the struggle for son custody, the ex-wife repeatedly exerted pressure, and the hard target of 10,000 pieces per month was the head... A word of money forced Lao Wang to embark on the road of producing and selling pirated DVDs.
It is only natural to choose this path: Lao Wang, who cleans the toilet in the movie theater, has always had a dream of becoming a filmmaker.
— Do you want to be a partner of the King of the Capital?
— Are you talking about a restaurant?
— It's a film studio, and in the name of our two, the king with the surname Wang is also the king of the emperor.
— Then who is the king of the capital?
— I'm the King, and you can be the Second King, just like "Warner Bros."
— How old are they?
— They're not your classmates, they're movie mogul...
When all was said and done, the grandfather and son found a prototype machine from the recycling station that sold "foreign garbage" in Yanjiao and began to start a local law business.
What is a prototype? I asked a few people who had been calling the storm in the piracy world and did not ask the results. Probably a premium name for some kind of DVD burner.
In the movie, it sounds like the head is the Tao, especially with gold content.
In 1998, pirated DVDs were not yet popular in China. Lao Wang's pirate workshop, low threshold zero access, a few minutes of video teaching to get started, do not believe you to watch.
At the beginning, Lao Wang's means of stealing film from the cinema were similar to the initial Haitao deception security check.
Stealing film to play privately in the basement, and then taken by a video recorder, the image is converted into data and burned on DVD, this legendary "glue to magnet", it is not difficult to understand it.
The film is heavy, the efficiency is low, and there are five and three-quarters of the time without engraving. The bold fattened father and son changed from stealing to stealing, rolling kites and rolling away like shafts.
That's still too slow. Entrepreneurship has become a migrant worker, doing all manual work.
It is better to record it directly when it is played in theaters, and remove the middle steps to run errands. This tube is now called "candid shooting", "screen recording" and "gun version", which is not a good word.
If pirated DVDs really make their fortunes from here, Chaoshan "audio and video big households" will be laughed at and generous. Okay, see how you and your grandfather play.
Originally thought to be the originator of pirated discs, he took the lead in becoming the "king of gun versions". The director's brain hole is a little big.
Directly recording audio and video, mass production is the essence of piracy. The burner came in handy, one into ten, ten hundred, mass production.
In the words of the King of the Capital, piracy is "creative labor," and copy is only half the battle. To do the market, we must have "brand awareness" from the beginning.
He relished the opening credits of Disney, Warner, and MGM. Lao Wang Xiao Wang also made a self-made opening to satisfy you.
Lao Wang Xiao Wang produced "King of the Capital", the exclusive title on the tall -
You shouldn't have misunderstood anything about being tall (laughter).
The so-called "selling a skin", the cover is the first face of pirated DVDs. Lao Wang's painting skills when he was in school can finally shine.
The rich earthy version of the poster cover "Driving for Miss Daisy", learn about it.
Camera photography, darkroom flushing, fan drying, the whole poster making process is as simple as you can imagine, and every centimeter is the sweat and brain hole of the working people.
Fancy entrepreneurship is so original.
The product comes out, how to open up sales? Of course you have to do the publicity!
The propaganda material cardboard is presented, which is quite local rough and textured. With three inches of incorruptible tongue, praising good people to heaven, and saying that dead horses have survived, this is the same as living.
The neighbors are the first customers of the king and the little king, watching the drama behind their husbands' backs, and watching cool movies with their wives behind their backs, all of which have become fans of the "King of Beijing".
They are no longer surprised by the sudden appearance of human heads in the film and the reverberation of the phlegm of melon seeds next door.
However, foreign blockbusters, born with a diaphragm, can't understand and can't keep up with it have become a roadblock to "feeling Western culture".
The customer is God, rest assured, wrapped up in me.
The second king of the great king thought of the solution, but he arranged to re-dubbing. There is no one who operates like this.
The two grandfathers themselves act as "voice actors", the two people top five people, the sound range is not enough, the hair dryer to make up.
This hard rhythm is simply two people turning over the entire translation studio.
So when the audience buys home to watch the disc, you hear the heroine muttering a hiss, you will never think that this is a big man with a foot.
In any case, if you are willing to open your mind and work hard, you will be rewarded.
Word of mouth for pirated discs was passed on by word of mouth, and gradually, the "King of Beijing" became a well-known golden signboard that resounded throughout Beijing!
Yes, the Chinese in the hearts of Australian directors is like this, full of infinite wisdom, shotguns and cannons, and the two can build a pirated disc super empire.
The roughness is permeated with full of feelings, that is, the director's experience of becoming a movie fan in old Beijing by pirated discs, all his lost youth and running under the sunset...
From the Republic of China era to the 1980s, national entertainment belonged to theaters and open-air movies. Later, the film declined because of the rise of television.
And television sets come and go with a few official shows, and aren't as good as booming Hollywood blockbusters. Western home audio-visual technology has greatly filled the gap in domestic films, albeit in an illegal way.
In a special context, "piracy" brings tens of thousands of Western music and images to the people, in addition to Hollywood blockbusters, as well as niche literary films.
Jia Zhangke once described the experience of "Tao Disc" in the past in the past shop pirate disc shop "Tao Disc".
You can't imagine spending 10 yuan at that time, you can spend 10 yuan at the roadside stall, and put the film history classics such as "Citizen Kane" and "Battleship Potemkin" into the pocket of happiness.
One day, pirated discs were stolen from Jia Zhangke himself, who had bought the discs.
The store manager told him, "Tomorrow there's Chief Jaco's "Platform," do you want it?"
Jia Zhangke's mood is a little complicated, on the one hand, he calculates how many more people will watch his movies, and he can't help but be proud; on the other hand, he wants to work hard to make movies that are easily stolen by others, and he is unhappy.
Pirated discs have indeed once become a hotbed for the spread of Chinese literary and art films, and more are European, Japanese and Korean literary and artistic films.
After the millennium, a small shop called "Four-Eyed Cat" in Guangzhou spread word of mouth in the literary and art circles.
Films in the shop range from Abbas in Iran to Kieslowski, Nanimoletti, Kenroche and so on in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Western Europe, and so on.
Not to mention the Asian ones, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Naruse Akio, Akira Kurosawa... The price of 20 yuan and 30 yuan can put a whole film history into the pocket, and this temptation is tantamount to heaven on earth for the literary and artistic youth at that time.
VCD has become a DVD with slimmer lines and fuller colors, and small shops scattered like four-eyed cats have converged and developed into a secret and legendary code name in the Guangdong Disc Friends Forum - CS, "Vegetable Market", Tao Sauce Paradise.
CS is indeed hidden behind a wet market, on both sides of the road are vendors selling meat and vegetables, go up to the second floor of a bedroom, the great tao dish paradise is in front of you.
About 80 square meters of housing, pirated discs are like a sea, underground, wall, dazzling. To find sharp goods, you really need to lean over the dish pile and carefully "look for goods".
CS is a legendary place in Guangzhou, many times migrated, followers are still looking for traces, admiring the name, and even turn around by chance, you will find a few Hong Kong and Taiwan stars, local directors.
"China D-Link", "Pioneer", "Star", "National Yuan Edition"... Once a famous pirated disc brand, it has become a talking point and memory for a generation of disc friends.
On Valentine's Day 2005, Chinese youth Chen Shijuncai and his partner founded YouTube in the garage, and the era of the Internet quietly came.
At that time, pirates began to transmit movies through the Internet, who could have predicted that the "download version" had gradually replaced piracy, and the era of pirate discs was coming to an end.
Once upon a time, movie fans always had to download a few "gun movies", which was an intermediate product of the excessive download era to the high-definition era.
From the gun version to AVI, to the easy-to-press RMVB, MKV, and now the pursuit of 720P, 1080P and Blu-ray discs.
Everyone at least remembers the format and experience of watching movies when they first opened the door to movies.
For the director of "King of Beijing", it must be the most primitive and crude pirated disc seen in old Beijing in the 1990s.
The whole film is full of confused nostalgia, a story that lacks the logic of behavior, and a background without factual basis. Just like the director himself, who speaks Beijing but has a high nose and beard, there is a strange sense of beauty.
The director's English name is Sam Voutas, according to him, his full name is Samuel, and he has long wanted to have a Chinese name of his own.
His Chinese teacher gave an idea of sound proximity and ancient Chinese connotation, and he was designated as "Sima You".
Sima You and China have been inextricably linked since childhood. He moved to Beijing with his parents in 1986 and completed secondary school in Beijing.
After returning to Melbourne, the then Victorian School of Art studied film, and immediately decided to return to China with his girlfriend after graduation, go deep into the Chinese market, and start a unique journey to the North.
During his career in Beijing for more than a decade as a child, China seemed to have become Sima You's second hometown.
In 2009, Sima You, who was an actor, not only cooperated with Uncle Ge in "Breathless", but also starred in Lu Chuan's work "Nanjing! nanking! 》。
However, it is his dream to use Chinese to write a script and to make a movie with Chinese. When he first started studying Chinese, he chose to be in a grounded café, where he liked authentic Chinese cavities and pyrotechnics.
In 2010, Sima You wrote and directed (and also made a cameo appearance) in the movie "Red Light Dream", and the poster impressively read "the first Chinese comedy about adult products".
It is about a man and a woman selling adult products to the peak of life, and the success of the external career is also accompanied by the reconciliation of the characters' hearts, which is very similar to the entrepreneurial road of "The King of Beijing".
The straw for the male protagonist of "Red Light Dream" to lay off, his wife to wear a green hat to divorce, and finally the straw that escorted the male protagonist into the pit of selling sex products was the Japanese wholesaler who collected 10,000 supply fees per month.
However, the director's greatest obsession was northern China when he was a child. 90s open-air movies, billiard halls, public telephones, green-skinned trains, and motorized tricycles, and pirated discs.
What really moved his heart to make a fortune in making pirated discs was that he saw his own film, "Red Light Dream", being made into a pirated version and sold on the street.
This happened after the release of "Red Light Dream" in the United Kingdom, and pirates, in order to promote it, were stunned to label the cover actors starring British superstars "Tom Hiddleston" and "Rachel Weiss".
He was overjoyed and decided to do something in response.
Rather than choose anger, he prefers a more cerebral and fun way. It is better to make a film in the form of crowdfunding and nostalgia for a piracy time.
The appearance in the memory, the shadow is enough, and even the time is not accurate.
Speaking of the rigor of the story, the director laughed and hid the embarrassment:
"I'm just making a feature film, and a lot of the details have changed."
Yes, it's just a story, just have fun, don't be more real.
Some fans who are reticent to call "King of Beijing" "nostalgia film", nostalgic movies. Presumably, in addition to old Beijing, there is also the fan feelings of that generation.
Lao Wang's biggest hobby is to listen to the soundtrack of the movie on the radio and guess the name of the movie.
From "Age of Innocence" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Lone Ranger" and "Police and Truck Bandits", they are the first die-hard fans. The king of the capital can make a name, one is the goods that can be handed, and the other is the enthusiasm of the two people who talk about the head of the movie, the Tao, and the hu kan haikan.
They used a walkie-talkie to code, the old king is Merta, the little king is Riggs, and they make up the golden partner of Mel Gibson's Hollywood blockbuster "Lethal Weapon".
The "King of the Capital" and the two pose as two partners in "Deadly Weapons"
The earthy taste of old Beijing and the foreign flavor of Hollywood have constructed a unique fan plot of the last century.
It is precisely for this plot that director Sima You crowdfunded this "King of Beijing", took it to the Los Angeles Asia-Pacific Film Festival, the Melbourne International Film Festival, and met with Chinese audiences on the Golden Horse.
On the one hand, with the filter of the other side of the West, on the other hand, it is the emotional blessing of his hometown and hometown, and the film looks strange and romantic.
Of course, Lao Wang Xiao Wang was ultimately unable to make the piracy cause stronger and bigger, but the summer when the grandfather and son worked together to play the "King of the Capital" was the most precious, and it could not be exchanged for gold and silver mountains.
This article was first published in the Adventure Movie: Cinematik
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