Dapeng, formerly known as Dong Chengpeng, is the 53rd disciple of Zhao Benshan.
debuted in 2004, starting from the Sohu video talk show "Dapeng Bang Bang", and became popular because of the mini comedy "Dick Silk Man" that he wrote, directed and acted in.
He can sing and dance, is talented, has formed a band, served as a host, and choreographed and directed the movies "Keep You Safe", "Auspicious Ruyi" and "Warm" are highly evaluated.
Bai Ke, formerly known as Luo Hongming, was out of the circle in 2013 for playing Wang Dazhuo in the funny web drama "Never Expected" directed by Yi Xiaoxing.
He is good at creating and performing highly personalized lines, and has created countless Internet hot words that are loved by netizens.
Over the years, he has been in the entertainment industry and participated in more than 70 film and television works.
These two are representatives of the post-80s Internet stars, and they are known by netizens as the originators of the new generation of online comedy, and their first cooperation has naturally attracted much attention.
The comedy "The Annual Meeting Can't Be Stopped!" is a movie in which "Dick Silk Man" Dapeng and "Wang Da Hammer" Bai Ke join forces.
was originally scheduled for December 29, but recently it was screened nationwide, and only one screening was scheduled every day, so Brother Pi was able to get a glimpse of his true face in advance.
was originally looking forward to it, but after watching the movie, I was in a complicated mood, and many of the problems in the perception of this comedy movie were not unhappy.
One
Let's start with the story
The film begins with an oolong incident about personnel transfers.
Hu Jianlin, a fitter played by Dapeng, is very keen to participate in the company's annual meeting, and actively signs up every year to perform his own programs at the annual meeting.
The so-called "annual meeting", I believe everyone is familiar with it, is the assembly organized by the enterprise at the end of each year.
This "family event" within the enterprise is well organized, which can not only boost morale and improve cohesion, but also improve the relationship between the management and employees of the enterprise, and has a very positive effect on the development of the enterprise.
Therefore, Hu Jianlin, who has worked diligently in the first-line screw factory for 20 years and is advanced every year, is so obsessed with performing at the company's annual meeting.
But this year, after he submitted the application form, what he was waiting for was not a reply, but an order from the headquarters of Zhonghe Group to transfer him to the head office.
It turned out to be Zhuang Zhengzhi (played by Wang Xun), an employee of the same factory, who spent 300,000 yuan to find a relationship to apply for transfer to the head office, but because the leader in charge of personnel took the wrong application form and accidentally transferred Hu Jianlin.
In the economic environment in recent years, the head office of Zhonghe Group has encountered financial problems.
After discussion, the management decided to lay off 40% of the staff, and calculated that more than 6,000 people would be laid off, and it was called the "Guangjin Plan", which is homophonic to "financial (layoff) source (staff) Guangjin".
In this context, the company actually hired new employees, and they are still 40+ years old, and they don't understand the company's operation at all, and they just went to the human resources department in charge of the life and death of employees, which inevitably makes people suspicious.
Soon rumors spread in the company, all discussing the special relationship between Hu Jianlin and Chairman Hu (played by Ouyang Fenqiang), thinking that he had a great background.
Only Ma Jie (played by Bai Ke), the deputy leader of the third group of the human resources department, found that Hu Jianlin was "misadjusted".
But he didn't want to take the blame for this mistake, so he had to make mistakes, take all the work on himself, hide the truth for Hu Jianlin, and transfer the company's temporary worker Pan Yiran (played by Zhuang Dafei) to help him.
As a result, Hu Jianlin became more and more mysterious in the head office, and was even suspected of being the illegitimate son of Chairman Hu, who thought that he was sent by the chairman to supervise the daily work of the company's employees.
In order to keep their jobs in the "Guangjin Plan", the grassroots employees tried their best to curry favor with him and staged a farce of "The Minister of the Imperial Mission".
The twist of the story is because of another line.
Zhuang Zhengzhi, who spent 300,000 yuan in vain but couldn't enter the head office, has been running around in order to get back his position, and thus uncovered the inside story hidden behind the company's "Guangjin Plan".
It turned out that Chairman Hu was the director of the screw factory, and the screw factory was the starting point of his business.
But with the continuous expansion of the company's business in the past 20 years, the screw factory and its 300 workers are gradually regarded as a burden to the company by Vice President Xu Yunfeng (played by Li Naiwen).
In order to prompt the company to close the screw factory, Xu Yunfeng came up with a poisonous plan:
He instructed Zhuang Zhengzhi to buy a batch of inferior screws from the small OEM workshop and mix them into the screws produced by the factory to reduce the pass rate of the finished product.
Then use the old production equipment of the screw factory and the low product qualification rate as an excuse to close the screw factory.
After Hu Jianlin learned of the situation, in order to keep the factory, he worked with Ma Jie and Pan Yiran to collect evidence, and finally at the company's annual meeting, he uncovered Xu Yunfeng's conspiracy to Chairman Hu who participated in the annual meeting with a rap that was adapted from Zhang Yusheng's "My Future Is Not a Dream" sung by three people.
Two
The 3 "loopholes" in the movie can't be covered
Beginning with the "Annual Meeting", and finally returning to the theme of the "Annual Meeting", the ending of the movie seems to be a happy one:
The company's moths led by Vice President Xu Yunfeng were kicked away, and the screw factory was saved.
Ma Jie was promoted and raised, Pan Yiran received a notice of regularization, and Hu Jianlin also returned to the screw factory he was most familiar with and was promoted to deputy director.
But the logic loopholes hidden behind the story have not been fixed.
For example, how did a CEO like Chairman Hu, who ignores the company's operation and realizes it later, and almost makes a big mess among his subordinates, develop a screw factory into such a large company as Zhonghe Group?
According to the setting of the movie, Zhonghe Group and the screw factory are the relationship between the head office and the branch.
However, this factory, which mainly produces screws, is out of place and full of contrast with Zhonghe Group, which is located in a large commercial building in the bustling center of the metropolis and has tens of thousands of employees.
Especially the 300 workers in the screw factory, and Hu Jianlin's appearance, they all wear coarse cloth overalls on weekdays, even if they change into suits and ties, they are also rustic, like people who have traveled from the 80s.
Brother Pi also knew that the appearance designed by the movie for Hu Jianlin was to create a sense of disobedience and create jokes with the dislocation of identity.
But in doing so, it inadvertently deepened the sense of disconnection between the screw factory and Zhonghe Group, like two companies in different time and space in the 80s of the 20th century and the 20s of the 21st century.
And since the screw factory gives people a feeling of "backwardness" and "can't keep up with the times", whether it should still exist, and whether Vice President Xu Yunfeng's decision to close the factory is correct.
This question is debatable, but the movie does not give an answer.
When the movie was promoted, under the banner of "watching Dapeng Baike join hands to rectify the workplace", the purpose was very clear, that is, it aimed at the workers who suffered from "996" and were running for life, and wanted to "attract" the white-collar groups that occupy the mainstream of film consumption into the cinema.
And in the film, we also saw old fritters in the workplace like Ma Jie.
Good at flattery, know how to speculate on the intentions of the leader, be cautious and cautious in the company.
When he is drunk, he will say, "Look up to the sky and laugh and go out, how can I be a Penghao person", but in order to keep my job and family, I can only live in fear.
I also saw that a female employee like Pan Yiran who has strong business ability, is active and hardworking, but is at the lowest level of the workplace, has not been able to get regularized, has a tough personality, and is known as a "rebellious" in the workplace, but has to bow down for life.
The movie also spares no effort to ridicule those middle-level leaders who are in high positions and can only talk about cars, shake pots, and kick balls.
As the so-called "leadership secret" is thrown out in the film:
One is to leave space for the people below in case of trouble, say ambiguous words, and let the people below figure out what you mean.
For example: "The key to this problem is to find the key problem......"
The second is to show their affinity in a timely manner, and then let employees do the work for themselves.
The third is to encourage employees to criticize each other in order to build contradictions, divide their relationships, and keep them from uniting.
These common tricks in the workplace, seemingly unfathomable and sophisticated tricks, are actually obscene means to undermine the internal unity of the enterprise and be harmful to the enterprise.
If the leadership of a company is full of these villains who play with power, then the company will definitely not go far.
In addition, the movie is also full of high-end terms of various large enterprises.
For example, "structure optimization", "alignment granularity", "sinking", "closed loop", "gripper" and so on;
There are also workplace chaos such as forming gangs, standing in line to climb relationships, and taking the back door to get to the top, all of which are shown in front of the audience in the form of comedy.
At a glance, the movie is all-encompassing, and it seems to present the power struggles and contradictions within the company encountered by our white-collar workers, "avenge our grievances" for us, and even "rectify the workplace" for us.
But in fact, what the movie exposes is just the appearance of workplace problems, like a dragonfly in water, and it does not dare to touch the deep contradictions and expose the essence of the problem.
Just as Bai Ke wanted to extend the content of the movie and say something he wanted to say during the interview, but after thinking about it again and again, he finally shut up, leaving only one sentence: "Forget it, it's not like it, anyway, it will be deleted ......"
In the movie, the hope of solving the problem was pinned on Chairman Hu alone.
With his sudden realization, all problems were solved.
What's even more ridiculous is that Hu Jianlin's plan to solve the company's financial problems is to let all employees voluntarily reduce their salaries to tide over the difficulties on the premise of keeping employees' jobs.
Let's not talk about whether this plan is feasible, the creators of the film obviously don't understand the corporate culture.
As the saying goes, "not suffering from widowhood but suffering from inequality", workers are not as afraid of layoffs as created in the movie, they are afraid of unfair layoffs.
It is abhorrent that those who are capable of doing business are laid off, and that those who have poor work but know how to do tricks are left behind.
Therefore, the film tried to curry favor with the majority of white-collar workers under the banner of "speaking out" for migrant workers, but did not dig deep into this theme, but only stayed on the surface.
A work made in the form of piling up jokes can only be called a "collection of jokes", and it cannot become a satirical comedy that exposes the workplace ecology.
Three
Dapeng and Baike, the play is restricted, and the heroine will be on fire
We all know Dapeng's best works so far, in addition to those movies written and directed, is "Dick Silk Man", which has been filmed for four seasons one after another;
And the most impressive thing about Bai Ke to the audience is also the "Wang Da Hammer" he played in "Never Expected".
Both are big names in the online comedy industry, and their first collaboration in the film will naturally be expected by the audience.
But often the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment, and the performances of Dapeng and Bai Ke in this film cannot deliver a satisfactory answer.
The movie is obviously based on Hu Jianlin played by Dapeng, centering on the story, although Ma Jie played by Bai Ke has many scenes, there is no plot exclusive to his personal character shaping, and the rivalry between the two has not been able to produce a chemical reaction.
Although Hu Jianlin and Ma Jie once hooked shoulders and called each other "brothers" when they were drunk in the film, they looked like each other in their daily work, each with their own little abacus, not a CP like Stephen Chow and Wu Mengda.
Therefore, although they can also create jokes in several rival scenes in the film, they fail to leave an impression on the audience, and they are definitely not successful.
The reason for the construction of this phenomenon is, firstly, limited by the script, the setting of the two characters of Hu Jianlin and Ma Jie was not too close from the beginning;
The second is that Dapeng and Bai Ke are both "funny", and their comedy performance methods determine that they cannot complement each other in the film, and they cannot produce a good chemical effect.
"Tease" and "teasing" are exclusive terms for stand-up comedy performances.
"Tease" is the protagonist in cross talk, telling jokes in the form of telling stories and experiences to make people laugh, that is, the person who "speaks";
Wang Jing once said that Wu Mengda is the best "chin" in Hong Kong, that is, the best "praise";
And Stephen Chow is the best "chin", that is, the best "teasing".
Therefore, no matter which movie Wu Mengda is in or who he plays a supporting role, he can make the movie better, and when he meets Stephen Chow, he can produce the best chemistry and give birth to a comedy classic.
Dapeng and Baike are both very good comedians, but they are both "funny", and they can't do "funny".
This is like the positive and negative poles of a magnet, both of them are positive poles, neither of them is negative, and no matter how much they rub them, they can't suck them together.
Another mention of Zhuang Dafei, who plays the supporting actress Pan Yiran, as a post-00s movie star, although Zhuang Dafei has participated in more than 10 TV series so far, it is the first time to participate in a movie.
Because she was selected by director Tsui Hark to play the heroine Huang Rong in "The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero", it also attracted the attention of Brother Pi.
Zhuang Dafei is the kind of intellectual beauty who does not have the beauty of "sinking fish and geese", but looks very good-looking, and can also control the role in the film and create the rebellious personality of Pan Yiran.
Brother Pi can also vaguely feel the reason why Director Tsui Hark chose her to play Huang Rong, hoping that she can have an excellent performance in "Shooting the Condor", and Brother Pi asserted that she would be popular.
Four
To sum up, "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!" As the first cooperation between Dapeng and Baike, "The Annual Meeting" has piled up a lot of jokes in the form of "shaking the burden", which can indeed bring the audience a more pleasant viewing experience.
But its essence is still just a "collection of jokes" that itches through the boots, and it fails to touch the essence of workplace chaos, which gives people a feeling of "unpleasant" and "not happy".
Therefore, Brother Pi boldly predicted that the movie "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!" would be popular, but the box office is estimated to fall within 1 billion yuan.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Bloody Danxin
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