文|nada
The word-of-mouth controversy surrounding the movie "The Ferryman" 6 years ago almost set off a storm in most of the domestic entertainment. After 6 years, best-selling author Zhang Jiajia picked up the guide tube again, but the new film "There is a Commissary by the Clouds" continued the reputation of "The Ferryman" and hit the street again, and it was once again on the hot search because of "ugly", not only did Douban score 5.3, but some netizens shouted on Douban, "Can you pay me back my movie ticket?" "Ask Zhang Jiajia to let go of the movie."
8 days after its release, on the one hand, there was a rapid decline in word-of-mouth, and on the other hand, the box office was booming. Up to now, the box office of "There is a Commissary in the Clouds" has reached 312 million yuan, becoming the champion of the box office in the same schedule.
The reason why this movie can perform so well at the box office is because of the huge chassis of original fans supporting the box office, and on the other hand, the plot of "Grandma's Death" has poked the tears of family affection of many audiences. But after Gu Duo finished reading the original book, he felt that Zhang Jiajia's adaptation of his novel could be called a sentence "take the dross and remove the essence".
The original novel has a total of 16 chapters, involving many characters and plots, Zhang Jiajia retains many characters from the original novel, but their appearances have no dramatic antecedents and consequences, but are spliced randomly like prose, making the movie a pot of simmered fragmented chicken soup; Moreover, Zhang Jiajia deleted many down-to-earth dialogues and necessary plot foreshadowing in the original novel, and changed it into an embarrassing scene that is out of reality.
The root cause of this failed adaptation is that the novelist does not have a thorough understanding of the structure of the play, and takes it for granted that the script is conceived in the form of writing a novel, which causes the failure of character creation in the film, the fragmentation of the plot and the confusion of the theme.
It's not uncommon for best-selling authors to turn directors and become bad movie professionals. Guo Jingming, Luo Luo, and Han Han all have low-rated directorial debuts, and even world-class bestselling author Stephen King suffered Waterloo when he transitioned to making movies. So what kind of gap does a writer need to cross when he transforms into a director? Why do their works always win high box office with bad scripts?
Yunbian Town, which is out of touch with reality
The novel "There is a Commissary by the Clouds" was published in 2018 and was named the warm and healing work of the year. The story of the novel is very simple, Liu Shisan, who is adrift in the big city, falls into confusion and despair because of the double blow of poor work performance and broken love. But after waking up one night, he found that he had returned to Yunbian Town in a wonderful way, and with the company of his grandmother and the encouragement of his childhood friend Cheng Shuang, he worked hard to sell a thousand and one insurance policies in the town. Along the way, he experienced both loss and gain, and finally regained hope in life.
This book has attracted many fans because of its warm description of hometown and delicate and touching emotions with his grandmother. But in the movie, the power of words is greatly weakened, and the idle details, psychological descriptions of the characters, and rich prehistories of the characters buried by Zhang Jiajia in the original novel are all useless, and all the content must be presented to the audience in the form of dramatic conflicts and audiovisual language. At this point, the killer feature of the bestseller, the sensational text, was forced to fail.
The only thing worth boasting about "There's a Commissary in the Clouds" is the casting and scenery. Zhang Jiajia chose Peng Yuchang to play the "cowardly, persistent, and stupid" Liu Shisan, Zhou Yelai to play the "domineering girl with a terminal illness" Cheng Shuang, and Alia to play the "straightforward, fast-hearted, and hot" grandmother. These three actors fit the characters in the original book very well, and their natural acting skills also give the plot a certain degree of credibility. Yunbian Town, on the other hand, is set in Dayan Town, Ningbo, where the mountains and clouds surround it, the green tiles and white walls and the rustic rural life all perfectly restore the picturesque southern town in the book.
But none of this saved a sparse script. Its biggest problem is that it is detached from the soil of reality, but it has not constructed a logic that can be justified, just like the beauty of Yunbian Town, but it only stays in the suspended county town in the director's imagination.
For example, Liu Shisan made a bet with the manager that he wanted to prove himself with a thousand and one insurance policies within a year, but as high as 210,000 commercial insurance, can everyone in the town really afford it? Tingting, the owner of the foot bath shop, only earns 30,000 or 40,000 yuan a year, how can she come up with such a large sum of money to buy insurance for her younger brother? All kinds of unreasonableness were lazily shelved by the creators, anyway, in the end, Liu 13 "sold a thousand and one insurance policies without knowing why". To be honest, this "I don't know how" is really a bit insulting to the audience's IQ.
Secondly, the script is not divided into primary and secondary, the director not only failed to control the side narratives of many groups of supporting roles, but also let the growth arc of the protagonist be covered by the bloody plot of the supporting roles.
Zhang Jiajia tried to use the four seasons of the year to divide the whole movie into chapters, and in each chapter, Liu Shisan's action line of selling insurance brought out the changes of characters in the town in turn: the love between Niu Datian and Qin Xiaozhen, the conflict between Mao Tingting and Mao Zhijie's sister and brother, the young Qiuqiu and his crazy father, the seriously ill grandmother and Cheng Shuang who left. These characters are linked by the director with various accidental events, but they lack the inevitable connection of inner fate, so when the madman makes trouble in the bank, the tragedy of hurting people and committing suicide occurs, and the fate of all the characters is reversed, and the audience not only does not reach emotional resonance with these characters, but feels inexplicable.
Finally, there is the adaptation of failed love and sensationalism that is too violent. Zhang Jiajia changed the famous scene of the novel mileage frost asking Liu Shisan's truth in the broken boat to a love triangle confrontation between Cheng Shuang, his ex-girlfriend and Liu Shisan, and the original true feelings between the two became a common bloody routine, which embarrassed the audience.
However, in the chapter of grandmother, the famous scene of grandmother driving a tractor to take Liu 13 home is really touching, especially when Liu 13 leaned on his grandmother and shouted the sentence "I am a waste, but Wang Yingying wants to live a long life", it hit the tears of family affection of many viewers who miss their families and hope for the safety of their families.
It's a pity that Zhang Jiajia even added subtitles to the movie in order to sensationalize: "The old lady's heart is about to break, life and death are sooner or later, but it's a pity that it's too fast." This place is really full of a sense of "why don't you cry" effort, I can't help but let Gu Duo's tears hold back, and even want to laugh a little.
The box office effect of playing the sentimental card
Although I counted the shortcomings of "There is a Commissary in the Clouds", I have to admit that the film can indeed play, earning more than 300 million yuan at the box office in just 8 days, and becoming the box office champion in June.
This is also the benefit of best-selling authors turning into directors, such as Guo Jingming, Han Han, Zhang Jiajia and other well-known writers, who have a large number of young fans, and can use movies to play another card of emotional killing. If book fans can be successfully converted into box office, then their movies will have a good commercial guarantee.
In 2012, he directed the autobiographical adaptation of the film "The Girl We Chased Together", which not only grossed 76.46 million yuan, setting a new record for the box office of Taiwanese films in Chinese mainland, but also won the Best New Director Award at the 48th Taiwan Film Golden Horse Awards for this film. This film integrates elements of Taiwan's small fresh romance and sex comedy, restoring the author's real private youth, so it has aroused the collective resonance of young people across the Taiwan Strait for youth.
Since then, most of the nine knives have participated in film and television creation as screenwriters and producers, and the second time he picked up the guide was to direct the horror film "Report Teacher!" in 2017. Weird monster! , but did not replicate the glory of "The Girl We Chased Together in Those Years". While the mix of youth + horror + black comedy genres is interesting, the narrative structure and characterization still fall into clichés.
Since the release of "Small Times 1" in 2013, the total box office of the four films has been 1.784 billion, and it has been the box office champion of summer vacation youth films for ten consecutive years, but it has also ushered in ten years of group ridicule.
Compared with the aesthetics of the studio and the audio-visual language of PPT, the problem that "Little Times" is more widely criticized is the value of money worship. This kind of value makes the film frantically piled up all kinds of pompous material symbols, and potentially encourages people to pursue money fashion. But that kind of effortless drunken gold fan is so far away for ordinary people, which is why it causes such a strong disgust from adult audiences.
After experiencing the box office setbacks and word-of-mouth hits of "Jue Ji 1", "Jue Ji 2" and "Qing Ya Ji" one after another, Guo Jingming began to move to the TV drama circle, relying on the reputation of "Cloud Feather" to rebound slightly. Because of the poetic and exquisite photography, art and makeup, "You can always trust Guo Jingming's aesthetics" has been repeatedly searched, but the plot of this drama is still anticlimactic, the logic of the characters is hard, and even the shadow of "Little Times" can be seen from the relationship between the characters.