In 2015, the movie "Lao Pao Er" won the creators Feng Xiaogang and Dong Runnian the honors of Best Actor and Best Screenplay respectively. After that, the two parted ways. Feng Xiaogang directed works such as "Youth" and "Only Yun Knows", instead of being commercial and focused on business; Dong Runnian became involved in directing after screenwriting "Crazy Alien" and directed the science fiction romance film "Being Lighted". "The Captured Man".
"Old Paoer" Screenwriter: Dong Runnian, Starring: Feng Xiaogang
html Eight years later, the two met again at the Lunar New Year festival. However, this time it is no longer cooperation, but competition - Feng Xiaogang's "If You Are the One 3" vs. Dong Runnian's "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!" 》.According to Maoyan’s forecast, the final box office of the former may not exceed 100 million yuan, while the latter is expected to exceed 1.1 billion yuan, taking the top spot in this year’s Lunar New Year box office. Judging from the current Douban scores, the two movies are also very different, with the former scoring 6.1 and the latter 8.2 (the opening score was 8.0, bucking the trend and rising by 0.2).
In the battle for Lunar New Year comedy, the winner has been decided. But I can’t help but wonder, why?
一
Feng Xiaogang narrates the "three treasures": brand, style and gimmick.
is the leading brand, that is, the "backer", a veteran IP "If You Are the One" with 15 years of vitality, as well as returning starring Ge You and Shu Qi, Fan Wei, Sun Honglei, Yao Chen who have participated in the IP, and Yue Yunpeng, who has become popular in the past two years , Yu Shuxin and others have joined, and it has three generations of movie stars, old, middle and young, with a luxurious lineup and full of momentum.
style, that is, visual, specially created dopamine color matching, high saturation, like a fairy tale, refreshing the audience.
The gimmick is the plot. With the extremely popular artificial intelligence as the core of the plot, Feng Xiaogang set the story in 2031, where Qin Fen (played by Ge You), who is seventy years old, is waiting at home for his wife Xiaoxiao (played by Shu Qi) who has been away for ten years. One day, he was given an AI version of Xiaoxiao that was exactly the same as the real person, and met the real person Xiaoxiao and suddenly came home. The real and fake wives surround Qin Fen and continue to explore what true love is while having fun.
The story framework is set up and the formation is ready. The key is to fill in the comedy material. The comedy color of "If You Are the One 3" is still Feng Xiaogang's old formula - relying on the wit of the lines to achieve the purpose of joking, ridicule, and irony, thereby dissolving seriousness and making the story's popular characters interesting.
For example, Qin Fen believes that AI and human beings have different attitudes towards feelings, "You (AI) are calculations, and I am calculations." For example, Qin Fen expresses his feelings for Xiaoxiao, and his thoughts are "It is too low to build a temple on a high mountain, sitting face to face" , I still miss you"; for example, using "making dumplings" to explain that he has been "self-protective" for ten years and has not "stealed", etc.
Ge You and Shu Qi are talkative and quarrelsome, with sharp wit and provocative energy, like a cross talk or a sketch. The audience enjoys the cunning and fun of this language.
On the other hand, "The annual meeting cannot be stopped!" ", Dong Runnian presents a heart-wrenching workplace comedy through the absurd story of a fitter Hu Jianlin (played by Dapeng) who was mistakenly transferred to the headquarters and promoted three levels during the group's massive layoffs. The
video also has language skills, such as deliberately using a lot of workplace slang: aligning granularity, focusing on vertical fields, opening up the underlying logic, completing new business formats, realizing closed-loop matrices, etc.; it also uses a lot of nonsense literature, such as "What is Backend data management? It means managing backend data" "The key to the problem is to find the key issues" and so on.
But it is significantly different from Feng's humor: it is not a comedy of language, but a comedy of structure. As Dong Runnian explained, structural comedy relies more on dramatic conflicts and structural dislocations to create comic effects, and does not rely heavily on performance and line design.
《The annual meeting cannot be stopped! "The conflict refers to the fact that when a large factory lays off employees, it recruits a fitter who doesn't understand anything; the misalignment refers to letting a fitter who doesn't understand the workplace take charge of personnel rights. This situation is like Grandma Liu entering the Grand View Garden, but possessing the rights of Wang Xifeng. A country bumpkin makes the entire company panic. Each character does his or her own thing, showing all kinds of ridiculous and pitiable embarrassments.
Of course, this does not mean that Feng Xiaogang’s verbal comedy is without merit, but this kind of comedy has its own era background.From the second half of the 1990s to the early 2000s, social ideological trends surged, the discourse system was liberated, and the power of language gradually emerged. Often a witty saying can become a popular slogan among the people. The lyrics of pop songs, the lines of skits on the Spring Festival Gala stage, the magical slogans on TV, and the ruffian literature represented by Wang Shuo, etc., can all prove that "language" was welcomed in that era.
Feng Xiaogang's representative comedies, such as "Party A and Party B" and "Big Shot", are burning under this general trend. Now, he continues his comedy habit and fills "If You Are the One 3" with a lot of language ingenuity and humor. Listening to it, I smiled knowingly, but that was all.
Because the current era is the rise of the Internet, "chicken soup" is frequently used, and exciting points, emotional points, and humorous points are changing with each passing day. It is difficult for the audience to pay for a few witticisms. Lines like "Although you look ugly, but you want to be beautiful" in "If You Are the One 3" are no longer interesting. Humorous language can only be the icing on the cake in comedy movies, and can no longer become the "cake" itself.
二
In 1997, the comedy film "Party A and Party B" was released, ushering in the Lunar New Year era of domestic films. In the following years, as films such as "See You or Die", "Endless", "A Sigh" and "Big Shot" were released one after another, Feng Xiaogang became the most profitable director in China. Fight for land.
In addition to Wang Shuo's language, there is another factor that must be mentioned in his comedic expression, namely, citizen awareness.
2007, Wang Shuo, picture based on Visual China
Around the 21st century, urbanization developed rapidly and the urban population surged. The trends of the times, social outlook, and lifestyles are changing with each passing day. The various human emotions become more abundant; the world's landscape becomes more complex. Feng Xiaogang keenly captured these changes, and writers such as Wang Shuo also provided character models under the drastic changes in life.
With the right time, location, and harmony, Feng Xiaogang has enough material to bring characters who are closer to ordinary citizens than traditional heroes to the big screen in a comedic way. These citizens are like the stubborn characters in Wang Shuo's works. They are cynical, absurd, decadent, and arrogant, but they are good inside and are definitely not villains. They are full of desires, cowardly or brave, and are just ordinary people everywhere. Visible mortals.
In "Party A and Party B", the bookstore owner wants to become a general, the Sichuan cook has a heroic dream, the loser in love wants to end his life, the male chauvinist always takes it out on his wife, the rich man tries to experience the hard life, and the star wants to Be ordinary people for a time, a sick couple wants a house... With all kinds of emotions and desires, all living things, these characters are not you and me sitting under the screen.
Stills from "Party A and Party B"
Feng-style comedies at that time were always speaking for the public. Even the slightly suspended later comedy "Private Customization" focuses on urban young women, film directors, driver masters, cleaning ladies, etc. In the "If You Are the One" series, the focus is also on the marriage and love of citizens. But why didn't it work in "If You Are the One 3"?
The movie itself certainly has problems. It uses a lot of material from the previous movie, giving people a shoddy feeling; the characters live in a mansion and have AI, and the plot is seriously suspended and ungrounded; the core of the story repeatedly focuses on whether Qin Fen went off the rails after his wife ran away, and did not show any direction to the movie. It conveys sufficient emotional value to the audience. More importantly, the "citizens" that Feng Xiaogang once paid most attention to have been iteratively updated and replaced by the huge number of netizens today. The evolution from citizens to netizens is the inevitable of the times, and comedy methods should also change accordingly.
Let’s look at Dong Runnian’s actor structure, which brings together almost 20 comedians from different genres in the Internet era: “Diaosi Man” Dapeng, “Wang Dachui” Baike, classic comedy supporting actor Wang Xun, “Lu Ziqiao” Sun Yizhou, “Talk Show” Tong Monan, "Mancai Group" Carnivore, "Annual Comedy Competition" Wang Hao, etc. This lineup brings together almost all the representative figures of online comedy - they are almost the comedians who best understand the laughter of current netizens.
Of course, it is easy for this pot of porridge to get out of control if it continues to cook, and it requires a skilled chef to take charge. Dong Runnian avoids this kind of loss of control by using structural comedy rather than verbal comedy. Otherwise, every comedian will be arrogant and talkative, which will easily destroy the direction of the story.
As for the main plot of the movie, it is closely related to current netizens: every Monday, almost all Weibo related terms "don't want to go to work" are on the hot search; "996" is discussed one after another on the Internet; "layoffs" "Overtime" and "Workplace ecology of major Internet companies" frequently trigger heated discussions; topics such as "vicious competition", "office politics" and "involution" can easily stir up Internet turmoil...
Netizens are just masks, and there are many things behind them. A large part of the group is "workers", and the workplace has become the largest collection of people in today's life. What Dong Runnian shoots is not a simple workplace comedy, but a tangible and ubiquitous reality.
In fact, whether it is a citizen or a netizen, they just have different names. Ultimately, they are all living people. Feng Xiaogang in the early days and Dong Runnian today, their comedy services are exactly these people.
The comedy dug out of the real life of the people is heart-warming. This year’s Lunar New Year holiday has proven this.
三
Chen Peisi said that the core of comedy is tragedy. A comedy without tragedy is almost like a farce.
Like Happy Twist's "Charlotte Troubles", it has the sadness and loss of middle-aged people, as well as memories and fantasies about the middle school years. It carries the experience of most people, so it has won both word-of-mouth and box office; and like "Li "Tea's Aunt", it was a intrigue between people who were either rich or noble. It failed to tell a story that the audience could empathize with, so it failed miserably.
Looking at it from this perspective, "If You Are the One 3" may also be defeated by the lack of tragedy elements. It was probably only at the end that Ge You and Shu Qi spoke as themselves, admitting that they were getting old and that although they were reluctant to part with this role, they could no longer act in romantic dramas, which also inspired the audience to feel a little sad. On the other hand, the whole story is like two women competing for favor or "the emperor choosing his concubine", which is too far away from the audience and too close to a farce.
It can even be said that without the nostalgic filter of the first two "If You Are the One" movies and the sense of completion that finally ushered in a closed loop after 15 years to imbue the movie with charm, I am afraid that the ratings and box office of the third movie would have dropped again.
In 2023, Feng Xiaogang, according to Visual China
and "The annual meeting cannot be stopped!" "The tragic elements can be seen everywhere. The main plot has already reflected many strange things in the workplace, all of which make us feel sad.
In terms of character clues, Zhuang Zhengzheng, played by Wang Xun, is a typical tragedy. He used all his savings to bribe the headquarters to get the promotion opportunity, but Hu Jianlin accidentally took it away. He was running around, he was in a state of embarrassment, he was hateful and ridiculous, and he was really pathetic.
As for the details, there are more words. For example, at the company annual meeting at the end, Hu Jianlin and others used the rap stage to accuse darkness. The scene was hot, but the camera suddenly switched to a girl who was working overtime in the office building. She was sitting on the computer screen. Before, I couldn't help crying.
Dong Runnian’s meaning is very clear. This movie was made for “this girl”. And this girl is all the "workers" here.
Li Naiwen plays the mastermind behind the scenes, the leader second only to the chairman
Dong Runnian's comedy is careful enough, neat enough, funny enough, and easy to cry enough.
"If You Are the One 3" lost to "The Annual Meeting Can't Stop!" ", Feng Xiaogang's loss to Dong Runnian seems to be an annotation for this year's Lunar New Year comedy movie battle: today's audiences no longer pay for feelings suspended outside reality, they are more willing to watch the drama hidden in the plot being performed. The hot life that belongs to you.
Text/Li Ruifeng Editor Wang Liqiang Pictures according to the film source
