As a small but beautiful Hong Kong-style romantic comedy, "I Still Think You're the Best 2" continues the interesting language and commercial entertainment of the previous film, and has a good performance in promoting Cantonese culture. The film maintains the same pace as the first film, with recurring Cantonese homophonic jokes, wave after wave of coincidences, and a large number of jokes with Hong Kong regional cultural characteristics, which constitute the main narrative elements of the film. As a genre in today's Chinese-language films, this kind of film that combines visual golden sentences and dense jokes has developed quite maturely. At the box office, they indeed verified the validity of this image logic. In an era that relies heavily on the spirit of entertainment, the audience's acceptance of this image logic has its own profound basis in reality. Fragmentation and paragraphing are important production forms of new media in this era, and the grammar of new media has long been the most important popular grammar in this era. Under the influence of this grammar, the audience's demand for film and television works is not only an exciting story, but also the mobilization of imagination and the summoning of emotions. Among the many Cantonese sayings and Hong Kong cultural corpora, "Still Think You're the Best 2" intends to mobilize a kind of reimagining of the new generation family and evoke a deep feeling rooted in family members. In this sense, this series of films can be said to echo the deep concern of Hong Kong films for citizen culture.
However, the idea of family in the film is quite childish. For example, the film uses two weddings as the main narrative axis, from the third brother's wedding to the second brother's wedding, and its core points to a proposition: how to make people who are afraid of love believe in love, and let people who are afraid of marriage enter marriage. However, the presentation of this proposition in the film is quite childish. Not only is the expression of love in it full of concealment and deception, but the imagination of marriage in it is also farcical. From the family dinner table in the previous movie to the wedding banquet table in this movie, the alternative food narrative emphasized in the film cannot exert enough thinking momentum. Instead, it pushes the previous thinking about family, marriage, love and growth into nothingness. In the previous film, we could at least see the director's reflection on issues such as what is family and what is family, but in the second film, these issues were eliminated by farce after farce. On the whole, this childlike family imagination is completed in the contradiction between desire and fear for love. This also makes the entire film almost driven by the farce that interprets and intensifies this contradiction, causing the entire film to be in a completely tense state of rhythm. Because there are crises that need to be resolved at any time, and lies that need to be covered up at any time.
In this series of farces, men face all difficulties and problems, either with a playful mentality of playing in the world, or with a weak and incompetent childish mentality. We can find that in the family composed of these three brothers, there is no mature male. Whether it's the second brother Chen Li imitating the cry of a bee every time he resolves an embarrassment, or the third brother Chen Xi playing the role of the Golden Saint at his wedding, people can't help but sigh that men remain young until they die. In contrast, in the face of men's playfulness and childlike mentality, the women in the film often shoulder the dual responsibilities and functions of mother and wife in intimate relationships. They are required to possess both motherly and wifely qualities. The psychological trauma and emotional baggage these men suffered in their families of origin are all borne and resolved by women here. The reason why these men are always happy, always able to joke and tell jokes lightly, and gain secret joy in lies, is precisely because no matter how painful they are, these women will eventually enter their real lives and inner worlds, giving them a happy life. They perform tender massage on the emotional dimension and break down the key points of trauma.
From this, the women in the film seem to have two mental states: either distress or pain. All this is because they have endured too much unbearable weight in life. With the support of women's bodies and spirits, these new generation men whose life contents are composed of fashionable elements such as e-sports, animation, Internet celebrities, and live broadcasts, who focus on showing off and believe in traffic, have no sense of responsibility in their imagination of family. , and is full of romantic sentiments that float above reality, are rooted in the online world, and pursue virtual pleasure.
Of course, we cannot criticize a movie for 100% restoring reality in its narrative. After all, we are in an era where virtual emotional comfort and emotional stimulation of traffic always imply that people have become hardworking workers in the digital space to varying degrees. This This is our current reality. However, if a cultural product has no energy to reflect and criticize reality, and does not raise the possibility of positive significance for the empirical world, then its significance for the times is questionable.
At the same time, the film also gives these women another layer of narrative mission, a female growth narrative. They obviously have their own careers, are considerate, gentle, generous, and beautiful. However, in this outdated problem category and imagination, most of these women are trapped between love and family, and their room for growth is very limited. Coerced by the dual roles of mother and wife, almost all of these women eventually became resentful women. Even though Monica has a PhD in cultural studies, we haven't been able to see her intellectual side. On the contrary, this character is given an emotional and dogmatic character, which is similar to the double stigma of gender and profession. The former has always been regarded as a significant feminine trait in a patriarchal society, and the latter is often regarded as a distinctive female trait. The stereotype of highly educated people.
In this childlike family imagination, the film constantly emphasizes the importance of face. For example, the second brother believes that the most important thing in life is to complete superficial rituals in a beautiful way, and his life's efforts are just to make himself a part of the society of spectacle. Therefore, he would rather deceive the people around him than to barely complete the wedding in a false whitewash. But this idea ultimately failed. Taking this as an opportunity, the characters in the film suddenly wake up: face cannot be trusted, but only face is worth cherishing. Although they do not believe in rituals, they believe in emotions; although they do not believe in marriage, they believe in specific people; although they do not believe in family concepts, they affirm the love around them. This is also the deeper meaning behind what Zhuzhu said in the film that the material is the truth and the taste is an illusion.
In the final analysis, "Still Think You're the Best 2" follows the narrative logic conveyed by most new-era Hong Kong movies: it no longer believes in grand narratives and instead focuses on the love, hatred and resentment of children. Although the film's vision of intimacy is almost utopian in nature, this utopia is undoubtedly conservative. This is clearly reflected in the concept of marriage. There is a golden saying that has been mentioned repeatedly in "Still Think You're the Best 2": Marriage is a dream, wedding is a tough battle. Describing the unfolding of marriage using the rhetoric of dreams and war has long been quite common. The key issue is that marriage does not need to be a dream, and it does not need to be a war at all. However, these thoughts have completely disappeared in the dual requirements and even coercion of Hong Kong-style nonsensical comedy and the Lunar New Year film. This exposes the dilemma encountered by the creator: Chen Yongshen has always been good at producing Hong Kong-style chick movies. His early "Xin Zha Junior Sister" accumulated a good reputation for him, but it is undeniable that the marriage, love and family scenes provided by these chick movies have been It is difficult to respond to the ideological trends of today's society. At a time when feminist knowledge and theory have entered public issues in large quantities, the audience's imagination of gender, marriage, love, and family has expanded to a broader and more diverse territory. This requires creators to further expand their horizons, innovate their concepts, and on this basis create an image discourse with regional cultural characteristics. In this dimension, Chen Yongshen and a series of image creators still have a long way to go. (Author: Lai Xiuyu)
