2023 domestic reality-themed movies (from top to bottom) "All or Nothing" and "I Love You!" "She Disappeared" and "In the Octagonal Cage"
Li Ning
In the past year, domestic reality-themed films have ushered in a creative boom. On the one hand, realistic themes are quite popular in the market. For example, among the top ten domestic box office rankings in 2023, five reality-themed movies, "All or Nothing", "The Vanishing Her", "Octagonal Cage", "Solid as a Rock" and "Unfamiliar Life" account for half of the total. At the same time, "The Mistake by the River" and "I Love You!" also emerged. ""The Light of the White Tower"""Wading the Angry Sea" and a number of word-of-mouth masterpieces with different styles, showing a rich textual landscape. Overall, this wave of creative trends is mainly driven by two types of works: one type is movies based on real events, and the other type is movies that focus on hot social issues. These two types of works often overlap, and together they show a keen concern for social events and real-life issues, and actively use the name of "truth" and "reality" to cater to public sentiment, create movie-viewing topics, and trigger media carnivals, from which We can see the progress and difficulties of domestic films in understanding and expressing reality.
Based on real facts: Fictional dilemmas
In this wave of craze, there are "She Disappeared", "In the Octagonal Cage", "The Eighth Suspect", "93 International Train Robbery: Operation Moscow", "I Am a Mountain" and " A large number of works such as "Three Brigades" are based on real events and prototype characters. Many movies use "reality" as a gimmick when announcing their release. For example, the movie "The Octagon" has a slogan of "a true adaptation, shocking", and "The Eighth Suspect" even boasts "rare reality and insight into human nature". ".
News topics and social events have direct references to real people, so adaptations of real events can often provide a topicality and appeal that fictional stories lack. One of the key points of this type of creation is to properly grasp the balance between real events and artistic fiction, and to properly handle the tension between reality and fiction. An excellent adaptation must, on the one hand, be realistic and realistic, and reasonably imagine and transform it based on real events; on the other hand, it must use fiction to prove it and show the authenticity of social life through fictional stories. The film "The Octagonal Cage" was more successful in this regard. It adapted the prototype story of the fighting orphans in Daliang Mountain into a smoother genre. Wang Baoqiang, who comes from a grassroots background, tells a low-income story with some traces of growth, and uses a group of non-professional actors from mountainous areas to express himself on the screen. This kind of realistic care both on and off the screen makes the work exude a rare sense of reality and sincerity.
It should be noted that if the adaptation of real events is not handled properly, it can easily be influenced by prototype events, and then fall into the trap of "realness". For example, in order to highlight the selling point of the movie "The Eighth Suspect" when it was released, not only did the slogan "Adapted from the true case of the largest armed robbery since the founding of the People's Republic of China" be printed on the poster, but the word "true" was also highlighted. However, it is precisely the obsession with "truth" that makes the film too faithful to the case itself and falls into the predicament of weak fiction. On the whole, the film almost follows the original case step by step, showing the protagonist's entire process from plotting a robbery, absconding overseas, changing his name to finally breaking the law. The story is told in a straightforward manner, lacking drama and suspense, and almost becomes a brief review of the case. Truth was originally the highlight of this film, but in the end it became its own shackles.
Chasing Hot Topics: The Temptation of Topics
In addition to films adapted from real events, films based on various social hot spots and real-life issues have also become a trend. "Keep You Safe", "All or Nothing", "I Passed Through the Storm", "I Love You!" ”, “School Dad”, “Solid as a Rock”, “Parrot Killing”, “Wading in the Angry Sea”, “Hot Searches” and other works have emerged, focusing on cyber violence, telecommunications fraud, domestic violence, aging society, family education, corruption, etc. Many popular social issues.
In the genre spectrum of Hollywood movies, there is a special category of "social problem films".This category combines social analysis and dramatic conflict within a relatively stylized narrative structure, usually through stylized means. Starting from films such as "I'm Not the God of Medicine", my country's social issue films have gradually become popular and have exploded in the past year, including some excellent works.
For example, the movie "I Love You!" " uses the youth love genre to intervene in the emotional issues of the elderly and writes a casual elderly love story that is rare in domestic films. The creator has injected a lot of common love tricks in youth love stories, but the expression is romantic but not vulgar, sweet but not greasy. The movie "Crossing the Angry Sea" explores family education issues through a suspenseful film. Through the violent and violent image style, the collision between the second dimension and reality, and the intergenerational conflict between parents and children, it reveals the heart-wrenching original family. the pain. The movie "Keep You Safe" uses a "comedy + suspense" technique and uses the protagonist Wei Ping'an's search for the culprit of rumors to depict the post-truth era in which information dissemination is highly networked and platform-based. Facts are easily influenced by emotions and truth is extremely difficult to control. A realistic picture that is easily obscured by rumors.
What needs to be noted is that the pursuit and enthusiasm for hot topics have caused many works to show an obvious tool-oriented tendency. In order to use hot topics to trigger public emotions and trigger a movie-watching craze, many creators are eager to intervene in reality, analyze social ills, and propose solutions, thus greatly highlighting the educational function and social significance of images. For example, the movie "All or Nothing" has the slogan "One more person will watch the movie, and one less person will be deceived", and the movie "School Dad" also boasts that "it is based on real material and concerns you and me." It is understandable that movies highlight their social functions, but too much emphasis on function first will make the plot and characters become instrumental and flat to a certain extent. For example, in order to meet the purpose of raising the national anti-fraud awareness, "Desperate" arranges the positive and negative characters such as Pan Sheng, Liang Anna, A Tian, Manager Lu and A Cai in their proper positions, but in a superficial and rigid manner. Acting as a tool in the anti-fraud propaganda film.
On the other hand, the spectacle of reality has also become an obvious trend in this type of works. Focusing on the topic itself and satisfying the audience's curiosity through spectacle, violence, and drama has become the intentional pursuit of many creators. The movie "Desperate" fully exposed the internal operating mechanisms, fraud tactics, and violent methods of overseas fraud gangs, bringing a strange experience to the audience, which became an important reason for the film's success during last summer's summer season. The film "I Passed the Storm", which is against domestic violence and cares for women, has also gone down the path of spectacle that overemphasizes sensory stimulation. The creator may intend to intensify the victim's depression and despair through the violent and terrifying presentation of domestic violence, in order to arouse the public's vigilance and reflection on this issue. However, the over-exaggeration of violent acts triggers more short-term emotional responses from the audience, which to a large extent hinders further in-depth reflection.
Typical reality and event-oriented tendency
As can be seen from the above, a major trend in domestic reality-themed films in recent years is the integration of genre narratives and realistic themes. Creators are increasingly adept at using the industrialization experience learned from other countries' film industries to examine local real-life issues with well-structured, typed stories. In addition to paying attention to social events, current reality-themed films also clearly show a passion for creating media events. As media platforms represented by short video platforms increasingly become the dominant position in film marketing, during the promotion period of the films mentioned above, almost all of them opened official accounts on major media platforms, released various promotional materials, and produced a lot of Various interactive topics and activities. Typification and eventization are becoming obvious trends in domestic reality-themed films.
The author calls such films that are keen on expressing social events through stylized means and actively creating media events as "event films". In fact, Hollywood has long had this concept to refer to those phenomenal movies whose marketing or release itself is a popular social event.The concept of appropriation and expansion here is intended to highlight the increasingly prominent position of "events" in the current production and dissemination of domestic reality-themed films, as well as the interactive relationship between social events, film texts and social media.
What does the popularity of “event movies” mean? One of the major worries may be that the realistic writing in domestic films is becoming increasingly simplified. On the one hand, in the current trend of typing realistic themes, creators are becoming more and more adept at framing and cutting realistic content in the genre film mode. Cut off the rough edges of reality and erase the ambiguity of life, and the originally open and boundless social reality will become more and more rigid and single. It seems that different movies are telling reality in rich and colorful rhetorical ways, but in fact they use the same templates and routines.
On the other hand, for stable social structures and ordinary daily life, social events are ruptures, abnormalities and abnormalities. The enthusiasm of domestic reality-themed films for social events and hot topics means that creators are paying more and more attention to those superficial and incidental topics, while ignoring more daily life content that lacks drama, and at the same time ignoring the deeper aspects of the topic. Excavation and questioning of deep-seated social structural issues. In this regard, how to get out of the confusion of events, face the richness and depth of reality, and explore more rhetorical possibilities beyond genre narratives are issues that domestic reality-themed films need to think about further.
(The author is a lecturer at the School of Art and Media, Beijing Normal University)
Source: Wenhui Po
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