Write the third part of the New Year's Eve file tonight——
Goldfinger
A reader on Weibo asked me how about "Goldfinger"?
I replied "very provocative", which is actually a bit arrogant for the audience, why, did the movie provoke the audience?But "Goldfinger" is exactly that, and it's hard for me to find a second description, or arbitrarily give a definition of good or bad.
It's the same in our background, some people don't like it, urge me to criticize, say it's pompous and boring;Someone likes it, urges me to interpret it, and says the information**.
That's it, there are some movies that I can tell you directly, bad movies run, but some movies I will be more inclined to help it find the right audience, and also help the audience find it.
The biggest difference between "Goldfinger" and those Hong Kong films this year is that he is really telling the story of Hong Kong, not the kind where the story of a random city is still true.
The whole story is closely related to the history of the city of Hong Kong, and uses the model of a spectacular story with a lower threshold to concretize and even anthropomorphize those originally secretive and dull histories.
He has almost no action scenes, full-text scenes, a lot of political metaphors, and traces of the times, which constitute decipherability, and you have to connect with the track of Hong Kong history in order to be satisfied in this movie. This alone will win most of the Hong Kong films released on the mainland this year.
Therefore, I must first qualitatively say - it is definitely not the old-fashioned and rough bad Hong Kong films that appeared on our list of bad movies this year, of course he has shortcomings, but it is also based on the premise of a surging desire to express himself too lightly or too heavily.
Body. Let's start with the opening scene where many viewers are confused - the conflict between police and integrity.
At the beginning, a large number of Hong Kong police demonstrations broke into the office of the Independent Commission Against Corruption and fought, which is an unavoidable gray history of Hong Kong, in order to prevent friends from knowing, I will tell it again in an encyclopedic way:
In February 1974, the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which was directly administered by the Governor of Hong Kong, was established to replace the Anti-Commission Division of the Hong Kong Police Force. Since the Royal Hong Kong Police was the hardest hit area at that time (1970-1972), with the efforts of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, a large number of ** cases were uncovered by the Force. This has caused many in the Force to fear that their old debts will be exposed, and has deepened their hatred against the Independent Commission Against Corruption.
On 28 October 1977, more than 2,000 police officers demonstrated at the Police Headquarters and demanded that the then Commissioner of Police, Mr Slap Wing, report to the Hong Kong Government that the powers of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) had been curtailed. On November 5, the then Governor of Hong Kong, MacLehose, issued a "partial amnesty order" in order to appease the police force, and decided to instruct the Independent Commission Against Corruption to grant amnesty to all civil servants who had been ** and had not been charged before January 1, 1977.
This scene has nothing to do with the main story that follows, what's the point of appearing here?
Because this is a historical event that can best represent the city of Hong Kong, he answered a question that was ignored in previous Hong Kong films: What kind of city was Hong Kong at that time?
It is a city where the law and making money are entwined and growing, and the police ** is the most typical example, the police are the defenders of legal justice, but they are also a power identity used to make money.
Making money, law, the two are one, coexisting in this cycle of eliminating the other's growth, like a seesaw, and the deformed stability of Hong Kong at that time was based on the balance between the two, relying on evil to suppress evil, which is a new form of justice.
So the matter of making money has been rationalized a lot under this premise, as if a policeman is wrong, but tens of thousands of policemen are wrong, as long as social stability is not affected by this, it is "not wrong".
This is the first layer that the movie wants to say, to restore what is under the mask of a city.
With this premise, if you look at this story again, many things will be different - Tony Leung is a wealthy businessman in Hong Kong who started from the bottom, bribery, insider trading, and economic crimes, and everything comes from, in his eyes, making money like this has never been a matter of course, and the first paragraph of his appearance as a rich businessman is "We are in business, and if we violate the rules, wouldn't it be good to fine some money." "That's the Hong Kong mindset we mentioned above.
There is another paragraph that can point to this kind of thinking, which I like, that is, the part where Tony Leung buys Jinshan Building, and the screenwriter uses a small trick here.
There was a scene where Hong Kong's landmark Jinshan Building in Central was hostilely acquired by the British at a low price, and Tony Leung's character was insulted at the celebration held by the British, listening to the British proud British Occupation Declaration.
So when the first thing he did after making money was to decide to buy back the Jinshan Mansion from the British, the audience would have the illusion that he was a patriotic businessman and that what he wanted was a sense of national honor.
But the plot suddenly took a sharp turn, he bought the house for only one purpose, to raise the stock price, speculate on the property price, and make the difference, and the audience suddenly realized that the emotions he generated in the British were not national emotions, but "Why do you earn this money, not me." ”
In his eyes, he also seeks fairness in social distribution and justice, but the way is to become evil and use evil to suppress evil. Everyone is a bad person, so justice is a relative concept.
This kind of violation of the audience's expectations is to detain another face of Hong Kong, in Hong Kong at that time, there was no so-called love or injustice, justice and patriotism for the purpose of making money.
At that time, Hong Kong nominally belonged to the British, but in essence it was a terra nullius, an orphan of Asia, and no matter whether it was east or west, there were no rules at this time, and they were all profitable.
But what the main creator wants to say here is still very unclear, and the above is just a presentation, not an expression.
Let's look at the next step of the movie - the screenwriter suddenly possesses Hong Kong to a character in the story, personifies it, and lets him finish the story of Hong Kong after that.
The role still isTony Leung.
The next story of Hong Kong is that the white glove and the goldfinger identity appear in a character and a city at the same time.
The theme of the movie is also officially set out here, which is to show us the two identities of Hong Kong and the hedging of each other.
Goldfinger is the title of the film, turning stones into gold, and Tony Leung's character does what he does in the movie and earns anything.
The opportunity to enter the upper class society was only with a hundred-dollar bill, which he used to disguise himself as a rich man to deceive Brother Song, and made millions for Zeng Cambridge. Later, the property seller ** relied on insider trading to become one of the largest business groups in Hong Kong.
This was Hong Kong at that time, in the 60s, the Hong Kong ** market entered the heyday of the Sihui era, various exchanges rushed to relax the listing conditions, strive for listed companies, and the financial industry broke out.
In the 70s, Hong Kong** began to implement the 10-year housing plan (1972) and the Home Ownership Scheme (1976), Hong Kong's land ** began**, real estate became a new business activity, and a large number of speculators poured in.
At the same time, a wave of liberalization of financial deregulation around the world followed, and Hong Kong** began to lift foreign exchange controls.
Open the market (free import and export), establish a market for commodities, and open up banking licensesCompletely realize the freedom of capital in and out - become a veritable "free port".
Hong Kong is prosperous, the economy is taking off, Hong Kong has a golden finger, turning stones into gold, Hong Kong people run horses, dance, drink afternoon tea, speak Oxford English, travel abroad, revealing nobility and drunken gold fans, the city of Hong Kong is like the beginning of a movie, the doors in the great building of the Liang Dynasty, each one is extremely luxurious, but you never know that ** is the end.
It is also in the past few years that Hong Kong has ushered in a large amount of international capital, so the city, like Tony Leung in the movie, has ushered in a new identity, white gloves.
This is the main suspense point of the movie - he is a white glove for the capital of all countries in the world to put in Hong Kong to make black money and launder dirty money for them, so who are these real financiers?
Strictly speaking, the movie is not done well, and the suspense is weakened at the end, but I can understand this weakening because no one knows about it in history.
Even Tony Leung himself didn't know, "Do you really think I'm a gold finger?."I'm just a white glove, how can I have the opportunity to see the world at a higher level" (The gold owner) is all national, aren't you afraid?”
This brings out the clear tendency of the movie, the main creator feels that Hong Kong is the same as Tony Leung, the prosperity of Hong Kong at that time was a kind of prosperity that was "used", and under the Asian financial center, it was also the center of the world's economic crime.
Writing this, many viewers are puzzled about what this film is going to say, but it can actually be answeredIt is a kind of pessimism about Hong Kong's prosperity and sympathy for the city of Hong Kong.
So in the second half of the film, we have to stop presenting the spectacle and turn our headsReturning the perspective to Andy Lau, a decent character, because the screenwriter wants to use him to output a sense of powerlessness, which is the ultimate criticism.
From Andy Lau's point of view, the city of Hong Kong is once again moving like a wandering ghost, sometimes Hong Kong is a citizen who has been bankrupt, and sometimes it is used as a land for speculation and arbitrage.
Andy Lau is the only one who does justice, he is avenging Hong Kong, he is a spiritualist.
But everything was useless, he sued Tony Leung 8 times, each time the evidence was sufficient, but failed again and again, and only the last time he was sentenced to 3 years. The whole of Hong Kong is protecting him, because the whole of Hong Kong has to be related to him.
Especially in the second half of the film, on the one hand, the wealthy families are carnivaling in making fortunes again and again, and on the other hand, the broken lives of ordinary people after ***, and the sentence "The inventory of property has returned to the capital, and the small shareholders have not received anything" after the punishment of Tony Leung at the end of the film, we will intuitively feel the falsehood behind this prosperity.
Therefore, the role of Andy Lau can only be face-painted, and he cannot have a trace of evil thoughts.
Because only such a pure and selfish justice can make him break away from the identity of an "individual" and become the righteous party of Hong Kong, and then achieve a delicate balance with the desires of Tony Leung, who is also referred to as Hong Kong.
In this balanced confrontation, what I prefer is actually the ending of the film.
Tony Leung ended up pleading guilty before Hong Kong's return to the motherland, so he was sentenced to only three years under British law, and there is an inconspicuous sentence in the subtitles of the trial of his crimes: small shareholders have not received anything.
The hero who represents justice, Howe does not hesitate to crash headlong into the south wall, ushering in the final doomed defeat, in order to output a maximum sense of powerlessness.
Remember the forced amnesty of the Independent Commission Against Corruption at the beginning?
Now digging three feet into the ground and chasing the culprit for ten years can only be exchanged for another "amnesty".
This is Zhuang **'s pessimism about the past, and it is not only pessimistic about the past.
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