Why are Spring Festival movies so despised? The trade-off between quality and box office!
This year's Spring Festival file has basically ended, and this one should be our last draft about the Spring Festival file.
Let's talk about many people's contempt for "Spring Festival movies".
The Spring Festival movies here do not specifically refer to a specific year or a certain film, but generally refer to the vast majority of Spring Festival movies that have achieved box office success, and these movies often have a more common feature, weakening the author's expression and aggravating sensory stimulation, the purpose is to be a family carnival, and the scale and threshold are as close to the whole age as possible.
Because of the above characteristics, these movies often achieve the largest box office, but in terms of quality, when they are put into the range of the whole year to compare, most of the time it is difficult to rank in the forefront, more often it is a medium echelon of works, the probability of bad movies is very low, and the probability of good works is also very low.
This is especially obvious this year, the first three films all meet the above criteria, and the withdrawn "Mr. Red Carpet" has a good reputation among critics and fans, and it is also my personal top ten alternatives, but it faced a double loss of word-of-mouth and box office during the Spring Festival.
At this time, a voice began to appear-The fact that these movies with not top-notch quality can get such a high box office is the sadness of Chinese films, and it is the sadness of Chinese films that they are sinking further and pleasing the audience.
Yesterday, under the Weibo where I talked about Jia Ling's marketing, there was also a very eye-catching question:
I think it's worth answering this question this year.
Tonight, we also invited another ** teacher @Silktail to talk to us about this phenomenon.
In this context, the good news is that we can draw a tentative conclusion to the chicken-and-egg question of whether cinema is a commodity or an art
Movies are at least a commodity.
It's even better to put this sentence before the films that were withdrawn this year – art doesn't just leave the museum because there are too few people to stop and look at it, but the merchandise does flee the shelves. When we understand the stop-loss logic of the withdrawn movie, we are understanding the situation of the film as a commodity.
Open the box office list of Chinese movies, 6 of the top 10 films in history were released during the Spring Festival. The Spring Festival is indeed the strongest and most concentrated period for Chinese people to watch movies. But this matter is not happy for fans, because the extra part of the willingness to watch movies does not point to film art. What people have more is the desire to consume, and movies are a kind of Spring Festival consumption - buying New Year's goods.
The popular slogan on the Internet, please don't let our traditional festivals be coerced by Western consumerism. I frown every time I see this. When the Chinese paid attention to wearing new clothes and hats during the New Year, Baudrillard's ancestors were slash-and-burn. Have we ever eaten and drunk on our festivals and abandoned worldly desires?
The essence of the tradition of New Year's goods is also the pursuit of consumer pleasure. In fact, festivals are inherently born for consumption, and most traditional festivals include ceremonies such as stopping production and enjoying leisure, as is the case with Christmas and Chinese New Year. Once humans are idle, the first thing they do is consume. In the absence of modern entertainment, New Year's goods such as sweets, cakes, rice, noodles, and fish are consumed. With modern entertainment, audio-visual consumption is a New Year's goods.
Watching movies still has the advantage of being able to go with the family, there is an action of going out and entering, and the sense of consumption ritual is stronger.
Therefore, it is not so much an opportunity for film art as an opportunity for film commodities. We can define the Spring Festival file like this: this is the most commoditized period of the year. Maybe this can soothe the wounded hearts of those movie lovers who sigh "how is it all a comedy" and "it's too small".
Similar to walking into a shopping mall during the Chinese New Year, you can't lament that these bright reds spoil the exquisite window design and store space narrative, because the big red is to provoke people's psychological cues of consumption, not to cultivate their artistic aesthetics.
Maybe you haven't considered the popular movies of the Spring Festival before, "The Wandering Earth", "Man Jianghong", "Hello Li Huanying" and "Detective Chinatown" have anything in common as movies. In fact, as commodities, they are all good New Year's goods.
The Wandering Earth brings sensual satisfaction in an industrial sense. Although "Man Jianghong" is quite controversial, historical romance + collective emotional catharsis is a good idea in the Spring Festival. "Hello Li Huanying" won in a very universal family emotion, and the film critics who were crying warmly were embarrassed to criticize them harshly when they walked out of the theater.
Some people question how to count "Detective Chinatown"? The New Year's murders are one after another, how can they succeed? Hey, isn't that abroad, the distancing effect has already been arranged. If this happens in China, the murder reasoning will probably be driven away by the Spring Festival stalls.
The Chinese New Year stall is a continuation of Hollywood's Christmas tradition. Flipping through the history of Christmas, you will feel that the joys and sorrows of human beings are quite similar. During the New Year's holidays, people's emotional needs are more concentrated.
The most successful Christmas movie in history is undoubtedly Home Alone, which was released in 1990. A careless family flies to Paris for Christmas, leaving the rebellious little boy at home and unfortunately encountering a stupid thief. After some wrangling, the adults reflected, the little boy grew up, they loved each other more, and they lived happily ever after. This story panned to the Spring Festival stalls. Changing to a Chinese face, there won't be anything uncomfortable in terms of subject matter and emotion.
The festival comes from the primitive human desire: the concentrated sacrifice of turkeys and pigs is to show people's primitive desire to be fed. At the same time, the various activities of the family unit show the importance that China and the West attach to family relations. Blake Snyder said in "Save the Cat" that "Home Alone" was successful because it was in line with "the primitive desire of people to defend their family territory," which apparently fits in well with Christmas, the time of year when the family has the greatest presence.
The same goes for the Spring Festival. The films that won the 2024 Spring Festival knockout round are all in line with the mood of the festival. We can summarize the simplest formula:
An ordinary person who is similar to us has encountered certain problems in his life. Eventually, through personal efforts, he was able to turn the tide and defend some value.
"Hot and Hot", "Flying Life 2" and "Article 20" all conform to this formula, and the three correspond to personal existential crises, life dreams, family security, and even social axioms, respectively, which are simple and universal. Compared with the withdrawn movies, the quality of "Let's Shake the Sun Together" and "Mr. Red Carpet" is not bad, but their respective themes and themes are obviously a little heavy or serious under the holiday season.
On the one hand, the festival uses excessive consumption to endorse secular life, and on the other hand, it uses the causal logic (blessing) after the contract, showing a simple and feasible path for secular life - movies meet the above two points at the same time, which is both consumption and blessing.
Therefore, we can understand the happy endings of Hong Kong New Year films, whether it is good or bad, or even people who have died in the plot, they can stand in front of the camera, Wishing you prosperity to everyone, and happiness for the family, which is the emotional drive of the festival.
This is also why, I will not pick the Christmas file and the Spring Festival file to lament that "the movie is dead", because this is the season when movies are least regarded as movies. Cinema is entertainment at this time, it is an emotional trigger, and it has to be related to stimulation and comfort.
There is a relatively ancient analogy, which may be the most suitable for everyone to understand the Spring Festival stalls.
Open-air movies when we were kids.
In the age of open-air cinema, people were frenzied for movies due to the lack of entertainment. In the era of independent choice, people walked into the theater because of the festive consumption atmosphere.
In fact, you can indeed think of the Spring Festival stalls as an annual "open-air moment" for contemporary cinema: people flock to the streets and alleys to dream for a short time.
Movies are not only the art of dreaming, but also the likes and dislikes of dreams. A good dream is one that has something to do with life, but not completely, and it is better to be better than life, and when you wake up, you have a good mind and a fluffy mood - and the same is probably true of a good movie in the eyes of the public.
I think of the movie "Once Upon a Time", the open-air movie years in China in the 70s, which was a period when Chinese people's enthusiasm for watching movies was unprecedentedly high. It will be late, people grab the land, step on the bench, prepare melon and fruit popsicles, and watch the ...... of "Shining Red Star", "Angel on the Road", "Railway Guerrilla".It is a dream of a national hero. After the 90s, Hong Kong films spread in the mainland, and a whole generation of audiences dreamed of old boys, stars, and martial arts. For the general public, watching a movie must have such an effect.
Therefore, I won't say that the overall trend of Spring Festival movies is lightweight, comedy, and the star route is something that sweeps the floor, which does not delay the film is the art of dreaming. Most of the audiences who bought tickets during the Spring Festival went out of the theater and returned to work and life, and they would not mention their interest and walk back to the theater a few times a year, and they separated their lives from movies.
The Spring Festival is certainly the time of the year when Chinese are most allowed to dream, and it is also the time when people are most strongly and intensively engaged in the form of life. People yearn for an aesthetic and value that lies somewhere between reality and dreams.
Yang Dechang once patronized a Japanese tavern and mentioned "Life, Dream, Movie" on the wall. Later, when Ang Lee came here, there was an inscription on the same wall as "Movie, Dream, Life", and the movie was inseparable from these words. The people who shoot and the people who watch actually put a part of their lives and dreams in the movie, but some are deeper and some are shallow.
So I think when we are talking about movies, no matter what period he is in, no matter what subject he belongs to, we can measure it on this gentle scale:
Does it broaden the boundaries of human dreaming, and does it have a slight impact on people's real life experience? If so, then the film as a commodity has not yet lived up to the film as an art. After the Spring Festival, ordinary audiences dispersed, and they returned to real life, still dreaming and living separately.
There's nothing wrong with that.