Chapter 328 Wonderful and bloody historical masterpiece (two in one)
On the second day of the Lunar New Year, a hall of Wanlong Cinema in Quancheng
Zuo Le wore a mask and a cap, and quietly sat in the corner of the last row of the cinema with his assistant Feng Ye.
He came here to observe the enemy's situation.
The reputation of "Golden Night Banquet" is divided, whether it is film critics or ordinary viewers, it is divided into two parts, some praise it and some criticize it.
So Zuo Le was a little unsure, and was ready to see for himself whether this so-called top masterpiece in history is a dragon or an worm.
Even if he is betting, he must first listen to the sound of the dice and estimate the odds of winning...
There were a lot of people in the theater. Before knowing that the movie started, Zuo Le made a rough estimate, at least around 90~95%, which meant that the theater was almost full.
Zuo Le secretly took a look at the two "Charlotte Troubles" venues nearby. They were undoubtedly weaker than "Golden Night Banquet", and they basically fluctuated around 80%.
The box office of the first day yesterday has been calculated. Taking into account the pre-sale box office, "Charlotte" totaled 297 million, temporarily ranking third in the Lunar New Year period.
"Dragon Totem" ranked second with 302 million.
Although it still maintains second place, the gap has been gradually narrowed by "Charlotte Trouble".
The box office of "The Legend of Jigong" exceeded 200 million, temporarily ranking fourth.
As for the hit "Golden Night Banquet", although it has received mixed reviews, it has not affected the box office yet. The total box office now reaches 512 million, which is lower than the same period.
Its momentum is so fierce that even Zuo Le is a little doubtful whether his "Charlotte Troubles" overtaking plan can succeed...
………
When the movie started, Zuo Le immediately suppressed his thoughts and concentrated on watching the movie.
Because he knew the general plot of "The Golden Night Banquet" before, now when he watches movies, he compares the movies with his mental impressions more.
The movie "The Golden Banquet" is said to have been adapted locally by Zhang Kaigang by combining parts of the famous Chinese drama "Thunderstorm" and the English Shakespeare's classic drama "The Revenge of the Prince".
The background of the story is set in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, but the dynasties in the movie are semi-imaginary and have no specific references.
It is said that the emperor (Fa Ge) of a certain dynasty had four sons. The eldest prince (Yanzu) made a mistake and was demoted from the border area, and the second son was established as the prince (Liu Ye).
The third prince (King Zhou Tian) is the most powerful general in the country and the most loved by the emperor. The fourth prince is still a child and a transparent person.
Among them, the eldest prince and the third prince are the sons of the queen (Huang Gong), the prince's biological mother is unknown, and the fourth prince is the son of Concubine Wan (Zhang Ziyi).
In addition, the royal family also had Prince Li (Uncle Ge), who was the emperor's younger brother and was quite trusted and held great power.
The emperor loved Concubine Wan, but the queen was lonely and unexpectedly had an affair with the prince. The queen was afraid that the affair would be exposed and the emperor would know about it, and she loved her biological son the eldest prince who had been exiled, so she wanted to instigate the prince to rebel and seize the throne.
The prince was cowardly and objected immediately, so the queen had no choice but to give up, but she didn't want their affairs to be known by the emperor's spies.
In order to cover up the royal scandal, the emperor secretly planned to poison the queen with chronic poison.
Sensing that her health was deteriorating, the queen found out that the emperor was attacking her. In order to protect herself, she planned to mutiny with the third prince and let him take the throne.
The third prince is a "mama's baby". As soon as he heard that his father wanted to kill his mother, he immediately quit and followed the queen to kill the king and his father.
At this point in the plot, Zuo Le is already confused. The historical masterpiece he co-wrote is about a son having an affair with his mother (who is not his biological child). The father kills the mother, and the mother takes her biological son to kill her biological father.
Just the real Royal Edition Thunderstorm...
Anyway, Zuo Le didn't know how the empress managed it. The harem was actually connected with the Ministry of War, and she secretly controlled 10,000 imperial troops.
With such a fierce operation, Wu Zetian is probably not as good as her.
In any case, the force for the mutiny was available, and the queen was planning to let the third prince lead a mutiny on the night of the Double Ninth Festival to kill the emperor.
The prince was too cowardly to hold a big position, but the queen had "true love" for him and came to her door specially to ask the prince to wear a robe with chrysanthemums on Double Ninth Night to avoid being hurt by the rebels.
The prince was unbearable, but he was not a fool. He immediately realized that something was wrong. After failing to stop the queen, he panicked and stabbed himself with a knife to get rid of suspicion.
At the same time, the emperor's younger brother, King Li, noticed the queen's behavior.
Zuo Le was speechless. Everyone knew that the queen was plotting evil, so why did she rebel...
Back to King Li, he was an ambitious man who always wanted to take his brother's throne and replace him. When he learned that the Queen was causing trouble, he also secretly added fuel to the flames in order to benefit from it.
Soon the Double Ninth Festival Night Banquet arrived, and the old emperor suddenly turned against him during the banquet and scolded the queen for his misbehavior.
First of all, there is the prince’s biological mother. For the sake of the throne, the old emperor was extremely flattering and married into this family, relying on the power of his mother’s family. After it happened, the old emperor was so ashamed of this that he even crossed the river and demolished the bridge and massacred the forehead of the prince’s in-laws. The prince’s biological mother was
The old emperor was so angry.
There is also Concubine Wan, who was childhood sweethearts with the eldest prince and fell in love with her. However, when the old emperor saw that Concubine Wan was beautiful when she grew up, he became lustful and forcibly married his future daughter-in-law.
The reason why the eldest prince was demoted was not because he made a mistake, but because the old emperor did not dare to face criticism after stealing his son's wife, so he sent the eldest prince far away to eliminate the impact.
Your circle is too chaotic!
Zuo Le was stunned. Only these four words were floating in his heart...
Many spectators nearby also made a commotion. It was exciting enough for the prince and the queen to get together before, but now there is "Tang Minghuang 2.0".
Only a few people are blinded by the fact that this screenwriter knows how to play. Go back and check if he has any masterpieces on the digital moderator website and give it a read.
Let’s go back to the movie itself. The old emperor couldn’t bear it when his dark history was revealed. He was about to kill the queen. The fourth prince, who had always been a little transparent, suddenly killed the prince with a sword.
Everyone was stunned. The queen held the prince's body and cried bitterly. The old emperor was also sad and angry.
Although the prince fell in love with him, he never thought about deposing the prince. Instead, he blamed all the faults on the queen, and now he let this brat be killed.
The fourth prince hysterically complained that the emperor had neglected him for a long time. He hated the old emperor and even his mother, Concubine Wan.
Because Concubine Wan was thinking about the eldest prince, she regarded the fourth prince born from her union with the emperor as a shame, and showed no care at all.
The neglect of his parents made the fourth prince completely crazy. He said that he knew everything and took advantage of the mutiny today to kill the emperor and several princes. The throne would be his.
Then the fourth prince called out seven or eight guards and prepared to regicide and rebel. But rebellion is not that simple.
The old emperor was so strong that he killed all the guards and then beat the fourth prince to death with a golden belt.
As soon as the fourth prince died, Concubine Wan, who had been too lazy to pay attention to him before, suddenly awakened to maternal love and looked at the old emperor with hatred in her eyes.
However, the old emperor didn't bother to care about her at all, because at this time, the third prince led 10,000 imperial guardsmen in gold armor and started a bloody battle with the silver armor ambush army arranged by the old emperor.
This war scene was shot so spectacularly that even Zuo Le was stunned. He asked himself, at least now he doesn't have this skill.
What shocked him even more was that after the war, countless palace maids and eunuchs came on the scene, quickly and methodically restoring the messy and bloody battlefield to the magnificent palace banquet before.
Watching this scene, Zuo Le was absolutely amazed.
There is no protagonist, not a single line, but in the elegant and solemn ritual music, it talks about the supremacy of imperial power, which is vividly expressed.
These two scenes made Zuo Le put away his previous contempt and become serious again.
The prince died and the fourth child died.
The emperor looked tiredly at the bloody third prince and the exhausted queen, and gave the third prince one last chance to feed the queen poison. The crown prince's position would be his.
The third "Mama's Baby" prince refused and kissed himself with his sword. The queen also died, leaving the emperor sitting on the chrysanthemum stage, alone.
The movie is not over yet at this time.
There are two banquets in the Golden Night Banquet. This is the first one, and the following is the second one.
A wife and three sons died at a night banquet, and the old emperor's body became a little unbearable. He put aside his past grudges and prepared to summon the eldest prince back to inherit the throne.
So, King Li, who had been hiding behind the scenes, took action.
Through flashback clips, it is explained that the fourth prince killed the prince. Although it was due to his own character, it was also because King Li was instigating him behind the scenes.
Now that the plot succeeded, King Li deceived Concubine Wan again and told her that the old emperor was planning to eradicate the problem and kill the eldest prince.
Concubine Wan deeply hated the emperor because of the death of the fourth prince, and was concerned about the safety of her old lover the eldest prince, so she and Emperor Li staged "Candlelight Ax Shadow 2.0" to kill the old emperor.
After the emperor died, the powerful King Li ascended to the throne and took his beautiful sister-in-law Concubine Wan as his queen, calling her Queen Wan.
King Li... No, the process of Emperor Li's ascension to the throne was not very clean. He just wanted to remove all obstacles. The first target was the old emperor's only living son, the eldest prince.
After Empress Wan learned about Emperor Li's thoughts, she worked with Qixu and Shenzi to secretly protect the eldest prince.
At the same time, Emperor Li's daughter Princess Qing (Mr. Zhou) also had an unspeakable admiration for the eldest cousin who played with her when she was a child, and she tried every means to mediate for the eldest prince in front of Emperor Li.
audience:"……"
Okay, mother and son, father-in-law and daughter-in-law are already there. It is not a new thing for a brother-in-law to dominate a sister-in-law and a cousin to love a cousin.
The eldest prince also knew about what happened in the capital. He didn't know the specific situation. He only knew that his parents and brothers were gone, his uncle had taken over, and he had taken over his baby mother and old lover.
In this situation, everyone thought that Emperor Li had harmed the emperor's family, and the eldest prince was no exception, and he was ready to take revenge.
The revenge plan was very simple. He still had some followers, so he was going to go back and kill Emperor Li.
Emperor Li's position was unfair, and there were many old emperor's confidants in the court. The eldest prince was the eldest son of the late emperor. As long as Emperor Li was removed, he would be the hero and the best successor to the throne. When the time came, he would stand up and shout, and the world would be settled.
Emperor Li also understood this truth, so he wanted to kill the eldest prince first.
But first he was seduced by Wanhou's beauty, and he was also a mad lover of women. Princess Qing even blocked the eldest prince's knife, but he couldn't punish her harshly.
Under the entanglement of the two women, Emperor Li was still unable to kill the eldest prince, and the eldest prince was also preparing a revenge plan while playing a love triangle with the two women with whom he had a complicated relationship.
Finally, the second night party of the movie began.
At the banquet, the eldest prince personally acted as an actor and reenacted the scene where Emperor Li killed the old emperor in front of all the civil and military officials.
Under the testimony of the witness Wan Hou, Emperor Li was forced to take poison, but before he died, he planned to pull Wan Hou away with him. At the critical moment, the eldest prince stepped forward and blocked Wan Hou's sword.
Emperor Li died, his sword was poisonous, so the eldest prince also died, and Queen Wan became the only survivor of this power struggle.
Just when all the viewers thought that "Wu Zetian 2.0" was about to emerge, Princess Wan Houqing took her away with a flying knife.
The reason was that Empress Wan was forced to kill her father, and also implicated the eldest prince. After killing Empress Wan, Princess Qing also committed suicide.
Two evening banquets.
Two waves of destruction!
The members of the royal family died cleanly, leaving only a group of civil and military officials looking at each other in shock.
Most of the audience was also confused. What kind of movie is this? A whole family is killed indiscriminately, and they all die in the end. The screenwriter must be sick.
Zuo Le roughly saw the intention of the director and screenwriter. The theme of this movie is very clear, which is to satirize the royal power struggle.
It is a metaphor that under the oppression of the royal family by feudal ethics and desire for power, human nature fell into madness and became inhuman, ghosts and ghosts, and ethics and morality were forgotten.
In the end, the whole family dies, which is also a reflection and criticism of the imperial feudal autocratic system.
………
Frankly speaking, Zuo Le still likes the connotation and conception of "Golden Night Banquet", which is profound.
Especially in the first half, aside from the messy emotional drama, it really feels a bit like "Thunderstorm".
Moreover, the theme of anti-feudal parents in "Thunderstorm" has been directly raised to a higher level, becoming anti-feudal and imperial autocracy. I dare not say it is a sublimation, but it can be regarded as another interpretation.
In the second half, the eldest prince's scene in Shakespeare's "The Revenge of the Prince" is borrowed, which seems to be a bit of a continuation of the story.
And it may be due to the length of time that the two plots cannot be spread out. Compared with the first half of the Double Ninth Night Banquet, the progress of the second plot is obviously a bit thin and anxious.
In the second night banquet, which is the highlight, the death of the villain Emperor Li was too careless, and the deaths of the eldest prince and Queen Wan were also inexplicable, which was a bit forced to kill the plot.
Comparing the spectacular war scene in the first half with Zuo Le's favorite scene of cleaning up the battlefield and re-arranging the night banquet, the second night banquet is not as powerful as the finale at all.
Judging from the plot line, it would not be an overstatement to describe it as anticlimactic.
In addition, "Golden Night Banquet" has many advantages. Whether it is the graphics, photography, service, and soundtrack, they are all of a very high level, and can even be said to be at the top level in the Chinese film industry.
The acting skills of the actors are not critical. Except for Zhou Tianwang, who was a little let down, the other actors lived up to their honors as Best Actor and Best Actress, and contributed a quite wonderful feast of acting skills.
Zuo Le was hooked on watching several scenes of emperor and empress, Emperor Li and Empress Wan, and couldn't get enough of them.
These are the advantages, let’s talk about the disadvantages.
First, the relationship between the characters is too confusing.
Zuo Le understood that the screenwriter and director were probably trying to intensify the impact to show the nastiness and filthiness of the imperial autocracy.
But to be honest, the screenwriter tried his best.
One or two people are okay, but if the whole family is messing around, not all viewers will be able to accept it.
Second, the emotional drama is bloody.
This is also what Zuo Le thinks is the biggest failure. Just write about power struggle, and you have to add emotional scenes into it.
Of course, Zuo Le also understands that these dramas are meant to show the brilliance of humanity in the darkness, but they are too bloody. They are just some unethical feelings, and they are very messy.
You love her, she loves him, he loves her, and she still loves him. What he really loves is her, and she actually loves him...
Zuo Le almost didn't recognize these two words.
In fact, the emotional scenes in the movie "Golden Night Banquet" are not only about love, but also about family affection.
The old emperor had a father-son relationship with the prince and the third prince, and the third prince was also very filial to the queen. Emperor Li was sinister and cunning, but he doted on Princess Qing. When the eldest prince came back for revenge, he often missed the scenes of playing with several of them when he was a child.
But the damn thing is, thanks to those unethical feelings, the audience's ideas were led astray by the movie.
Even if the movie shows family affection, people will automatically think of other things, such as——
Did the third prince have some thoughts in his heart when he fought tooth and nail for the queen? Was there any unspeakable emotion behind Emperor Li's mad love for his daughter?
Not to mention ordinary viewers, even Zuo Le was a little vague. Is there any emotional line that was hidden in detail and he didn't see it?
Third, the actors' performance methods and lines are not down to earth.
Most of the leading actors act with an enigmatic attitude, their lines are cloudy and misty, and they are particularly pretentious.
In fact, the setting is quite suitable for their status. As a royal family, it is normal for them to speak in a roundabout way because of their status.
But it is quite unfriendly to some viewers.
There is a saying in the industry that you should never overestimate the understanding ability of the audience, especially commercial movies, which are aiming for the box office. If you play riddles with the audience, and the audience spends money to buy tickets and is filled with questions, isn't this just infuriating?
That's all. After all, the plot is not difficult. There are a few incomprehensible joints, but it doesn't hinder the overall situation.
But the most important thing is that the narrative style of "The Golden Banquet" is a bit more like a drama and Shakespeare's drama.
To be honest, it is okay for ordinary audiences who have not received certain education to watch dramas, but most people will not be able to adapt to watching Shakespeare.
Just like ordinary people watching Peking Opera for the first time, they don't understand the key points and can't appreciate the charm.
Under such circumstances, it is undoubtedly very unpleasant for "Golden Night Banquet" to take the path of "combination of Chinese and Western styles".
Even in Zuo Le's opinion, it's just the director and screenwriter who are enjoying themselves...
………
Overall, "The Golden Banquet" is a movie with very obvious advantages and disadvantages.
Lovers love it very much and regard it as a classic.
People who don't like it think it's very bad, the core is empty and lacking, and their feelings have been deceived. They can't wait to rush to Zhang Kaigang and shout "rnm, refund your money!!!".
It is only now that Zuo Le finally understands why "Golden Night Banquet" has such polarized reputation.
Even he himself doesn't know how to evaluate this movie.
I say it is a bad movie, but there are many excellent things about it. I say it is a good movie, but when I look at the shortcomings, I feel that it is not worthy.
“…”
Lao Zhang is indeed one of the most famous directors in the country. He can make such a confusing movie, and Zuo Le is the one who feels inferior.
