Hu Ge is a first-rate TV actor and a second-rate movie actor.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s coffee or acting.
From "The Legend of Immortals and Swords" to "Langya Ranking" to "Flowering Flowers", Hu Ge has had a hit drama at every stage of his acting career.
But compared with TV dramas, Hu Ge starred in fewer movies, and even fewer masterpieces were produced.
So far, the best film of Hu Ge’s career is probably "The Wild Goose Lake" directed by Diao Yinan.
Recently, he starred in the theater film "Stop and Go" was released, and I thought that this movie starring Hu Ge could be ranked second.
Compared to "The Wild Goose Lake", there is no way, and there is a gap in grades between directors. But compared to "It’s Worth It", which won the Best Actor of the Shanghai Film Festival for Hu Ge before, "Stop and Go" has similarities in genre and theme, but the overall is much better.
More importantly, "The Wild Goose Lake" is more significant to Diao Yinan than Hu Ge, and Hu Ge’s performance in it can be regarded as futile at best, but "Stop and Go" has opened up a new track for Hu Ge.
Let’s talk about the movie itself first.
"Stop and Go" is a very "small" movie.
It had nothing to do with grandeur. It was about the little things that happened to the little people, and the director didn’t have much ambition. He didn’t want his movie to be linked to the big word "era".
The key word for the film is two words, go home. To put it more bluntly, it is the other two words, lie flat.
Wu Di, the protagonist played by Hu Ge, belongs to the North Drift Return crowd.
He worked as a screenwriter in Beijing, but he repeatedly hit a wall, and eventually failed in his emotional career and couldn’t get along, so he returned to his hometown of Sichuan.
In crime movies, this kind of person is most likely to have a big vote, but in literary movies, the trash will of course continue to live in a way that is heartbroken but free on the surface.
After Wu Di returned to his hometown, he immediately entered a state of mixed eating and waiting to die. A scene that reflects his state is that he is mixed in a group of the elderly queuing up to get eggs.
This scene also formed a connection with the main storyline, Gao Yuanyuan played the heroine Feng Liuliu appeared, as the host of the TV station, she was shooting this group of eggs for the elderly, but accidentally found high school classmate Wu Di mixed in.
Therefore, she came up with an idea to make a documentary with Wu Di as the protagonist.
Feng Liuliu’s behavior of shooting whatever he wants is very inconsistent with the tonality of local TV stations. The local stations in our impression, in addition to broadcasting painless advertisements and selling drugs for the elderly, will at most provide local leaders with a platform to show their self-charm. A host casually catches an old classmate and wants to shoot a documentary. This is nonsense among nonsense.
But nonsense is nonsense, the scene where Wu Di and Feng Liuliu met for the first time was really good.
Fortunately, the description of the characters.
The highlight is in the conversation between the two.
Wu Di met Feng Liuliu and was a little embarrassed, saying that he was "Gap". This reaction was very accurate. He bluntly said that he was unemployed and went home. Although he was honest, he was too sad, which would make the temperament of the film dim all of a sudden. He pretended to say that he actually had a job and just went home for vacation, and it was too hypocritical, which made the character unpleasant. He said that he was in "Gap", which was in line with the characteristics of the character as a literary youth.
Feng Liuliu is the character of an idealist in the film, and her ideas are relatively simple, which is also in line with the appearance of the actor. After all, if she grows into Gao Yuanyuan, she will not be beaten too much in reality. The characteristics of idealists are that they are easy to fake and empty, like to talk useless big words, and are especially willing to pretend to be very realistic. When she met Wu Di, she wanted to make a documentary, and she also said this sentence:
Middle-aged people like you often face a double burden.
Note that it’s not just middle-aged male characters who have fatherhood.
Wu Di’s reaction was very good. He didn’t think he was a middle-aged man, so he was stunned. He repeated the words "middle-aged man", but it became a question.
You look at Wu Di as if he should have eaten and slept when he returned home, but in fact, he didn’t. At this moment, he was stunned and exposed everything. Wu Di was just running away from his failure like a child.
Feng Liuliu took it well, saying that you are two months older than me, why are you not middle-aged?
Wu Di took it better. He didn’t follow the topic and turned a corner. What he said was:
You still remember my birthday.
The oppressive atmosphere caused by Feng Liuliu not speaking human words was instantly reversed, and Wu Di’s personality characteristics were once again highlighted. More importantly, the relationship between the two people was brought closer by this line.
In the film, Feng Liuliu may not really take Wu Di’s birthday seriously. Wu Di is very surprised. It is probably a reaction at that time. It does not mean that he will rekindle love because of this information point, but in the eyes of the audience, they will naturally look forward to something happening between them.
This made the movie look good. Many viewers would subconsciously shy away from literary films because some directors of literary films were too boring to film. Whether or not the artistry was put aside for the time being, and the audience could not see it, it would be difficult to find your artistic exploration and ideological expression.
The advantages and disadvantages of "Stop and Go" are symbiotic. His advantages are that the details are handled humanely, the characters are fresh enough, the lines are well written, and the rhythm is properly arranged. The disadvantage is that the living environment provided to the protagonist Wu Di in the film is a purified ideal world, as if as long as he returns home, everything will really be quiet, and even the opportunity to realize his ideal will appear.
Feng Liuliu made a documentary for Wu Di, saw the script written by Wu Di, and suggested that he make a movie. As a result, Wu Di really started filming.
This matter is no longer science fiction, and can basically be included in the category of magic.
Wu Di, who failed in Beipiao, should understand what the three words of making a movie mean. Don’t look at the Apple advertisement saying that you need a mobile phone to make a movie. Although Xu Lei used his father to make "Sherlock on the Plain", it also cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Of course, Wu Di had no money, so Wu Di’s mother gave Wu Di his father’s private money, but it was not much, 10,000 yuan.
What if there are no actors? His mother, Jiang Meiling, is the female lead, and the male lead? Call Lao Li, the pillar of the drama troupe. Lao Li also cooperated very much, and he was so idle that he agreed immediately.
Wu Di could be both a director and a screenwriter, so where could he find a photographer? Feng Liuliu didn’t want to make a documentary, but the TV station had a photographer. Coincidentally, this photographer liked Ozu as much as Wu Di, and also had the dream of making movies, so he was willing to volunteer labor, so he didn’t have to worry about the equipment, so he just appropriated it.
All the idealists in Sichuan surrounded Wu Di.
It has to be said that when these "golden fingers" accumulate to a certain extent, the reality of the film has been stripped away. In a sense, it is no different from a martial arts film. The difference is that martial arts may really exist, but the vacuum environment Wu Di is in is absolutely impossible to exist.
But what’s great about "Stop and Go" is that it held me back with characters and details.
I knew that the movie was a nonsense, but I was still attracted by it. I knew that there wasn’t much left in the movie’s reality, but I was still moved by the characters in the movie.
This is a very contradictory point, but it also reflects a certain dilemma faced by domestic film creators. Some of them are really good at making movies, especially writing single scenes, and know how to impress audiences, but the subject matter they have to deal with is likely to be either as distorted as air or as tasteless as water.
The scenes in the main plot of "Stop and Go" were shot with a high degree of completion, vividly portraying the Wu Di family and Lao Li and other characters, completing each single scene with great fun, and also making the emotional concentration become higher and higher in the development of the film’s plot. Finally, Wu Di’s father made up the shots for his deceased wife, which reached the peak of the moving level.
As far as the temperament of the film is concerned, there is a bit of Woody Allen’s taste. The director not only pays tribute to Woody Allen with the name of the male lead and the poster on the wall, but also has a touch of humor and sadness.
What really made me like the movie more than disappointed was the director’s handling of the ending.
If something really happened to Wu Di and Feng Liuliu in the film, then the film would be completely deflated. The director is very smart, and at the end of the film, Wu Di took over his sister’s class and became a taxi driver. The driving encountered congestion, and as a result, he met Feng Liuliu’s family who had been reunited with his ex-husband. Two lanes, two people and two cars stopped and stopped, the cars did not intersect, and there was no conversation. Everything was just right, with a little regret, but isn’t life like this?
This ending is ingenious enough, designed and natural. It is the point of the full score composition, but it is not so contrived, which is in line with the overall life flow of the film.
The director will arrange for Wu Di to become a taxi driver at the end, indicating that he knows what reality is like, and that he can make Wu Di and the others’ filming process interesting, indicating that he knows what life is like, but unfortunately, he still failed to find the perfect balance between realism and literary temperament. Inevitably, there will be distortion, but since the completion is high enough, many audiences, including me, can tolerate its shortcomings.
In other words, this is indeed a movie with a good sentence but no good chapter, but compared to many domestic films that don’t even have a good sentence, it is already a general among the shorts.
For Hu Ge, the significance of this film is that it allows Hu Ge to meet a particularly suitable role for him, that is, a dejected Wenqing boy with a bit of optimism.
In addition, although it is a bit far-fetched to classify "Stop and Go" as a comedy, if Hu Ge can use this film to realize that he can do comedy, and other directors can also see Hu Ge’s potential in comedy films, it will open up a few new possibilities for Hu Ge’s acting career.
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