Movie Master

In 1997, Boogie Nights came out. In the year when Titanic occupied the field of vision, this work became the object of much attention, because it announced the birth of a genius, Paul Thomas Anderson. He appeared in people's field of vision once, and in the following five years, he successively released two works, Magnolia and Wild Love, and successively won the best director at the Cannes Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival Award, only thirty-two years old, has become a generation of film masters.

In 2003, City of God debuted, and people were amazed that after Paul, another film genius appeared in the world. However, compared with Paul, Lance's artistic creation source seems not so sufficient. Interrupted people's expectations. Although this commercial film achieved a big success at the box office, it was criticized by professional film critics, who believed that this was the beginning of Lance's fall. But then, Murder with a Borrowing Knife and City of Sin appeared one after another, and people suddenly realized: this genius has never been sunk, on the contrary, he has always been groping and exploring in the balance of business and art, and he is even better than Paul Paul. Still farther and deeper.

When the mystery of Sin City was unveiled, people couldn't help but marvel. At only thirty-two years old, Lance had already created his own crime trilogy, which brought the indifference and cruelty of the real society to the fore. It was put on the big screen and displayed without reservation, whipping everyone's inner moral bottom line.

From the self-proclaimed justice launched by the United States against the Iraq war, to the sanctimoniousness of the Catholic Church's violation of innocent underage children, the crime trilogy will show the cruel truth behind these facts: no one is innocent, just like Rashomon Similarly, everyone in the society bears responsibilities, like heavy shackles, and no one can stay out of it.

Real and cruel, violent and bloody, delicate and profound. Lance injected powerful energy into the crime trilogy, like a blow to the head, shocking everyone with skills, and leaving a profound aftertaste.

Roger Ebert is the most authoritative film critic in the United States, and Kirk Honeycutt's Film Review is the most authoritative professional magazine in the United States. Both have justified Lance's name and not only gave Sin City full marks With a 100-point evaluation, it also presented the context of the crime trilogy to the public, and truly put Lance on the throne of master. Even if he is not yet, he is already a reserve.

Such a situation was definitely something no one could have predicted before Sin City was released. Even Lance himself did not dare to be so arrogant.

Of course, Lance hopes that someone can read the core idea of ​​the crime trilogy. This is not only his painstaking blueprint, but also his bold attempt to break through the shackles and a breakthrough in breaking out of the halo of rebirth. Because Lance deeply knows that he cannot always follow the pace of history—his own existence itself is the countercurrent of the long river of history. If he does not want to be wiped out by the torrent of history, he must constantly break free and seek breakthroughs. .

The crime trilogy is an attempt to break through the shackles, and it is also an attempt to position himself in art.

But objectively speaking, as a cult movie, Sin City is indeed too eye-catching in terms of image stylization. This is a positive or negative work. It is almost impossible to either like it to fanaticism or loathe it to vomit. Intermediate values ​​appear. So, it's all a high wire adventure.

Unexpectedly, two people, Roger and Kirk, stood up and supported Sin City, and even conducted an in-depth analysis of the connotation of the movie. All fantastic results. However, reality is reality. This is not a novel, let alone a movie. The protagonist cannot kill all directions wantonly, nor can he never die. When the first batch of reviews of Sin City were released, Lance's guess was still became a reality.

Polarization, the media commented on the extreme experience of ice and fire, the frenzy of praise and the torrential rain of criticism, the two extreme comments complemented each other, creating the first media frenzy when the summer holidays of 2005 came, and The Chicago Sun, Film Review and the tit-for-tat media are united in their hatred, and the leading figure among them is the San Francisco Chronicle, which is well-known on the west coast.

Glamorous! Lancelot will inevitably go to the end of talent exhaustion.

This editorial written by Brian Barlow undoubtedly pointed the finger of criticism at Lance. Bryan gave an extremely dazzling zero score at the beginning of the article, declaring his support for this issue in such a shocking gesture. The attitude of the film, and the article is full of firepower, almost criticizing the entire film work to nothing.

Lancelot has done it again: succeeds in making the action paler, more incomprehensible, more self-contained.

Looking back on Lancelot's past four works, it seems that this law continues, one work is more empty, weaker, and more boring than the other, and then a lot of color and light are used to fill in the blanks to cover up the boring and empty plot.

We used to think that Murder with a Borrowed Knife was already an abyss. From the rich and intertwined plots of City of God, to the weak and boring two-pronged approach of The Day After Tomorrow, to Murder with a Borrowed Knife the whole story only tells why one killer Bad story about not killing a taxi driver but killing himself. We thought he had hit rock bottom, but obviously, we were all naive.

In Sin City, Lancelot is all about one thing: killing. From the killing in the first act to the killing in the fourth act, without any plot at all, we only saw a group of people killing each other inexplicably, and what is even more absurd is that everyone seems to agree with this The story line, let the killing continue to spread, and finally evolved into a large-scale killing of everyone.

There are no characters, no story, no ins and outs, no emotional ups and downs, not even a specific climax, just pure carnage. Lancelot used 126 minutes to tell a story of killing, telling all audiences that we can choose different ways of killing, but the ending is the same: death.

So, maybe this movie still has something to tell us not to use violence lightly.

We used to think that such naive B-grade movies have been eliminated by the long river of time, rough, direct, inferior, strong sensory stimulation, violence and pornography are flooding the big screen, trying to arouse the audience's desire/desire, simply feel The pulsation of the flesh, and then unscrupulously amplify this stimulation to the limit. History has proved that B-level movies can be successful, but they are no longer suitable for the current market. The simple and rude without any artistic quality has been completely eliminated. Now Lancelot once again deliberately An attempt to reawaken the love for B-movies.

Lancelot spent a lot of time on color and lighting, doing everything in his power to amplify that sensual delight to the extreme. There is a scene in the movie that impressed the audience: Jessica Alba stood almost naked on the bar, waving a whip, like a queen of S/M, and the men in the audience let their beasts/desires go Get the upper hand and lose control. This is the core content of the whole movie of Sin City. It deliberately uses plasma to stimulate people's emotions and flesh to stimulate people's desire/desire. This reminds me of the southern movie theaters in the 1930s.

Perhaps, if Lancelot is interested, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights could find him a job.

The so-called B-grade films are not the so-called film grading, but the registration of the production investment. It mainly refers to works with a short shooting cycle and low production budget. Good quality, even plagiarize the current popular plot mode.

In the 1930s, there was a distinction between A-grade movies and B-grade movies in Hollywood. The former naturally refers to works with huge investment and excellent production. When Wind Talker suffered a disastrous failure, film critics satirized this work as a B-level film produced by A-level, and now B-level films represent more inferior, rough, and low-quality labels, and many film critics even refer to Porn/erotic action movies are called B-grade movies. This is where Brian's last sarcasm comes from.

The only part of the movie that is worth remembering and recorded in the annals of history is the undisguised and unscrupulous violence scenes. The bloody and arrogant cruelty runs through every detail of the screen, challenging the audience with a flamboyant and arrogant attitude. It is pushing the bottom line of American violent movies and challenging the bottom line of the film classification system. Obviously, this is not just an R-rated movie. This is not just a B-rated movie.”

At the end of the article, Bryan once again mocked the shoddy production of Sin City, and also alluded to the fact that the movie should be classified as NC-17 instead of R. From the beginning to the end of the article, Brian criticized relentlessly, and the rock-bottom evaluation of zero points epitomized his disdain for the film.

Bryan's views complement Roger's and Kirk's. The two extreme comments are puzzling, and even create an illusion: Are they really watching the same movie? How can it be possible that some people are full of praise, while others scoff at it? Even the difference in aesthetic standards is not enough to explain the huge drop from one hundred to zero.

But the fact is that, not only these three media, but looking at the first batch of comments on Sin City, you can deeply feel that this polarized word-of-mouth war has just begun, and it is just the tip of the iceberg. The extreme commentary on Sin City is far beyond imagination, such a scene was dubbed by the Boston Globe as a media collective climax-yes, this is the one that recently became famous for exposing the Catholic scandal. home media.