“Pay attention, this man’s name is Xiaoshuai, and the woman in his arms is Xiaomei. Just at the critical juncture between the two of them, Foboule’s voice suddenly came from the door.”
You must have heard such a film and television commentary on the subway, in restaurants, and on the Douyin of colleagues around you.
But you must not expect that this commentary is actually a classic fragment of Ximen Qing and Pan Jinlian’s affair in “Water Margin”.
At the moment when Chinese movies are endangered, short video film and television commentary is flourishing in another corner. In the interpretive universe built by millions of accounts, all the characters in the long history have entered a different dimension world.
In this mysterious land, all men are called Xiaoshuai, all women are called Xiaomei, the police are called Fubole (the pinyin of FBL, a misspelling of the FBI), the bad guys are called Sangbiao, and passersby are called Xiaomei kalami.
This group of people who share their names forms an electronic mustard called “talk about the movie in 3 minutes”, which is delicious and convenient, and enriches the spiritual space of contemporary people; at the same time, they are like a blade, precisely cut on the artery of the movie .
The movie is being dismembered by Xiaoshuai and Xiaomei.
No contemporary person can refuse an electronic mustard.
You can imagine any environment – when you are eating alone, when you are in a daze on the subway, when you are squatting on the toilet, when you can’t sleep in the middle of the night – you urgently need an electronic mustard, otherwise real life is cheaper than cheap The takeaway food package is still hard to swallow, and everyone is forced to experience an endless mental constipation.
In the dazzling electronic menu, you must have brushed this kind of dishes. A movie you may have heard of, but never seen, appears on the screen, and the AI robs you of your attention with a false cadence: Look, this woman’s name is Xiaomei, and she’s poisoning a glass of water .
Next, Xiaomei and Xiaoshuai are going to embark on a tedious journey. There will be a big guy named Dazhuang next to him. The coquettish bitch might as well call her Damei. Sangbiao is planning a crime, but it doesn’t matter. Arrested.
Your attention drifts by like a puff of smoke. You couldn’t help but listen to the AI’s stiff voice until the progress bar came to the end, and you found that the story came to an abrupt end. I just listened to one-third of the movie and devoured the remaining two-thirds of the wreckage like a beggar.
This is your secret Guilty Pleasure as an intellectual. You ask yourself, you can be regarded as someone who respects the art of film. But for some reason, when you encounter this kind of low-level and cheap film and television commentary, you still waste countless 3 minutes unknowingly.
After the video ends, you feel a sense of emptiness, like eating a plate of frozen zombie meat that was slowly fried in gutter oil when you were extremely hungry.Full is full, but no nutrition, and even feel a pang of indigestion nausea.
Admit it, each of us is a consumer of short video commentary. But what’s more interesting than this is that in fact, everyone can disassemble the production routine of film and television commentary videos.
The first thing that catches the eye must be the most central, dramatic and jaw-dropping segment of a movie. This clip is like a bait on a fishing hook. The fatter the bait and the more exciting the taste, the more traffic will be retained and the bounce rate will be reduced.
In “Gone Lover”, this clip may be the scene of the heroine Amy drawing blood to create a crime scene; in “Seven Deadly Sins”, this clip may be the scene where the bulimic fat man is forced to choke to death in the leftovers; in “The Seven Deadly Sins” In “Old Boy”, it may be the scene where Choi Min-sik eats octopus alive.
And these climax scenes are likely to appear in 1/2 or even 2/3 of a movie. But film and television commentators don’t care about the beginnings and turns of the plot, they only care about whether the opening scene has enough visual impact.
“This man held the orchid finger and ate the first bite of fried chicken in his life, and then he asked the driver, where did the bones go?” – This is the opening of the “Green Book” commentary.
“This is the strongest avenger I’ve ever seen, and the best way to treat a rapist is to turn him into a woman” – this is the opening of Almodovar’s “The Skin of My Place”.
“This clown came to a variety show, and inexplicably robbed and killed the host” – this is the opening of the “Clown” commentary.
“This man has a special hobby: pretending to be blind, so that he can spy on other people unscrupulously” – this is the opening of the commentary of the Indian film “The Tuner”.
Have you found what they have in common?
At the beginning of a video commentary, the most exciting elements must be highlighted: sexual innuendo, crime and murder, conflict and contradiction. The most tense shots in every film are used as bait.
It doesn’t matter why this fragment appeared;It doesn’t matter what this clip echoes before and after; no one cares about the ingenious empty shots and transitions in this movie.
The commentary of the movie “Prometheus” won’t show you how many grand but empty empty mirrors in this movie, because these empty mirrors do not have the exciting plot of “unarmed caesarean section”. In fact, none of these meaningless shots are superfluous, they are the world conceived by H.R. Giger, the father of aliens.
In the film commentary, all serious settings can be replaced by jokey language.
“A Box of Instant Chocolates”
The taboo of being a film commentator is procrastination. Since a person chooses to click on the video of “Talking about a movie in X minutes”, he does not expect to obtain any redundant information from this work “for the time being called a movie”, and aesthetics has become the first burden to be excluded. . Everyone is speeding up the culinary culture of fast food, and the warehouses of the world‘s movies may not be enough.
To be a film and television commentator, you must have an attitude of dissolving everything. The names of foreigners are too long to remember, so they are changed to Gangdan and Cuihua, allowing people to travel from Sicily to Ivory Mountain in one second. Human nature is too complicated to skip and not explain, all affairs are obtained and punished by everyone.All poverty is caused by laziness, and all murderers will eventually be arrested and brought to justice by Foboule.
This is Damei, Cuihua, Awei, Gangdan
The whole purpose is to help the audience minimize the cost of understanding. What the narrator needs to do is not only to chew the rice, but also to chew it, and turn a film with a complete structure into a puddle of unrecognizable paste, which is convenient for the audience to swallow.
After dizzying and boringly swiping for dozens of minutes of video commentary, we curled up on the sofa and gradually became the meatless pigs in “Spirited Away”, with only swallowing, the only emotionless action left. .
Does everyone want to see a movie condensed into powdery, uninteresting minutes?
There are both supporters and opponents. Some people are happy, some people are worried.
For an ordinary audience, film and television commentators avoid bad dramas and bad films for them in advance, and judge whether a film suits their tastes in the most efficient way, which is equivalent to a video-based film planting process.
“If I think the film is worth watching after watching the explanation, then I will find a way to find resources to watch the full version. This method of watching the film is very useful, and it also gives me the motivation to watch the film.”
Xiao Li next to me told me that he is a staunch movie commentator, “Assuming your work is very saturated, will you still open a 2-hour movie and enjoy it slowly after working overtime at nine o’clock in the evening? No one who has ever worked would have such a spare time.”
For Xiao Li, film commentary is an efficient tool in a tired life.
And for the purer movie lovers, they may not be able to accept an era of “interpretation killing movies”.
Sanliang is a typical movie fan. Born in the 1990s, he grew up in the laser light and shadow of pirated discs.
“When I was a child, there was an audio-visual store in front of my yard. The owner was my film teacher. What kind of discs did I watch? Some of them didn’t even know their names. Knowing how many Douban top 250 I watched in the disc store in those years, I don’t know how stupidly.”
With the advent of the digital wave, audio-visual stores finally closed down. Later, Sanliang accidentally saw a program called “The Tenth Screening Room” in the central ten set.
In just a few minutes, the show became the love of his entire teenage years. “I still remember that there were no Douban and film critics at all at that time. The most powerful film critic was CCTV.”
The tenth screening room has commented on many film masters and commercial blockbusters, and the language is spicy and humorous – and in the current era of film review inflation, we may never see such accurate and objective film reviews again.
In 2015,A man named Gu Amo appeared, and he invented the product “X Minutes Talking Movies”.
With a Taiwanese accent, he deconstructed bad films into jokes and scolding jokes, used nonsense to dispel all serious film themes, and added his own ridiculing film reviews from an outsider’s point of view by breaking the fourth wall.
“She is so pure and unpretentious, so different from those coquettish bitches outside.”
“He’s the protagonist, how could the protagonist die?”
“The two of them slap each other’s lips wildly with their tongues.”
It is humorous that the grandfather who invented “X Minutes Talking about Movies”, after falling into the copyright quagmire, has now been filmed to death on the beach of film and television commentary by younger generations who are gradually streamlined, becoming one of the tears forgotten by history.
After Gu Amo became popular, the series “Blind After Reading” and “Blind Look” also dominated station B.
Different from other film commentaries, they used a slightly neurotic black humor and a sonorous and powerful voice to interpret a large number of film history classics in a perverted way, and captured a large number of fans with “serious nonsense”.
The humor, absurdity and irony of the “Blind” series have not been successfully replicated since then. Such film interpretation and text creation are in themselves an act of artistic creation.
“No. 2 goes to listen to the scriptures, stay in a hotel for the night, go to a restaurant on No. 3, and then watch a movie. Grandpa, the butter bread is delicious.”
“However, according to the principles of quantum physics, thieves do not get away.”
“Son, I’m the mother you want to support but don’t want to kiss.”
“He accidentally broke his arm and couldn’t take care of himself sexually.”
Today, there are still a group of creators who stubbornly maintain the craftsmanship of film and television commentary.
@木鱼水心’s “Film History Story” and “One Thousand and One Ones”, the Lord of the Rings series and the Da Vinci Code series of @ frog knife _1993, the Marvel series of @大g watching movies, @Fuji_Uncle Rose Tasting Game of Thrones series and Jin Yong series…
These film and television area Up masters, which maintain high-intensity and high-density output, continue to create high-quality film and television commentaries. Behind each video, there are hundreds of thousands of words of information and tens of thousands of words of script copy.
A high-quality movie commentary does not only do the basic work of sorting out the plot. They prefer to use a personal perspective to drive the audience to “re-watch” it.
The fans of such Up masters are extremely sticky, because their personal style has surpassed the film and television works they interpret. Audiences want to see their interpretations, most of them already know the film and television works well, and they want to see their subjective opinions as film critics.
And such a craftsman’s explanation with the selling point of “slow work and careful work” has gradually become a rare treasure of the Internet. The mainstream group no longer needs to interpret the words frame by frame, so the commentary dealers who sell the video information at the fastest speed come on stage. They quickly fill every corner of your short video software in the form of fission like psoriasis.
The latest TV series on the Internet, even if you haven’t had time to download the resources, you can be spoiled by opening Douyin; movies that are not released in theaters, just search Douyin to see the full version of the movie.
Behind the buttocks of producers and consumers, there is an invisible whip whipping fast – make faster, consume faster, digest faster. We are all like hamsters trapped in the wheel of speed, running on the wheel in confusion and anxiety.
The next second the finger slides up, the “seen” number on the Douban sheet can be increased by one again.
But we ask ourselves, after reading the commentary for less than ten minutes, is it really “seen”?
The field of film commentary has long attracted many MCN institutions to enter the game.
Searching for Douyin MCN institutions under the category of “TV Variety Shows” on the new Douu platform, there are 10 companies covering 5-10 million fans, 17 companies covering 10-50 million fans, and 50 million fans – There are 4 companies with more than 100 million fans, and 6 companies with more than 100 million fans.
Take “You Hao Xi”, a giant MCN agency in Guangzhou as an example, there are 92 accounts related to its film and television commentary. Among them, there are many famous professional film critics “Poison Tongue Movie” (60 million+ fans), “David’s Crazy Cut” (11 million+ fans), which mainly focuses on editing video clips, and “One Red Star”, which focuses on interpreting the main theme movies. “(6 million+ followers), “Bangbanglai” (5 million+ followers), which focuses on women’s fashion content, and so on. These assembly line MCNs together form the regular army of film and television commentators.
It seems that, from cultural entertainment, gossip variety shows, geography, humanities, historical myths, whether you can’t think of it or what you want, in any field on earth that can be used to explain, large-scale MCN institutions have already spread their stalls, and they don’t want to occupy the pit. Location.
But “3 minutes to talk about the movie” seems to be an exception.
Searching for “film and television commentary” on Taobao, tutorials for dozens of dollars are flying all over the sky. The current short video operation teaching market is so saturated that even a drop of water cannot be squeezed in. Just click on a tutorial product with the highest sales, and in the comment area, you can see many self-employed people who teach themselves to do film and television commentaries according to the tutorial. The text is filled with the first joy of self-media business success.
You can buy dozens of movie scripts for 4 yuan 90 cents, and you can learn to edit and operate for 30 yuan. It seems that the door to the new world is 180 degrees open to everyone.
You don’t even have to worry about your speech is not fluent enough and your Mandarin is not standard enough. As long as you can use AI dubbing and do video commentary, you can avoid opening your mouth, which is convenient and fast.
The fake and cadenced male voice we are most familiar with is actually the voice of “Microsoft Yunxi”.
In the Microdoft Azure Cognitive Services cognitive services platform, we can easily find an old acquaintance Yun Xi. As long as you have purchased the voice service, you can also ask Yunxi to narrate a video.
As a result, on the platform, you can see a dense number of film and television commentary accounts, all with similar faces. When these faces stand side by side, they draw an eerie blueprint of the universe at an unexpected speed.
Copy-pasted copy without sincerity starts with “this man/this woman/this alien”, which is like telling infants and young children the storytelling skills of bedtime stories. Even elementary school students can understand “The Godfather”. what a story.
No matter how complicated and esoteric the movie history is, in front of these increasingly mature technologies, it can be disassembled into three fragmented sketches, trying to grab the attention of every passerby.
Video commentary is like a lottery ticket. Anyone can buy a lottery ticket, but not everyone has a chance to win the lottery.
If you are an independent self-employed, it is not difficult to get started; but if you want to continue doing it, it is difficult; if you want to compete with professional MCNs, it is even more difficult.
My friend Fisher Girl is one of the vast number of self-employed film and television commentators. She stepped into this Red Sea inadvertently.
Fisher girl’s own job belongs to the content-related industry, so she has more copywriting foundation than ordinary people. Fortunately, she has more spare time than her peers, and she has enough free time to write scripts after get off work and weekends.
The fisher girl didn’t learn tutorials online, but just explored her own interest and leisure. Her method even seemed too simple: “First cut out the materials that may be used, then start writing the copywriting, and assemble the materials according to the copywriting.” , a video can be produced in about one to two weeks of free time. Even she didn’t use much high-end editing software, and one editing screen can basically meet all needs.
In the process of revisiting an old Korean drama, she picked up her first hot topic at station B-Yin Yaliying, the heroine of the old Korean drama “Miss Mermaid”, is the textbook for flirting with Chinese – this video is at station B The number of plays reached 260,000.
After the fisher girl selects the footage, she uses the copywriting of the love tutorial to connect the footage. You can say that this is a Korean drama commentary, or it can be said that it is based on the Korean drama commentary and adds the creator’s subjective secondary content.
The reason for the explosion seems to be very simple: the main focus of ancient Korean dramas is the collective emotion, coupled with the reproduction of the second deconstruction, it naturally has the appearance of the explosion, but the fisher girl also admits that the explosion is more often relied on luck.
At present, she has 7000+ fans at station B, and Xiaohongshu has 4000+ fans, but due to the low update frequency, fans are slowly declining. The film and television commentary has not yet made her money, but the opportunity is not without it: “Kongguang who had hemorrhoid cream before came to me, and it was only a few hundred dollars. I was afraid of losing powder and didn’t pick it up.”
After this explosion, the fisher girl never made a new explosion, which made her a little troubled. Although film and television commentary is not her main business, she still wants to make this account with her heart. Either way, it’s all about making a way out for your future.
She couldn’t bear to give up the account that she had created in a few months. In the future, she plans to get involved in more film and television-related commentaries, “The scope of Korean dramas is still too small, let’s do more other movies, and I still want to make the account bigger. Some”.
There are more smart people, seeing the saturation of the domestic market, and looking overseas in advance.
Low-cost film and television commentary, which was originally a unique local product in China, has now crossed the ocean and has become a treasure in the palm of foreigners.
On TikTok, a group of “going overseas film and television commentators” emerged six months ago. They appeared in the form of retail investors, and moved domestic Douyin’s film and television commentary videos to TikTok, and the traffic was surprisingly good.
The operation method is very simple, the video content is the commentary of the domestic version, and even the subtitles on some film sources are still in Chinese. Then translate the narration copy into various languages by machine, match the AI dubbing that everyone is familiar with, remove the watermark, and delete the screen that will be screened by plagiarism detection.
Play volume is not low
The seemingly careless production has made foreigners unable to stop. Many netizens are chasing the name of the movie in the comment area, and even urging the next episode, even if the movies themselves are well-known foreign works.
For the Hollywood natives on the other side of the ocean,The film and television commentary with pure Chinese taste can be regarded as another kind of “export to domestic sales” – it is obviously a product of the film industry at your doorstep, and you don’t know it if you change your vest.
In the TikTok version of the AI movie commentary, Xiaomei became Mary, Xiaoshuai became Jack, and the names on the elementary school English textbooks were invited out in turn to go through the motions.
This strange explosion is not without reason.
If overseas audiences want to obtain a movie resource, they often have to subscribe to members of multiple platforms. Major platforms such as Netflix, HBO, Disney, Amazon, and Hulu are lining up to collect tickets.
And overseas viewers who suffer from subscription fees can open TikTok and see the edited version of the commentary, and naturally enjoy it. Overseas netizens who “haven’t seen the big scene” expressed their joy in the comment area: Thank you good people, it turns out that blockbusters can still be watched for free.
There is not much difference between the needs of domestic and foreign basic audiences – to understand the highest density of information with the cheapest time cost, this information will be quickly digested and converted into a light social capital.
They would love to see more films being narrated. In less than ten minutes of video, you can know all the key plots of a movie like the back of your hand, saving countless precious “2 hours” in a high-speed society, why not do it.
Well, here comes the question.
Do we care about the movie itself, or is it a conversation that is casually brought up at the dinner table in the future?
This is not only a problem that movies and fans have to face, but we have accelerated to a superficial and efficient era of mental retardation.
This era no longer needs useless art, aesthetics and philosophy. All cultures can be measured and classified with the most cutting-edge technology, turned into symbols and labels, placed in the bookshelf of everyone’s mind, and used as needed.
The balance of technology and civilization is slowly tilting. At the moment when relying on short videos, everyone may be a consumer and worker of cultural reproduction. We have completed cultural “self-empowerment” with the help of digital media. The traditional one-dimensional cultural output was overwhelmed and turned into a barrage covering the display screen. This is a vigorous deconstruction and arrogance of the “decentralization” of the grand narrative.
However, it is inevitable that this essentially rebellious movement has moved towards a pattern of high homogeneity and capitalization.
Everyone talks about “entertainment to death”, and at the same time, the book “entertainment to death” can appear in the short video of “reading famous novels in three minutes”, and the link on the little yellow car costs only 8 yuan 8 can take a copy home. In this sense, Neil Postman was too optimistic a few decades ago.
At the time, television replaced printed paper; now, the Internet has completely replaced television. Once, Neil Postman painfully warned Americans that indulging in the visual paradise created by technology will unknowingly stifle a nation’s ability to think independently; but now in a world where short videos dominate everything, even Postman sees it. You should also call the insider directly.
In front of short videos, watching TV has even become a “retro behavior” that cannot be understood by young people. Not to mention the cinema, a once noble public space, now we have also witnessed its demise and exit.
“Emotionally, I would be deeply saddened if new technologies end up bringing about the death of cinema, but more than that. Digital technology has replaced film, and there is still no changed film medium, only cinema space. In this sense, I hope to defend the movie so that the physical theater will not be replaced by the virtual theater. Another reason is that the theater is almost the last space where the body meets the body, and I pay more attention to its social significance, which allows us to get out of the house, Enter the real streets and cities, and everyone shares space.” – Dai Jinhua
Coleridge wrote in the verse: “There is water everywhere but not a drop to drink”, just as we are in a sea of information and can’t find any useful information. Information surrounds us like sweet, hot milk, then overwhelms us, and generations indulge in it, multiplying so happily.
Postman concluded that the future withering of the cultural spirit is not necessarily the cultural prison constructed by Orwell in 1984, but more likely the burlesque depicted by Huxley in Brave New World. Everyone was so happy, and if that wasn’t happy enough, just another ounce of LSD would do.
The destruction of the cultural spirit does not always appear in a ferocious form, but sometimes it is the god of technology slowly flapping his icy wings, turning everything into binary symbols, or shouting and soaring numbers in the live broadcast room.
“Orwell feared those who forcibly banned books, Huxley feared losing any reason to ban books, because no one wanted to read anymore; Orwell feared those who deprived us of information, Huxley feared It is people becoming passive and selfish in the sea of information; Orwell fears our culture becoming a controlled culture, Huxley fearing our culture becoming a vulgarity full of sensory stimulation, desire and unruly games Culture. As Huxley mentioned in Brave New World Revisited, libertarians and rationalists who were ready to rebel “completely ignored people’s insatiable desire for entertainment.” In “1984,” People are controlled by pain, and in Brave New World, people are freed by pleasure. In short, Orwell fears that what we hate will destroy us, and Huxley fears that we will destroy us For what we love. What this book is trying to say is that it is Huxley’s prophecy, not Orwell’s, that may come true.” (Entertainment to Death)
No wonder Chen Danqing sighed that we are already in the world described by Bozeman today, in an era where information and actions are seriously out of balance. In the era of unprecedentedly convenient media, we are smarter than ever, and we are more frivolous than ever.
If I could add one more sentence, perhaps we are more anti-intellectual, arrogant and lazy than ever.
We do not have the patience to watch a work, but use short videos and AI dubbing to evaluate the value and weight of art. Today we want to read the “Godfather” trilogy in one breath, tomorrow we want to read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in one breath, and the day after tomorrow we want to live a complete life in the blink of an eye. Everyone’s patience and attention turned into quantifiable data and business, tossed around by a pair of invisible hands.
The movie is dead, some people are applauding and some are silent, so what will be the next to die?
Movie fans told me in twos and threes that the day when the audio-visual store in front of his house closed down was the saddest day in 2009. He watched the movie poster in front of the store being torn apart by a north wind.
Then, he asked me a little lonely—
“You said that Kubrick could spend a few minutes explaining it?”