Text | Reading Entertainment, author | Lingyi
“Little Me” opened on Douban with a score of 7.4. After the decline, it basically stabilized at 7.2, which is the same as “Send You a Little Red Flower”.
Regarding the film itself, let’s talk about the conclusion first: The biggest highlight of “Little Me” is indeed Yi Yang Qianxi’s performance. His efforts as an actor and performance effects exceed all his previous works. Even if it reaches the level of the best actor, it is not Not an exaggeration.
There are occasional good chapters in other parts, but the overall presentation is clumsy and fragmented, with a sense of fragmentation after forced commercialization and popularization. In addition, the movie places too much emphasis on the performance of the lead actor and fails to provide sufficient support in other aspects such as audio-visual and narrative, which also reduces the effect of the performance itself.
So I personally think that Douban’s rating of 7 points is just right. This is a masterpiece with its own topic and above-average visual quality, but it is not an undisputed good film.
But the film “Little Me”,There are many topics to talk about from three perspectives: the artistic expression of the film and director, Yi Yang Qianxi’s career as an actor, and market promotion.
Good acting, but only half a good film
As a story with a cerebral palsy patient as the protagonist, the most praiseworthy aspect of “Little Me” is the “eye-level” position. The film is completely from the perspective of the protagonist Liu Chunhe to reflect his strong self-esteem and surging spirit. His vitality, his lust and self-destruction, his stubborn pursuit of the value of his own existence.The sharp contrast between Liu Chunhe’s rich inner shaping and the difficult situation of his outer body also constitutes the most impressive first impression of the film.
The style of the film is “semi-documentary”. Except for the three “dream scenes” between erotic dreams, transformation, and life and death, the director is quite restrained in the use of audio-visual language. The film leaves a lot of time for Liu Chunhe. He, through his powerful one-man show output, created an emotional shock that the audience could not ignore, and thus deeply experienced the protagonist’s situation.
In addition, the differences between “Little Me” and “Send You a Little Red Flower” are mainly in two aspects:One is the presentation of family relationships.In terms of narrative weight, the actual heroine of the film is the grandmother, and the second heroine should be the mother, not Yaya, played by Zhou Yutong in popular discussion. There are commonalities in the personalities and attitudes towards suffering between the grandmother and mother. This deep-seated contradiction forms the background of Liu Chunhe’s family.
The family relationship between parents and children is often reflected in movies and TV dramas as emotions regardless of the cost, a facade of the purest giving and positive emotions. But in fact, family relationships often show cruelty to the people closest to them – why do so many people have the worst attitudes and the greatest anger directed at their relatives? Why do closeness and love sometimes manifest into control and intense distrust of loved ones? What these questions actually reveal is the highly probable “two sides” of this extremely close relationship. In fact, it means “people are not saints” and “discussing deeds does not care about one’s heart.”
At the beginning of the story of “Little Me”, the cross-examination between the grandmother and the mother, and Liu Chunhe’s recollection of hiding in the suitcase and overhearing the “betrayal” of his parents, are essentially a direct confrontation of the complex side of family relationships. This also constitutes the film’s underlying view of human nature——Don’t deify any relationship. Realizing that “mother is not God” does not mean denying the beautiful aspects of close relationships.
The second is not to avoid the expression of passion.The emotional drama between Yaya, played by Zhou Yutong, and Liu Chunhe received the greatest attention and questions on Weibo. Some viewers asked about the necessity of this relationship and described the necessity of Liu Chunhe’s pursuit of male and female love, but in the author’s opinion, this is the biggest highlight of “Little Me”.
Some comments said that Zhou Yutong’s incident was actually very funny. “Little Me” certainly highlights Liu Chunhe’s desire for Yaya, because this is one of the most important ways for the director’s core expression. The author believes that the scale of the film has actually been sacrificed for the commercial market, which affects the expression. Completeness and intensity.
The core concept of the film about Liu Chunhe and this group is to look at them squarely and face them squarely – cerebral palsy patients only have limited mobility, not mental retardation. They have all the same needs as you and me as a human being, including physical and social values. on.How to solve these needs is another question. The first step for the public is not to “ignore” them and always take it for granted that these needs do not exist.As physiologically normal people, we should not just look at them with a charity attitude, but should look directly at their objective existence as ordinary people like you and me.
Parent-child relationship and eroticism are the parts that the director is best at. Director Yang Lina’s previous trilogy “Spring Dream”, “Spring Tide” and “Spring Song” (later renamed “Mom!” and released) all focused on the relationship between mother and daughter. “Spring Dream” has focused on the “neglected” “Sexuality”, and “Little Me” expresses the mother-daughter relationship in “Spring Tide” and “Mom!” “There are also more profound expressions in “.
But these directors are good at integrating parts, and they did not really push “Little Me” into a good film. Going back to the beginning, one of the shortcomings mentioned is “twisted and fragmented”, which is essentially because director Yang Lina seems to be hesitant between the artistic style of the “Spring Trilogy” and the expression of a commercial film.
The film leaves a lot of space to Yi Yang Qianxi’s Liu Chunhe, but it also tries to include expressions from the perspectives of mother and daughter, passion, society, etc., but it lacks such comprehensive and yet focused narrative skills. As a result, with the exception of Liu Chunhe, his grandmother, and his mother, the other social figures in the film are almost facial-like and tool-like. This also makes the film’s theme expression lack of power and can only be accomplished by relying on Yi Yang Qianxi’s personal performance. Narrative and expression.
And unlike the “Spring Trilogy”, “Little Me” targets a wider audience and has a clearer demand for box office returns. This is most likely why the film lacks a deeper, more powerful ending. The film finally converges its emotions to “healing” through a notice, which actually makes the temperament of the whole film more banal.
When Liu Chunhe wrote a letter to complain about the bus driver, he said that the result was what he wrote. In fact, he had expressed his resistance to “consequentialism”, but in the end the film still had toSuccess in the worldly senseresults to complete the narrativebut instead reduces the intensity of the film. In other words, what would happen if Liu Chunhe was not so smart, not so full of heart, and could not get into a key university? His pursuit of love and ideals shown in the film, the process itself is actually the value itself.
Yi Yang Qianxi who attacks all the way
After taking in 140 million yuan on New Year’s Eve and 93 million yuan on New Year’s Day, “Little Me” has now accumulated 490 million yuan in box office results. The Beacon Professional Edition shows that this brings the cumulative box office of starring Yi Yang Qianxi as the leading actor to 19.4 billion yuan, surpassing Wang Baoqiang’s 19.333 billion yuanIt ranks fifth at the box office among Chinese male protagonists, second only to the four box office big brothers Shen Teng, Wu Jing, Huang Bo, and Zhang Yi.
Because of Yi Yang Qianxi’s huge traffic and Internet public opinion’s inherent controversy over the traffic, “Little Me” received extremely polarized reviews on the Internet. There was no shortage of valuable discussions, but there were also some absurd angles. , saying that this is “consuming” the people at the bottom.
According to the opinions of these netizens, it is wrong for the film and television industry to focus on the bottom class, and the profession of actor does not exist. Should we find an orphan to play an orphan, a person with cerebral palsy to play a cerebral palsy, a person who has failed to start a business to play a failed start-up, and a person who is about to commit suicide to play suicide, otherwise it is just consumption?
There is no need to refute this statement too much. Returning to the topic of actors, Yi Yang Qianxi’s choices since his acting career are very distinctive. In addition to being one of the leading actors in the mainstream blockbusters “Changjin Lake” and “Man Jiang Hong”, Yi Yang Qianxi has Yang Qianxi’s solo male protagonist movies are mainly “Young You”, “Send You a Little Red Flower” and “Miracle” “Stupid Kid” and “Little Me”, the common feature of these four movies is that they are all typical teenage images, but they are all marginalized characters with physical or psychological defects, and they all have a certain degree of “self-destruction” “Thirdly, the characters are three-dimensional and complex, and there is a lot of room for development. They are all stories with the male protagonist as the clear core.
This means two things: first, the characters in the four films are very consistent with Yi Yang Qianxi himself, and he will definitely shine if he plays them well; second, these characters are the absolute core of the script, which means that Yi Yang Qianxi must The acting skills are not inferior to those of actors of different ages such as Zhou Dongyu, Liu Haocun, and Lin Xiaojie with whom he has collaborated, and he must evenExceed these partners in terms of “sense of presence”the premise of all this is not to show timidity in one’s performance.
Yi Yang Qianxi’s completion of these roles is quite high. There may be two reasons for this. On the one hand, it may be because of his highly sensitive personality, which allows him to have an ability to empathize with Xiaobei, Wei Yihang, Jing Hao, Liu Chun and other teenagers who are in different predicaments beyond their actual situation. , the experience of transcending from the limited experience of oneself and entering the role, this is the instinctive part of the actor’s ability.
Chen Chong once recalled his experience working with Yi Yang Qianxi in his book: “Yi Yang Qianxi surprised me.His personal emotional life is limited. I don’t know where he gathered such a rich, full and delicate heart.I can only imagine him putting all his desires for life and love in front of the camera. “
Just from the perspective of actor performance, Yi Yang Qianxi’s performance in “Little Me” is almost impeccable. The part about “Moss” and the part about the confrontation with the mother are particularly excellent, and the scene of eating nougat is even more heart-wrenching. After the author came on stage, I heard an elderly audience member said to his companion: “He was tired from acting, but I couldn’t watch it either.” Sweated all over.”
He obviously put unimaginable effort and determination into the role of Liu Chunhe. His body language and line performance were truly incredible, reminding me of a classmate in my class who was also sick when I was a child. This phenomenal performance has a strong sense of presence in the film and is almost perfect. However, as mentioned above, the final effect of the film is not perfect, and there are still some regrets in the perception.
Effective publicity and distribution step by step
From a publicity perspective, the benchmark for “Little Me” is not “Send You a Little Red Flower” about patients, but “Hot and Spicy” by Jia Ling. This is a very real issue. Although the film “Little Me” itself may not agree with it, the biggest suspense aroused by the film before the screening was the image of a cerebral palsy patient played by Yi Yang Qianxi.
So we will find that “Little Me” is the same as “Hot and Spicy”. Before the film was released, Liu Chunhe, played by Yi Yangqianxi, did not have any full face exposed. The early posters showed the back of twisted hands and neck. In the end, The trailer shows Liu Chunhe’s back and profile as he walks through various scenes, but the frontal shots are all reserved for his grandmother. There is still no frontal shot of Liu Chunhe. The day after the film was officially released, Liu Chunhe’s frontal appearance quickly spread all over the Internet.
On January 3, 2025, one week after its release, the “Little Me” film team and the New Media Center of Xinhua News Agency jointly produced a name change initiative video, recording the campaign launched by 14 real cerebral palsy patients against the commonly known name of “cerebral palsy” name change initiative,Call on everyone to use “Five Chronic Diseases” instead of “cerebral palsy”, the common name for “cerebral palsy”.
It can be said that the promotion of “Little Me” was carried out step by step, without making any mistakes. In the early stage, the selling point and suspense of the film were maintained, and almost no additional materials were released except the poster. This is“Period of suspense”.
After the pre-sale begins, we will focus on word-of-mouth reviews and the presentation of the two main features of the film – Liu Chunhe’s back and body shape, as well as the comedy elements of the grandmother’s character. We should try our best to maintain suspense. It may bring something interesting to the public, this is“Warm-up period”.
After the film is officially released, it is impossible to remain mysterious in the social network era, so we can freely release a large number of shocking scenes related to acting and emotional expression in the film. This is“Combustion period”.
One week after the premiere, the public’s curiosity about the image subsided. Marketing accounts began to intensively output various controversies in order to eat up traffic, and actor hackers wanted to attack the actors. At this time, the film launched a charity cooperation. This is“Value Period”.
One thing that needs to be explained is that marketing publicity is just a means, not something shameful. To evaluate, you must look at the actual social impact. Judging from the call for everyone to use “five chronic diseases” to replace “cerebral palsy”, “Little Me” is really trying to exert influence and transform traffic into positive social energy. One step even completes the last link in expressing the social value of the film, so why not?
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