Film Name: 不止不休 / The Best is Yet to Come
After several years in the limelight, The Best is Yet to Come is finally available to audiences.
The film is innovative in a number of ways, such as featuring journalists in the age of the paper media to show what it was like at the turn of the century, and exploring the deeper rightness of “anti-discrimination” by focusing on basic factual correctness, and so on.
Honestly speaking, although The Best is Yet to Come expresses the theme and sentiment in place, and the overall degree of completion is also good, will not make people feel bored, but its narrative design and position is still not ideal, so it is difficult to become a hit film.
However, I’m still willing to give the film a good review, because it makes me feel the power of “iron shoulders to bear the righteousness, wonderful hands to write articles”.
[Friendly reminder: there will be spoilers below.]
The Best is Yet to Come has a lot of eye-catching labels, and the first one that caught my attention was “Northern Exposure”.
The three young people in the film who go to Beijing to look for opportunities represent three typical categories:
Zhang Bo is so ambitious that he can sleep in a university dormitory and scrimp on food and clothing, and he only wants to study for the exams and won’t stop until he succeeds; Xiaozhu is the most accepting of reality, as long as she can have a stable job, she can always go against the grain when she encounters aggression at work and in life; and Han Dong is somewhere in between, being even more over-ambitious than Zhang Bo on the one hand, and taking on the pressure of life on the other. On one hand, he is more “over-ambitious” than Zhang Bo, and on the other hand, he takes the initiative to bear the pressure from life.
The film’s basic context is also derived from this – Han Dong, a “three-less young man” with no education, no background and no money, thinks of working for a mainstream media company in Beijing with only a little bit of journalistic ideal and some experience in publishing articles on the Internet. “This is the story of a small man pursuing his dreams.
What satisfies me most about The Best is Yet to Come is its presentation of the social landscape of 2003-2004 and the newspaper media industry.
I admit, as a paper media “deserter”, I have a special selfishness and sentiment added to the film: piles of newspapers piled up all over the place, always needing to be dealt with, a thousand strange hotlines, loved and hated, journalists, editors and editors-in-chief for the layout of the battle of wits, in the cybercafé, at home, and in the car, hurry to catch up with the manuscript! …… For me, this is youth.
The “golden age” of China’s paper media was only a decade or two long, and “The Best is Yet to Come” not only chooses the heyday as the time background, and designates the newspaper as the Beijing Times, but also gives the main character a halo to one of the most rare and legendary professions, the investigative reporter. profession, the investigative reporter.
It can be said that most of the content in the film related to the editorial work of the newspaper is for the purpose of highlighting the “professional sanctity” of the investigative reporter. Han Dong’s small conceit and Huang Jiang’s other eyes stem from the investigative articles that Han Dong has posted on the Internet in the past, and Huang Jiang’s dusty debut and the thunderous manner of his investigation into the mining disaster in Shanxi have also fulfilled the perfect imagination of the profession. perfect imagination of the profession, not to mention a series of later details.
Although this “flat” gold is slightly deliberate, it is not annoying, especially when Huang Jiang and Han Dong tracked down the truth through their own skills, adding a layer of legitimacy to the title of “Uncrowned King”.
It should be said that “The Best is Yet to Come” has a good foundation in all aspects, as long as the specific execution does not go out of the way, in any case, it can have a passing grade or above, and this is indeed the case. …… As for whether it can be called a good film, it depends on the success of the personage, performance, plot, narrative and other deep-water areas.
Unfortunately, that’s where The Best is Yet to Come falls short of being a truly great film.
For example, many will point out that Xiaozhu, the only female character with a heavy role, is too stereotypical, and although this is to some extent a reminiscence of the era, it’s really not very flattering when viewed through today’s eyes.
Most of the supporting characters in the film are moderate in performance, the most outstanding only a Zhang Songwen and half of Baike.
Zhang Songwen really has a kind of “performance status” feeling in the past few years, he plays the gold medal reporter Huang Jiang, giving people a kind of easy to handle with ease, before and after the interviews of the scruffy and unconventional, but also and the leadership of the colleagues of the sharp, and sincere to treat people with gentleness and hate the iron is not steel harsh, how to see how to have a play (I do not know whether the actor heat to create additional selling point for the film). I don’t know if I can take advantage of the actor’s popularity to create a wave of extra selling points for the film).
Baike also contributed a good performance this time, probably thanks to the experience of playing the loser Wang Dahammer repeatedly in the early years, he is quite in place in the pinpointing of Han Dong’s grassroots attributes and the state of wood, just to the late stage to show the complexity of the character’s entangled state of mind when the realm of the character, he can not keep up with it. …… Of course, the non-talented actor is dependent on good roles fed out, and in the past few years, the role of the actor is still not as good. Of course, non-talented actors are fed by good roles, and you can still feel his progress in the past few years.
The biggest shortcoming of The Best is Yet to Come is the imbalance between the plot design and the narrative point of view – to put it bluntly, it is the “professional growth line of Han Dong’s reporter” and the “anti-discrimination line of Hepatitis B infected people” in the middle and late stages of the film. To put it bluntly, it is the incompatibility and incompatibility between the “professional growth line of Han Dong’s journalist” and the “anti-discrimination line of hepatitis B infected people” in the middle and late stages of the film.
The Best is Yet to Come” is a film that focuses on the grim situation of people infected with hepatitis B and the hardships of anti-discrimination, from the point of view of the video interviews throughout the film, and it is also true that the film puts a great deal of effort into this part of the film in the later stages, with even the protagonist, Han Dong, giving way to the narrative to a certain extent.
But from the structure of the film, The Best is Yet to Come is based on the standard template story of Han Dong’s growth in a newspaper office, and all the nodes of the transition are correct, and the specific faces are replaced by blurred portraits, which is always suspected of changing the dishes in the middle of the banquet.
Theoretically, an in-depth investigative report with flesh and blood and a socially responsible investigative reporter should be a mutual achievement, but in fact, the two main lines of the film does not have the effect of 1+1＞2, and a lot of the dramatic tension in the sense of tearing each other off.
Thinking about it, it may be because “The Best is Yet to Come” is too much like “Dying to Survive”, which makes people feel that the pre-preparation is not enough, and the post-preparation is too fast, and as the story of Han Dong, it is obvious that the story has not been told thoroughly, and in the end, it seems that nothing is grasped, and even the theme of “anti-discrimination” seems to be like “anti-discrimination”, but it is also like “anti-discrimination”. Even the theme of “anti-discrimination” is as shallow as the memories of temporary residence permits and SARS.
Having said that, I still hold a positive attitude towards The Best is Yet to Come. It’s not easy for a newcomer director Wong Jing to make his first feature-length film independently, and I like the way the film conveys the romantic sentiment of “Iron Shoulders Carrying the Righteousness of the Road, Wonderful Hands Writes the Writings” as if it were a flying pen and newspaper, based on reality, but not so realistic. The film is based on reality, but not so realistic.
It’s a good way to commemorate a time that’s never coming back.
Please specify：Yescase Store » The Best is Yet to Come 2020 Film Review: lit. iron shoulders carry justice (idiom); fig. bear responsibility for what is right and proper