On February 1, the premiere of "Tangshan Earthquake" was held at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

Summit Entertainment has made great efforts to promote the movie, inviting many stars including Keanu Reeves and Nicole Kidman to help, and the red carpet is star-studded, and the excitement is comparable to that of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Zhang Ran undoubtedly hopes that "Tangshan Earthquake" can achieve good results in North America, but he knows that it will be very difficult. In the previous life, Feng Xiaogang's "Tangshan Earthquake" only grossed $60,000 in North America. American audiences don't like to watch subtitles, no matter how well-made they are, and no matter how big your investment is, as long as it is a foreign language film, it is a literary film in the eyes of American audiences, and it can often only be screened in art theaters.

In the past 20 years, there have been only three films with more than 2,000 foreign language films, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", "Heroes" and "Kung Fu", all of which are action movies, because action movies have a fixed fan base;

"Tangshan Earthquake" was able to obtain 1,800 museum openings, which is a record for a foreign language film that is not an action movie.

Although there are 1,800 museums, Zhang Ran still has no bottom on how much the final box office can reach. So far, his films, in addition to "Time and Space Warrior", the highest in North America is "The Aviator", with a box office of 10 million, which is still achieved with an Oscar nomination.

Zhang Ran's expectations for "Tangshan Earthquake" are more than $20 million.

How can this result be achieved, then "Tangshan Earthquake" can easily enter the top ten of the North American foreign language film list, and this result will be very beneficial to the release of DVDs in the future!

However, this time he went to the United States, Zhang Ran was not entirely to promote the movie, there was a more important thing.

Halfway through the movie, Zhang Ran got up and went to the bathroom of the theater, and after confirming that the entire bathroom was empty, he entered one of the rooms, sat on the toilet, pinched his throat with one hand, and dialed a number.

Garvey, a geologist at the U.S. Bureau of Mines, was sitting in his office, slowly flipping through the Proceedings of the Seismological Society of America, which contained an article by him entitled "Active Structure of the Eastern Margin Fault of the Tibetan Plateau."

Last September, Gaviyo received a strange phone call from a mysterious man who said that he had been inspired by God that one day in May next year, there would be a major earthquake somewhere, but no one would believe him. So, he wants Garvey to publish an article arguing that there will be an earthquake that day, and that he will pay Garvey about 5 million when it happens.

There are too many people who say that they have been oracleed and inspired by God in reality, and they are either crazy or liars, and Gaviyo hung up the phone directly.

A week later, Mr. Garveillo received another call from the man, who told him that an advance payment of $500,000 had been made to his account. The suspicious Garvey asked the bank to check, and there was really an extra $500,000 in the account, and he was stupid at the time.

However, Gaviio did not call the police, and for the next few days, he kept thinking about whether he had met a religious fanatic, or had he encountered some conspiracy? He thinks that maybe some rich man doesn't know that nerve is pumping, or has hysteria, thinks that there will be an earthquake somewhere, and hopes to give an early warning through a paper published by a geologist.

Almost another week later, Gaviyo received another call from the mysterious man. This time, Gavieu directly agreed to the mysterious man's request. He's a retiring geologist, and $5 million is too tempting for him.

The requirements of the mystery man are simple, all you need to do is publish the paper in any professional journal in February.

Now that my article has been sent, I don't know when the mysterious man's call will come again!

At this moment, the mobile phone suddenly rang, and Garviyo answered the call: "Hello!"

A deep male voice came over, with a slight Italian accent: "Mr. Gaviyo, has the article been sent?"

Gaviyo's heart jumped suddenly, and he immediately said: "It's been released, the February issue of the Proceedings of the American Seismological Society!"

On the other end of the phone, the man was visibly relieved: "May God be with you, Mr. Gaviyo, you are a good person! The money will soon be in your account!" After speaking, the man hung up the phone.

Gaviyo let out a long sigh of relief, and then smiled, 5 million, with this money, you can enjoy your old age after you retire.

At the same time, Zhang Ran in the bathroom exhaled softly, using the movie "Tangshan Earthquake" to evoke the memory of the audience and the country about the earthquake, using Gaviyo's article to warn, and then using tens of millions of Weibo users to spread it, and now the most important preparations have been completed!

Zhang Ran sat on the toilet and thought about all the links carefully, there was no mistake in the whole plan, and there was no place for him to show his feet, even if he traced it, he couldn't find his head. He pulled out the phone card, threw it down the toilet, pressed the button, and flushed it down the drain.

Coming out of the bathroom, Zhang Ran returned to the screening room, he looked around, the audience was immersed in the plot of the movie, their eyes were hazy with tears, and no one paid attention to themselves. He smiled and watched the movie seriously.

There is no need to repeat the viewing process, Chinese attach importance to family and family, and Americans also attach importance to it, and finally the film ended in the audience's hazy tears and applause.

With the end of the premiere ceremony, the media reviews of "Tangshan Earthquake" were also released.

"Variety" gave a detailed account of the background of the Tangshan earthquake and praised it as a great movie, Zhang Ran showed a strong sense of compassion, more social responsibility and higher moral standards.

The Wall Street Journal devoted a full-page in-depth report on the film, saying: "As the world's first 4K film, the first non-Hollywood film to be presented on an IMAX screen, most of the film was filmed in Tangshan, and some of the extras experienced the 1976 earthquake. Through the movie, we see a city reborn from the ashes!"

Unlike the domestic media and film critics, there are many film critics in the United States who attach importance to film language and technology, and these film critics have praised "Tangshan Earthquake".

Todd McCarthy, a well-known film critic for The Hollywood Reporter, gave a 95-point evaluation: "In the past, the color composition of disaster films was basically close to reality, and every color existed in the picture. "Tangshan Earthquake" shows amazing creativity, most of the colors in the film are psychological, and the tone of the film will constantly change as the story develops, and then highlight the psychological state of the characters. Among them, Yu Hong, played by Zhang Jingchu, is the most obvious, Yu Hong's initial color was warm, and after receiving the news of her mother's illness, the tone began to turn cold. After the Tangshan earthquake, the tone of her home became colder and colder, and when she returned to Tangshan to know that her relatives had died, the whole tone was even colder to the extreme, giving people a feeling of winter. After discovering that his son is still alive, the whole tone quickly warms up until it finally matches the tone of reality. This change in tone reveals the hallucinatory charm created by the screen image, and directly serves the theme of the film. ”

"Film Review" gave a full score of horror: ""Tangshan Earthquake" introduced the performance techniques of many war films into "Tangshan Earthquake", completing a breakthrough in disaster films, and the disaster film shows the scene of the disaster is undoubtedly the biggest attraction, Zhang Ran used the handheld photography technique that is only used in war films, and a large number of handheld photography brings a strong sense of substitution to the audience, and the audience can clearly feel the camera shaking caused by the earthquake and the continuous aftershocks, making the audience feel as if they are in an earthquake area.

In addition, the film was shot at a 90-degree shutter angle, which captured the details of the characters' movements and earthquakes very clearly, giving people a jerky and hard feeling, creating the ultimate earthquake effect and giving people a strong sense of presence. These are undoubtedly extremely rare disaster movies in the past. ”

In ordinary movies, moving shots will have a tailing phenomenon, and objects moving at high speed are often confused, such as falling rocks during an earthquake, and bouncing dirt during an explosion.

There are two ways to solve this problem, one is to increase the shutter speed, such as the 48 frames per second technique used in "The Hobbit", and the other is to adjust the shutter angle, which was created by cinematographer Kaminsky when he was filming "Saving Private Ryan", the explosion in the movie, the graininess of the earth jumping is particularly obvious, and the explosion scenes of war films after that are liked to be filmed in this way, including Feng Xiaogang's "Assemble".

However, I think that no disaster movie does this, disaster movies are not as simple as shooting explosion scenes, burying explosives and then detonating them, most of the special effects of disaster movies need to be done in post, and it takes more time and money to use this shooting method, so no disaster film uses handheld lenses on a large scale, and no one uses a 90-degree shutter angle to shoot.

From a technical level, "Tangshan Earthquake" is indeed a breakthrough in disaster films.

However, "Tangshan Earthquake" is not an impeccable movie, and it has received bad reviews, but these bad reviews are mainly because I don't know China, I can't understand the characters in it, and some of them are directly political.

"Zhang Ran, the director of the opening ceremony of the Beiping Olympics, has a close relationship with the government, and the film itself is also funded by the government, in which we can see a large number of Chinese soldiers, who are brave and fearless, and they are as strong as robots. These soldiers went to the earthquake-stricken areas to provide relief, and since they did not bring weapons or even tools, these details are too false. It's a botched propaganda film devoid of emotion!"

Zhang Ran adopted a one-dimensional, patriotic approach to the Tangshan earthquake. Recently, the Chinese government has begun to step up its cultural propaganda, and many Chinese films have shown a more emotional nationalism and chauvinism, as is the case with "Tangshan Earthquake." The longitudinal comparison with similar classic films "Tangshan Earthquake" seems superficial, and the narrative subject is weak. ”

However, there are only a few negative reviews after all, and the freshness of "Tangshan Earthquake" on Rotten Tomatoes has reached 86, and MTC's comprehensive media score has also reached 78.

For Chinese-language movies, this evaluation is not particularly high, Chinese movies Rotten Tomatoes freshness and MTC scores have always been good, Zhang Yimou's movie "The City is Full of Golden Armor" has received a lot of bad reviews in China, Rotten Tomatoes freshness is still 78, and MTC scores are also 74.

However, compared with Hollywood disaster movies, the score of "Tangshan Earthquake" is simply god-level. In the past decade, no Hollywood disaster film has scored more than 60 points, except for "Titanic", which received a freshness score of 83, and an MTC overall score of 74.

To this extent, "Tangshan Earthquake" is definitely a masterpiece!