"Happiness" [.] + _"Kung Fu Hustle"_

[fiefoe]

I don't skim read much, but this is a prime candidate. Some statements managed to snag my attention:

• There is no difference between what people think they feel and what they "really" feel, as some social philosophers would have us believe.
• Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.
• Even depression may have had some function. When confronted with an unbeatable opponent, dogs show signs of depression that turn off the opponent's will to attack.
• The bronze-medallists are happier about their result than the silver-medallists are about theirs - the bronze-medallists are comparing themselves with people who got no medal, while the silver-medallists believe they might have got the gold.
• Clearly the secret of happiness is to seek out those good things that you can never fully adapt to.
• Prod any happy person and you will find a project.
• The principle of impartiality or anonymity is fundamental to all moral ideas.
• In many cases excessive focusing on the past had the framing effect of giving it excessive salience, making it more difficult to make progress.
• "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross."  [Ezra Pound]
• "I could cry when I think of the years I wasted accumulating money, only to learn that my cheerful disposition is genetic." [a cartoon person says]
  

_________________________________________________
Today's entry is mainly a pretext for me to blab about "Kung Fu Hustle", as I don't want to break from form.

The last time a movie left me this giddy was "Kill Bill, Vol. 1". Naturally, there's all that exuberant, breathless kinetics. But it's more than that this time. This movie has a moment.

The moment came when our hero, still a frustrated small-time hoodlum, attempts to stick up an ice-cream cart with a pen-knife. As the robber grabs his victim and leans into her, the guy and the girl lock eyes and each recognizes the other from another damsel-in-distress episode in their childhood. (The dragon was the knight that time.) The camera pulls back, and we see that they are under a giant movie poster for Fred and Ginger's "Top Hat", and the two figures arrested in this unfolding petty crime incongruously but unmistakably mimic the pose of the graceful and carefree dancers in the poster.

This is the moment when I realized that Stephen Chow understands romance.

It also helps that the setting of the movie could easily have been Shanghai in the 30s during the 'Concession Era'. It's a bit of a cliche, but that's an imaginary place I have always been rather nostalgic for.

Realized later: the toads on the corridor floor of the insane asylum where the hero goes to free the Beast foreshadow an important development in the final showdown.

Somebody said a while back on Metafilter that "Some movies are a contextual experience." In this case, I'm glad that I didn't watch it on a full stomach.