Weekend movie maration

I just can't see a movie without giving an opinion.

Serenity

Very much "wild-west in space". You can tell Joss Whedon's been writing screenplays for a long, long time. He knows which narrative conventions to short-circuit and which ones to leave intact. He also tends to define his characters through one-liners, reducing the normal give-and-take of natural dialogue down to something more like thrust-and-parry. It's clever, but it's got limited range. Joss can't write drama with a capital D, but it's okay in this film, because he knows it and doesn't try.

Corpse Bride

Smoother and smaller than "Nightmare Before Christmas", yet ironically not as well paced. Burton has a good time playing in his universe, but it's no longer surprising for me.

Laputa: Castle In The Sky

Now I know where all those early Nintendo RPGs stole their "Flying Fortress" motif from (Crystalis, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, etc). Here's a film that stuck in my head, and I can see why so many people at Pixar love it. The characters are adorable, and the bright comic-book colors are almost old enough today that it becomes a style, instead of a technical restriction. I was amused to discover an animal that was later copied wholesale into a Pokemon character. It was also very disconcerting to hear Anna Paquin's voiceover work, which made the character sound a whole lot like a certain aelf I know. (Her accent also wandered a bit - she did a better job in Steamboy). When she said "Well that was exciting!" 2/3 through the film, I did a double-take because it sounded exactly like that aelf. There's also another character in here who fits the character study I did for valley of the winds. Good ol' Miyazaki actually managed to bring tears to my eyes during one scene, which surprised me. This film is two hours long, and I already want to watch it again. That's a good sign.

House of Flying Daggers

Just a bit too convoluted near the end, but you can still appreciate what Wang, Li, and Zhang were up to. Gorgeous production values of course. The film is worth seeing just for that and the combat.

Happiness

From this article about the physiology of happiness:

At the Royal Institution, Nettle explained how brain chemistry foils our pursuit of happiness in the modern world: "The things that you desire are not the things that you end up liking. The mechanisms of desire are insatiable. There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly — having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the psychology of wanting, and the psychology of liking gets drowned out."

What's funny to me is that people have to learn to tell the difference between the two - like the way teenagers have to learn the important difference between "love" and "lust".

... In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.

... Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His teams are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives.

Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach "victimology" and says research shows it to be worthless: "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects."

This means you, parents: Quit worrying that your children are in some kind of mortal danger from having an "unhappy childhood", without medication or therapy. Quit meddling in their brains. You don't have control anyway. Be there for them, and they will learn.

In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week. The other is about identifying your signature strengths and using one of them in a new and different way every day for a week. A third technique involves writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person.

Seligman and his graduate students weep tears of joy when they do this exercise, but most Brits would probably rather be miserable than do it. So it's a relief to hear that it doesn't work particularly well. It has strong, but only brief, effects.

I like all of these examples, especially the letter-writing part. It's not enough to just talk, you have to get the chance to place your thoughts in order first, and speak without interruption so they all come out. I've done this exercise many times in the past, usually with a girlfriend I was too shy to open up to. Reading a letter over the phone was also good middle-ground.

The British approach to wellbeing also emphasises good physical health and diet, proper sleep, relaxation and exercise, and spending time in the natural environment.

Oooo, take that, city dwellers! ;)

But repeated stress weakens us. The stress response temporarily increases the level of cortisol, a vital hormone that regulates the whole immune system. This is a healthy response, designed to produce fight or flight only in cases of real danger. Unfortunately, the daily hassles of modern life induce repeated stress in some of us, subjecting our bodies to frequent pulses of cortisol. This unbalances the immune system and makes us ill.

There you have it. Stress makes you unhappy, unhappiness causes stress. Both make you sick. We can either eliminate the things that stress us out, or work to minimize the stress we feel about particular things. Kind of obvious, actually.