Watched Happy–Go-Lucky on Netflix and was so pleasantly surprised… who’d’ve thought a movie about ‘anti-miserablism’ could be so life-affirming? (Derf.) For some knee-jerk judgmental reason, I thought I’d not like it, or be annoyed for investing 118 minutes into chirpy mediocrity. (Been burned by Netflix poster images before.) In any case, don’t watch the American-male-narrator voice-dub trailer — one will definitely hate that. But the movie itself was actually amazing, a light tragi-comedy. Seriously, pretty inspirational in terms of harnessing positive life force.
Afterward, I poked around and found (on Y 0 
T |3 E) Mike Leigh’s other chirpy life-affirming film from eighteen years before that one: Life Is Sweet. Just finished watching it, and holy fuck, was it so sweet. The bits of darkness in it thrum throughout, and the climactic conflict squeezed fat tears out of my eyes. But all these slice-of-life scenes (and instrumental soundtracks… felt like the same one for both films?) will really do a number on pithy, negative self-talk — flush it right out of there, and still leave sweetness in the air.
