December 20, 2006
-
The Pursuit of Happyness
I just came back from this movie, and loved it. I was curious as to why happiness was misspelled but now it makes sense: The main character takes his son to Mrs Chu’s day-care centre in San Francisco’s Chinatown where the pre-school Chinese children have painted “Fun, Joy, Happyness” on the mural outside the building. (In a scene appearing in the screenplay, but cut from the finished film: when he points out the misspelling, Mrs Chu replies that it doesn’t matter whether “happiness” is spelled correctly, only that children have it (later he contemplates the concept of the “pursuit of happiness” as written into the US Declaration of Independence). Tyson and his brother actually taught Will Smith how to solve the Rubik’s Cube for this movie:
Wonder where Will Smith picked up his impressive Rubik’s Cube skills in The Pursuit of Happyness? Thanks to one of the world’s top competitive Rubik’s Cube champions Tyson Mao, Smith was able to learn how to master the mind-boggling cube for his leading role.
When Mao’s younger brother Toby taught him how to solve the cube in July 2003, it was only a matter of time before Mao could solve the puzzle faster then his brother…that is in less than two minutes- blindfolded of course. When not covering their eyes, Tyson and Toby are ‘speedcubing’ wizards, solving the cube in less than 20 seconds and taking part in competitions all over the country. Twenty-two year old San Franciscian native Mao has only been beat by two of the world’s top 3x3x3 blindfolded Rubik’s Cube competitors. This and the fact that he was one of the ‘geeks’ in the hit reality show Beauty and the Geek last year, makes him a perfect geeksugar geek of the week.