Tragedy not comedy

Why is it that a sad ending to a story makes it hit so much harder? Why does that stay with us longer than a sweet little everybody's happy tra la la la ending? What is it in us humans that we prefer tragedy to comedy?

Here, I always think of this movie, Stranger Than Fiction, starring Will Ferrell (Harold Crick) and Emma Thompson (Karen Eiffel). Harold is a boring IRS agent until he starts hearing an author narrating his life. Turns out Karen is writing a book and somehow her character is an actual person. Harold hears the author narrate his forthcoming death and does all he can to stop her from writing it. (SPOILERS ALERT) He finds Karen and reads the book and he is convinced that he should die in the end because that's just what the book needs. Karen however can't go through with it and changes the ending. A literature professor (played by Dustin Hoffman), who had helped Harold track down the author, reads the book with the changed ending and his verdict to Karen? - "It's ok. It's not bad!" And he can't understand why Karen would change the ending. - Meaning that Harold should have died! It's almost like an unwritten rule. Just look at the classics - how many of them have a sad ending? I don't get the reasoning behind this, but I do know that personally, no matter how much I like to see a happy ending, the ones that don't have that are the ones that remain in memory as classics!

This guy is quite an inspiration

How Not To Discuss Rates with a Translator

So true .. Hilarious and sad that this is how it is really!

Die Welle

Just saw this film and found it really good, reminiscent of Lord of the Flies a tad. Though thinking about it, certain aspects are weird - many of the changes that the teacher Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) makes in his classroom, changes that slowly form the students into a quasi fascist group, are normal school practices here in India. We all wear uniforms to school, raise our hand when we want to say something and stand to give the answer, we never call our teachers by their first name and the desks always face the front of the class. That doesn't make us fascists, only disciplined. The students in the German school in the film are clearly shown as lacking this particular quality and when discipline is introduced through the Project Week experiment, they turn into a group that excludes the other and embraces violence. Komisch!