kung-fu hustle (2004): cantonese in shanghai?!

Partly due to seeing the trailer and assuming the whole thing was in Cantonese and mostly due to being lazy, I watched with no subtitles. So while the movie was comprehensible 85% Cantonese, the remaining 15% mostly went through my ears, brain department processed about 20% of that and shooed off the rest. As for the film itself, why would a Chinese director set his story in Shanghai but write most of his characters as speakers of Cantonese and those few who were Mandarin speakers, fluidly engage in conversation with each other?! As anyone who has been in mainland China knows, no one north of Guangzhou understands Cantonese and most of the general Chinese population pretty much perceives it as no more than a dialect.

But I digress, language hi-jinks aside: it was all in good, martial-arty, screaming your guts out fun. I enjoyed how no one in this movie was a particularly sympathetic character and were all flawed to an extent of almost-obnoxiousness.

My favourite shot in the whole movie; I just love the not-really-but-sort-of-parallelism in background and foreground.