Ultimately, this movie answers the question "What do women want?" with the answer, "An honest, thoughtful, handsome man who understands a woman's anxieties and needs." That, alone, would be reasonable, I suppose, except that the counter-message (hidden in the ad campaign for Lotto) is that a woman wants independence, freedom, a new direction, and a new goal. But this movie doesn't sweat the details and worries little about its contradictions.

From our point of view, this movie is sexist: the man has all the advantages, women are portrayed as wanting men to be able to read their thoughts rather than wanting privacy, it plays with the male fantasy of how it might be possible to manipulate women if there "inside information", and so on.

This is a casual movie meant to entertain in the happy-ending (guy and girl get together), comic-romance style. It is cheezy at times in its special effects and other scenes but it isn't tyring to be serious about its production quality. It pleases the male audience with the impossible situation of a few men running an ad agency that is full of a hundred beautiful adoring, happy women employees, and with making Andy Lau the center of attention. It pleases women, I guess, by providing the fantasy of Andy Lau committing himself to the female protagonist (Gong Li), giving her good looks, lots of beautiful clothes, style, money and a high-ranking job. Daughters can be sure that their fathers will understand and care about them, eventually. And so on. It also gives comic voice to a female frustration: "Why are men so dense?" It is a men-are-Mars, women-are-Venus sort of film that reassures that there are ways to bridge this gap.

Plotline: Sun Zi Gong is a handsome and successful creative art director at an ad agency; he is also a playboy lacking seriousness. A new, talented, beautiful creative art director, Li Yi-Long, is hired and placed above him in rank. She wants the agency to understand women's products better. An accident gives Zi Gong the uncanny ability to hear women's thoughts providing a variety of comic situations. Zi Gong comes to understand he is not the object of pure female adoration that the thought he was. Howver, he learns to exploit his secret ability to gain women's attention and undermine his new director's career. The expected plot twist is that he falls in love with the woman he has meant to drive out of the agency. Yi-Long, however, does lose her job because of his stratagies.

The following changes allow the two to understand how much they mean to each other and get together in the end (something we have expected—there is no real suspense in this film): she turns down excellent job prospects in Shanghai to be near him, he learns from his father that honesty is the best policy, he loses his ability to hear the thoughts of women, she regains her employment at the agency.

This movie is casual so side-steps various interesting questions: Does intimacy really require understanding? It is possible to be too well understood? Would anyone really want to be with someone who could hear private thoughts all the time? And so on.

An possible line of analysis with this film would be to compare it to the original Amercian version (2000) since this is a remake adapted for a Chinese audience. The director was trained in Beijing but has lived and worked overseas and should be considered international in his sensibilities, I think. Some of his choices in the adaptation that could be considered are 1) that he believed the plotline would work in China 2) that he wanted to making a pleasing film for domestic release. (I guess—I don't think he really wanted the film to be all that successful overseas since a remake of an American film is a bit awkward in that department.) This second question leads of course to looking a what changes he chose to make and whether they are telling of Chinese-style modern romance.