Pi
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Movie Reviews of Pi
Movie Review: The Calculus of Disbelief
Summary: 5 Stars
It is a remarkable surprise that, in a time of science fiction and fantasy films which continually strive do outdo each other in pyrotechnics, one of the best science fiction films I've seen is a little black & white masterpiece that was shot with a $60,000 budget. Darren Aronofsky, writer and director of 'PI', has created a film that is every bit as engaging as its 'big' brothers - in reality, even more so.Mathematician Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is on a quest. He is convinced that underlying the chaos of the stock market is a pristine order, a mathematical rule with which he can prove that everything can be reduced to numbers. His mentor and teacher is Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), who was forced to give up his own investigations into PI when he suffered a mysterious stroke.
Cohen's investigation takes him far beyond the gyrations of the stock market into the mystical Kaballah and an intense questioning of the basic nature of reality. His tool for this journey is the silent, inanimate computer, Euclid, who seems to deconstruct Cohen's universe further with each strike of the return key. Even when Robeson urges Cohen to take a break from a quest which is clearly destroying the mathematician, torturing him with horrific headaches and hallucinations, Max is unable to stop. He is drawn step by step into the irrevocable gap between the sacred and the mundane.
Made with reversal film which heightens the contrast between light and dark, the film provides a continuous flow of symbolic content which plays in harmony with the world of ideas from with it is drawn. Ants and electric drills, computer chips and the swirls of cream in a cup of coffee all seem to have otherworldly referents. Aronofsky and Gullette, by some strange archaic alchemy have managed to create the seeming of layer after layer of possible meaning. To me the film itself becomes a non-repeating pattern where chaos mimics reality.
This film satisfies on many levels, starting with a question, finding an answer, and then discovering the next question. It is visually brilliant. Film director Matthew Libatique proves himself a genius, and Matthew Maraffi's production design is amazing. Euclid is created out of scrap and loose parts, but manages to take on a full life of its own. The acting is simply perfect. This is a film for late night coffee house conversations, appealing to both the paranoid and the believer.
Notable additional contents of the DVD are two full length commentaries on the film one by Aronofsky and the other by Gullette. There is a section of outtakes, the film trailers and some other miscellany. Much recommended.
Movie Review: May we have your gematria, please?
Summary: 5 Stars
Lord, over 400 reviews! It is my great displeasure to have missed the chance at reviewing this when it was new. So I can add a few points for the newcomer to the film, and perhaps answer queries about the movie itself.
What begins with the mathematician fishing for the solution to the stock exchange ends in his discovery of God. That's right: he discovers God. When his PC and then even his electrical system begin creating life, which somehow attracts carpenter ants, we know he's got more than just a spooky number in there.
It is very, very clever of the makers never to show the audience this number. A good thing.
Paranoid, suffering blinding migraines and other sensory disturbances, the mathematician finds a certain release--and this is how the film introduces some to the results of studying the Kabalah. This man is clearly not so religious, he's not studying the Kabalah. He's gone beyond that.
In the stunning, noir thriller, the mathematician is pursued by a silly girl who really likes him, by the government who really wants his work (the men in black pursue him, but it is a black lady!), and by a knowledge-hungry Hasidic Jewish community who is trying to lure him back into the fold. They are the most interesting, for they have revealed to the mathematician that he has found God--who is HE to deserve that knowledge all for himself? Who is he to hoard it all forever?
Well, he is the discoverer...or is he the Chosen One??
I think the actor Gulette is very sexy in this film. A few shots of him are quite sexual and provocative, and I wonder to this day why that was done. A very revealing shot of him sitting in a chair finds the camera nestled neatly in his crotch. Personally, I loved it. I still don't get it.
His final solution is to drill a hole in his skull--or cause a superficial wound, I'm not clear what he did. This relieves his migraines and possibly erases his incessant genius with numbers. The allegory, of turning away and paying a small price in exchange for what would have been a very high price, is a life lesson.
This film is unforgettable; over the years I've had pals ask me, "What the heck is that movie called, the one with the crazy scientist whose computer comes to life?"--and I always know which film they mean. There are some younger people who think the film dates back to the 1970s. There is a 1970s quality to it, and that is a part I love. I love this film with a finality that is rarely given, and so will you...whether you 'get it' or not.
Movie Review: Superior, inventive thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
It's often said that movies are an art form, and I really believe it's true. We often lose sight of this idea. Movies are a driving force in entertainment. If a film is poorly done, we quickly realize it. We can think of such movies as celluloid equivalents of drawing stick men or happy faces. Others really entertain us, yet we rarely consider the art of how these were done. When a movie like Titanic costs $200,000,000, the implication is that throwing money at a project is all it takes. In fact, it takes a genius to work successfully on such a large canvas. At the other end of the spectrum are pictures such as Pi. These are works by talented filmmakers who, so far, have limited reputations and even less money. The cost of a score of these films costs less than the publicity campaign of one major studio release. In this low budget area, we often find true artistry, simply because lack of funds makes innovation a necessity. While the results are not always successful, the effort is always there.
Pi, the story of brilliant mathematician whose work drives him to insanity, succeeds brilliantly. Filmed in black and white on location in Manhattan, it's a "X files" story of patterns, visions, covert operations, crashing computers, and Creation itself. Based on science theory rather than science fiction, it is frightening because it is possible.
It has long been accepted that the Universe might be understood through mathematical equations. What Pi suggests is that the obsessive pursuit of such knowledge could drive someone to insanity. I suspect that it would, perhaps because it would make one so different and apart from the rest of humanity. As Sol, Sean Guilette gives a first-rate performance. It's often hard to have empathy for a character this obsessive and humorless, but Guilette manages to involve us, even when we've no idea where Sol is coming from.
Director Darren Aronofsky, like others before him, may have set his career in motion with this little seen movie. His co-writer, Sean Gullette, is also Pi's star. The techno-industrial music by Clint Marsel is a rare example of a film's score being an integral part of the plot. This music, along with tight editing and good acting, causes some scenes to become so intense that you almost feel what the main character is feeling.
For those viewers who like to step outside the mainstream, Pi is highly recommended.
Movie Review: Number Theory and the Kabbalah.
Summary: 5 Stars
_Pi: Faith in Chaos_ is a bizarre cult movie featuring a mathematician searching for meaning in the number pi and attempting to understand chaotic systems in nature that originally appeared in 1998. The movie is entirely in black and white and attempts to portray an intense atmosphere of heady thought. The central character Max Cohen is a mathematician obsessed with the quest for meaning in numbers. He describes mathematics as the language of nature and notes the role of mathematics in explaining various natural phenomena. In particular, he seems to be enamored of chaos theory (the idea that small changes in initial conditions may lead to large changes in outcome) and expresses the idea that the spiral is a universal form found in nature. He lives alone in an apartment where he has set up a supercomputer (nicknamed "Euclid") that attempts to predict the stock market. While obsessively working on these problems he encounters a Hassidic Jew who attempts to introduce him to the Kabbalah (a form of Jewish mysticism). However, it is at this point that his mentor tells him that dabbling in such things amounts to numerology and that by leaving behind the trappings of scientific rigor he is moving into the realm of mysticism. He is also followed by a group of people representing a large corporation who hope to use his discoveries to control the stock market. It is while conducting his researches that he mysteriously finds a 216 digit number which may hold the key to the mysteries of the universe. His mentor theorizes that his computer has attained consciousness and this number is highly important in that respect. Followed by corporate Wall Street hopefuls and Jewish fanatics who hope to use this number believed to encode the name of God to bring the Messiah, and plagued by increasingly growing headaches, the mathematician faces an imminent crisis. To see how this crisis is resolved (and ultimately unresolved) you must watch the movie. Ultimately the movie asks us to question the very nature of reality and asks us why mathematics should pose such a profound tool in our understanding of that reality. I recommend it as a strange, mind-expanding film that will shake one's assumptions and which shows the dangers inherent in all obsessions.Movie Review: A word to the timid and closed-minded: don't bother.
Summary: 5 Stars
For anyone with a sense of high, high, HIGH concept and scientific/spiritual adventure, however, this film is one of the finest I've ever seen. The dark, edgy cinematography is unusual and atmospherically appropriate, the acting is very good, the music sets the post-modern, bleeding-edge timbre of the world, and the plot has enough depth and twist to leave some of our less inspired thinkers behind. And like any good film that aspires to the level of art, it has inspired deeply divergent and often passionate reactions from those who see it.A sort of warped cross between Good Will Hunting, Eraserhead and Jacob's Ladder, Pi manages to capture in under two hours the sort of deep, paranoid, multi-layered huge concept plot that books like Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" accomplish only in hundreds and hundreds of dense pages. Pi, too, is very dense, and done in a way that clearly does not appeal to everyone... but it works.
While I personally find this film to be utterly brilliant, I can see why some might not appreciate it; others actually hate it. I've heard some disproportionately negative reviews... so negative that there would appear to be something deeper going on under the surface for these folks. It is a disturbing, edgy film that deals with concepts that are beyond some people, and that others simply do not want to have explored.
One criticism I've heard that seems completely off base is that the film has no plot. Even on first viewing, the plot seemed perfectly clear to me - tortuous and requiring solid attention, but discernable and beyond clever. Granted, after viewing the film with friends, we had a discussion that proved my take on the plot merely an interpretation, not a definitive treatise. But any film that can inspire the kind of reactions that Pi has and still remain open to multiple interpretations deserves a special place in Hollywood: that all-too-sparse shelf for films that also qualify as true art.
If you can appreciate movies for an intellectual and visceral challenge and enjoy watching something that isn't simply handed to you with a dumbed-down plot formula for cheap laughs or mere adrenalin, Pi will keep you coming back. I am buying it as soon as I finish writing this review.