Pi

Rating:
Summary: 3.1415926535897932384626.........
Review: Take a journey through a mind on overload. This movie exploits the famed history of the number PI with snips of actual mathematical revelations divulged throughout the plot. However, the intrigue is the main character who reveals to us, the potential power of discovering the numerical constant's in life and it's impact on his emotional well being. There is a sickness, or is it a madness that has developed, but the audience is not sure what it is, or which came first, was it due to his quest, or did it provoke the quest? I would have had an alternate ending, but that is merely because I do not subscribe to the mainstream idea that higher knowledge is forbidden. I realize for most, the end is satisfactory. I like the high contrast black and white cinematography and the lightning speed flashes of scenery. This movie visually appeals to the alternative, gritty side. If you like the number PI, math in general, see the grids in nature, or just want to take a trip in a guy's head.....I recommend this movie.

Rating:
Summary: Compelling, but empty
Review: "Pi" was Darren Aronofsky's freshman entry into the movie biz. Although not as compelling as "Requiem for a Dream" (whose soundtrack I am listening to now, coincidentally), "Pi" commands your attention. From a warped plot involving the stock market, a group of Rabbis, a mysterious number, and an amalgam of other questions and insinuations, Aronofsky braids such a brilliant thread that becomes frayed at the end. Plotlines are left open, and the movie's ending is speculative at best.

Besides the lackluster finale, "Pi" is a great journey through a true unknown, where possibilities are many and so are enemies.

Rating:
Summary: very good student film
Review: Don't rush out to see it, it's really just a very well-done student film. But it very effectively sustains a desperate and claustrophobic air, enough so that you mostly forgive its many flaws, which include reliance on dream sequences and no real investigation of the implications of its own ideas. It has the momentum of a great movie, without being one.

Rating:
Summary: A Qabalistic view
Review: The movie PI centers around a Qabalistic principle that the sacred name of G-d is secreted away in the Hebrew text of the Torah. Through the course of the movie, a mathemetician searching for patterns in the stock market stumbles across a pattern in the Torah that may lead to the discovery of the 216 letter Name. In a fantastic, surreal story, you can feel Max's pain of genius. All of the qabalistic math shown in the movie is accurate; Theta does approach 1.618 and AB+AM=ILD, and the true name of G-d does hold 72 syllables of three letters each (216 letters.) But the relations between these principles is the fictional genius of Aranofski.

Rating:
Summary: Almost as good as Requiem....but still fantastic
Review: This is an incredible movie. I had my doubts about this movie when I first sat down to watch it, but Darren Aronofsky really blew me away with this film.

For those of you that hate films that don't really end completely resolved, and carry a very strong message, this film is not for you. There is a very strong message here, but a lot of people won't take the time to look for it.

The movie is basically about a mathematical genius, who intends to discover a cryptic number in the Bible that contains the true name of God. According to some of my more religious friends, a lot of this stuff isn't Biblically accurate, but I could care less. The man doesn't believe in the existence of a higher power. Everything is based in math and tangible principles. Meanwhile, various factions struggle to use the man's mind for their own designs.

This movie says a lot about the true nature of the world, and the true nature of man. The message at the end is decidedly more positive than the one contained in Requiem for a Dream, and it still makes for powerful viewing. See this movie at once.

Rating:
Summary: Just the kind of weirdness we don't get enough of
Review: I admit, I only rented this... and I'm sorry to say, the writer or director doesn't know as much about math and its bizarreness as he would like to. But the film is a fantastic meditation on intelligence and people's craving to submit to an intelligence greater than their own, and leaves our hero wondering, since he is the king of that hill, where he can turn? More than that, the film is devoted to the kind of quirky madness you tend to toy with at 2 in the morning after crazy nights, on the occasions when you wonder, what is this all about and what keeps me going? Scattered throughout are memorable film bytes that peck at your imagination later on, like when an immediate calculation of the decimal form of a fraction is one that endlessly repeats, and that is coveyed by the repitition of the numbers as the hero steps on each stair on his way down from his apartment, and you hear the numbers trailing off... or when you ask yourself, jeez, why does he keep his CPU suspended in a transparent tank on his ceiling? If you haven't seen this, it's perfectly clear to you by now that this is the most pretentious of films - cast in black and white with no good reason, ironically scored with driving techno, and with a random human brain as likely to be lying around as a newspaper, the film aims for the margins of both storytelling and its potential audience. But it is unmatched in its absorbing introspection of the human mind - or in its viscerally astonishing climax.

Rating:
Summary: Pi
Review: Pi is by all means a masterpiece of cinema. Aronofsky's noir film technique and photography are ingenius. The intensity of Pi reaches a level that very few directors can achieve. In an age when making films purely for money and forgetting about the artistic value of films are commonplace, Pi is a wake up call. When trying to describe the style and tone of this movie, I come to a loss of words. Stylistic images of horrifying beauty combine with an original and dramatic story to create Darren Aronofsky's first film, Pi.

Rating:
Summary: Huh ???
Review: I like (no, LOVE) arthouse movies. But this one left me wondering what was the point ?

The basis of the plot was interesting - find a way to crack the stockmarket, using mathematical formulas.

That's the part on the cover that got me interested. I wish there had been more information on the confusing way in which the rest of the movie was to be presented. I wouldn't have bothered buying it.

For much of the movie, the lead performer is undergoing a nervous breakdown, due to the pressures he is facing from a corporate firm on Wall st, who want to crack the market, some Jews who want to work out the name of god (sounds like part of the story "the 1,000,000 names of god"), and his own pressure at finding out about Pi.

This is repeated too many times, and towards the end, I was hoping that he would go quickly, so the movie could end.

I know that many people have raved about how good this movie is, how clever the photography is, using different angles to present the information, but for me, it was too far out there.

I don't go for the "Julia Roberts" type movies, and this one was
right at the opposite extreme of her type of movies.

Watch it on weekly rental from your video store and if you like it (and moreso, understand it), buy it, otherwise, move along, nothing to see here.

Rating:
Summary: MAD MAX: BEYOND THE NUMBER-DOME
Review: This is an intense film with a superb visual and aural style. The black and white photography, the music, the lighting and editing, and the claustrophobic cinemaphotography all are outstanding. And when the director wants to show you what it's like to have an epileptic fit (or something of that nature), you'll almost feel as bad as the movie character Max.

That said, I found the script to be engrossing but ultimately pretentious. It promises an intellectual reward that it can't deliver. The script owes more to numerology than mathematics, and the numeral hokum deflates the film's intellectual posturing. Still, Pi is an interesting portrait of a troubled soul.

Rating:
Summary: Numbers Please...
Review: Darren Aronofsky's brilliant debut is this black and white indie picture. It stars Sean Guilette as a hermitted mathematical wizard who believes that numbers hold the pattern to everything. The pattern that continues to illude him is the patter of Pi. He soon finds that there is a pattern to it though, a 216 digit number. In figuring this out Guilette gains more than he bargained for. Two groups of people are also after this number: A set of Jewish extremists and a set of vicious Wall Street brokers. Then the race is on to see who can control the pattern of Pi. Aronofsky's cinematography is remarkable, the angles and character development are also very in depth. Now see the debut that earned him top honors at Sundance.