Pi

Rating:
Summary: Again It's: "Ignorance is Bliss"
Review: The Untied States has a long and probably singular contempt for intellectual pursuit, stemming mostly from its Puritan roots. In fact, this film could easily have been premised on the biblical verse: "Of the making of many books there is no end and much study is weariness to the flesh."

The film concerns a mathematician's (Max Cohen's) quest to find an underlying structure to all reality that can be expressed mathematically. Of course, his quest is cast as an obsession that makes him somewhat antisocial and gives him extreme debilitating migraines that he attempts to palliate through various drugs. He hopes to discover this underlying mathematical structure for noble purposes like predicting outcomes in the stock market. In the Puritan worldview, people given to intellectual pursuits cannot be motivated by worthwhile concerns. His pursuit comes to the attention of corporate gangsters and Jewish mystics. The former want to use his formula to plot their investments, while the latter want it in order to find the mathematical expression that can be translated into the (lost) secret name of God. Both groups strong-arm Max, indicating that there is no real spiritual difference between them. I found the parallel of greed with Jews disturbing.

In the end, Max lobotomizes himself by drilling a hole in his head. He can no longer do relatively simple computations and has all the docile pleasantness of Forrest Gump, the American ideal. Ignorance is bliss. The entire movie turns on this cliché.

Ironically, the choice of black and white was appropriate for the film. It parallels nicely the false dilemma the film presents: either we live with a tortured dysfunctional intelligence or a tranquil ignorance. The acting was superb and the special effects were quite good for a low-budget film. The film is worth seeing, but it really says nothing we haven't heard many times before.

Rating:
Summary: Vintage Noir with the Hip Hop Twist
Review: PI - Darren Aronofsky's 1ST Feature Film / U.S. 1998 (4 STARS)
November 2003: I truly enjoyed this B&W film - symbolic of Film Noir from the 50's (Touch of Evil and The Trial), but more technically savvy. It is a masterpiece in control, and a director's ability to create mood - in the true spirit of independent cinema style, in display with all it glory (and gratuitousness).
• Mise-en-scene: The figure behavior of Max Cohen appealed to me - strange, erratic and inconsistent - it furthered the narrative to establish a man truly on the edge.
• While I did not feel personally for Cohen's character, I enjoyed being a voyeur and following his track to see where he would end up. My goal was very narrative driven and I don't think the director's aim was for us to empathize with the character - it was more to get us interested in him -which we do quite acutely.
• I did not particularly care for the gangster angle, but I guess it was important to keep the less-artsy crowd hooked on and to drive the narrative forward in a linear fashion.
• Cinematography: The mood was built both by the choice of wide angled lenses used at very close distances to distort the images and give the 'crazy world' feel. Camera height is used effectively to convey an impending feeling of something waiting to happen or lurking around the corner.
• Sound & Editing: The director's total skill and control on these two stylistic elements is what makes this film an imperfect masterpiece. I so enjoyed the complimenting of the sound bridges to give the impending feeling of foreboding. Yet the sound was hip and a departure from earlier noir works where it created only mood. The editing was totally maverick and the mixing of superimpositions with quick and flash cuts gave a more music-video feel which was fast and slick - thoroughly enjoyable in the end.

Rating:
Summary: GOOD
Review: A crasy movie, takes a crasy mind to undestand. Watch this movie, if you can handle it!!!

Rating:
Summary: A good low buget indie pic..
Review: Pi is good because using low-budget constraints the director has managed to do a remarkable job of it all, however like most other reviews do say the movie does fall short and never really gets around to sorting itself out and opts for an ending that is shocking but does not really pay-off. Watch it for a good job done on a very small budget with limited characters.

Rating:
Summary: Dont buy into the hype--rent "A Beautiful Mind" instead
Review: This movie is a classic of the psuedo-intellectual hipster genre. It has the optimal mix of drugs, weirdo-psychotic behavior, and pop mathematics to take the hippy psuedointellectuals on a fanatastic voyage into a world where they matter. The truth is, this movie is more focused on the drugs and the weirdo-psychotic behavior than the math, and so the name "Pi" is misleading. This is not a movie about mathematics nor a mathematician. If is was trying to be, it did a really bad job. Number theory unlocking the secret to the stock market? The number 216? This is not serious mathematics. Hence the movies' plot is meaningless to people who really know what applied mathematics is about--all that is left is the drugs and the weirdo-psychotic nonesense. Two stars.

Rating:
Summary: 3.14???
Review: This movie pi has a really good idea but it falls way short. Personally i am a math instructor and I value the math part. But the end is what really killed the movie. Also the end doesn't explain anything at all. I loved the whole insanity, drug, and the directing. "Requiem" is a much much better film. This one will leave you disappionted.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, weird and intense showcase for raw talent
Review: This 1998 film certainly is weird. It's brilliant too. And incredibly intense. Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, the Brooklyn-born, Harvard educated twenty-something young filmmaker, it was shot it black and white on a shoestring budget and has achieved much recognition in the world of independent film.

The story is about an obsessed mathematician named Maximillion Cohen who is looking for the secrets of the universe. Sean Gullette is cast in this role. He's skinny, balding and manages to make the audience wonder if he is a misunderstood genius or mentally ill nutjob who's constantly popping medications and injecting himself with various substances just to keep sane. He's a sympathetic character and it is a tribute to his fine acting that it was possible for me to identify with him.

The setting is the rundown area of New York's Chinatown, where our hero lives behind triple locked doors. His computer takes up a whole room and the only resemblance to any computers I've known in my lifetime is the fact that it has a screen and a keyboard. The one person he trusts is his aging mathematics professor who has long ago given up looking for those patterns in numbers which have been searched for by madmen and scholars from the beginning of time. A young Orthodox Jewish man befriends him and gets him interested in the secrets of numbers in the Torah. There's also a high-profile Wall Street firm which wants to use his findings to make millions. The plot might be strange but it moves with the speed of light and there's no time to stop and think about the logic of it all. Before I knew it, I was drawn into the story which included some chase scenes through the New York subway system.

Certainly, this is not a film for everyone. But its an inspired showcase for raw talent in writing, directing and acting. Therefore I give it a high recommendation.

Rating:
Summary: When You Start Giving Up.
Review: Darren Aronofsky's first film, Pi, tells the story of a determined mathematician/computer scientist who spends his life searching for number patterns everywhere he can look--in nature, religion, business and so on. If he can just unlock that secret 216-number pattern, it would be the answer to--well, everything. Everyday that passes he gets a little bit closer to unlocking the secret pattern of the universe, and--so bent on exposing and discovering the mystery of the world--he becomes madder and madder. Holed up in a dark and shaded urban tenement with little in it save the archaic supercomputer that he toils is life away in front of, Max Cohen [Sean Gullette] is hounded unceasingly by stockbrokers and religious extremists alike--everybody wants to know the solution to the universe! Working his brain to the maximum capacity, Cohen begins to suffer from horrible migraine headaches and--partly because of the unbearable pain, but also because of the maddening numbers that never quite work into valid patterns--to soothe his aching head, grabs an electric drill and pierces his brain--silencing the pleading numbers and throbbing pain for an eternity! Earlier in the film we are greeted with a scene of Cohen and a little girl sitting together--she, asking him random arithmetic problems, and he, rattling off the answers absently, thinking of some far grander thing. In the closing scene, the two of them sit together on a park bench once again--only this time Cohen has a large white bandage wrapped about his head. This time, when the little girl asks him a mathematical problem, Cohen smiles and says broodingly, "I don't know."

I once was under the impression that directors were unimportant to films--they tell the actors what to do and decide how the shots look, yes?--but, after seeing Aronofsky's Pi, I see now how valuable a good director truly is. Aronofsky, more than any other director of films I've seen, suffers from an extreme admiration/jealousy of Stanley Kubrick. He lets you know throughout his films that he's seen the best of Hollywood's cinema and that he is here to play along with the big boys--the sad thing is, though, is that he's not in league with the great directors. His problem, it seems, is that he wants to be remembered too much and is trying too hard. He wants you, the viewer, to know and to remember that his films are directed well and are artistically triumphant. What Aronofsky doesn't seem to understand is this: it wasn't necessarily the outlandish and daring camera work that the likes of Kubrick and Scorsese used in their films, but what they were saying with the shots. Sure, Kubrick was pretty revolutionary with that camera in 2001: A Space Odyssey--and not every one of those shots of the stewardesses walking up the circular walls were biting social commentary--but Kubrick wasn't into directorial glitz, as Aronofsky seems to be. So, yes, we've established that Aronofsky is trying too hard with his directing. I wish that were all I had to say for him, but he tries a little too hard as a writer, as well. Though Cohen never spends any time thinking of anything but meaningless numbers, he is certainly symbolic of "the intellectual." Yes, and what a positive portrait of one it is. Yes, I want to grow up to be an intellectual so I can be like Max Cohen--a lifeless loser, afraid of light, sitting in an apartment with his computer--too afraid to talk to anyone! Yes, that's the kind of person that I want to be. It is Aronofsky's intent that thinkers who watch this film are supposed to identify with Cohen--he's trying so very hard to be original and brilliant, yes, but in the end he is forced to surrender himself to stupidity because it is impossible to achieve perfection. Though this might even be true, that is an absolutely contemptible idea on which to base one's film--especially to be so perverse as to represent intellectual relinquishment as something which is positive. "Just give up! Surrender! Don't try! Who cares?" That's one of the worst messages related through a film probably of all time. You know what? I hate Darren Aronofsky! I absolutely hate him!

Rating:
Summary: A Creapy Math Thriller...They Didn';t Teach this in Algebra!
Review: The movie about the 216 digit number that can both unlock the secrets of the stock market as well as the Kaballah is a classic. Max is a brillaint mathematican. Perhaps a little too brilliant for his own good. This man believes there is a pattern and he is bent on finding it.

Not to mention his increasing drug problems. Then the Kaballah come in. They want a number to unlock theit text. Max finds the number for *both* and finds that he is wanted by both. And his life is at stake. These people will stop at nothing to get the number. Then he does something drastic to make sure no one ever knows...

This independant black and white film is masterfully done. Well acted and well scripted. You will get chills and thrills when watching this movie. The commentary tracks are very informative as well.

See it today!!! NOW!

Rating:
Summary: The math fixation is cool; but the movie falls short
Review: Summary:
Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a brilliant mathematician who is trying to predict stock values using his mathematical wizardry. He has turned his apartment into a giant computer and spends every waking hour working on mathematical problems. When approached by a fellow Jew involved with Cabalah, Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman), Max learns about the existence of a 216 digit number that is supposed to hold the key to, well, everything - including stock values and the true name of God spoken by the ancient high priests of Israel. Consulting with his mentor, Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis), Max is informed that it might exist, but Sol also warns him that once he fixates on a specific number he will begin to see it everywhere.

It's not clear whether Max takes his advice or not, but Max seems to solve what the number is, only to be attacked by a number of people that want the number. Eventually he is able to escape from all of these attacks only to succumb to his own insanity.

My Comments:
Two friends highly recommended this movie. As was the case with Donnie Darko, it was described as a 'mind trip'. And, as was the case with Donnie Darko, I think this movie fails to fully realize its potential. Yes, the idea that pretty much everything in the universe can be represented mathematically is cool. Also cool is the idea that perhaps there is a single number that holds the key to unraveling all of the mysteries of the universe. But the story used to explore this idea just doesn't cut it.

The story isn't necessarily full of holes, it just doesn't make much sense. The biggest problem is Max's headaches, if that's what they really are. I'm guessing they are supposed to be hyper-severe migraines that result in him hallucinating at times. Max also seems to be somewhat paranoid, though his paranoia seems to be somewhat based in reality. In the end, the headaches just turn into an excuse to kill Max off without actually dealing with what the consequences would have been if someone had actually discovered the 'almighty number' that solves everything. It was really disappointing and much shallower than I think most people want to believe. Yes, it had potential, but all of that potential rested in Max actually doing something with the information he discovered. Instead, Max takes a drill to his head and kills himself. Whoopee.

I'm sure defenders of the movie will turn around and say, "But consider the budget. They really couldn't do much beyond what they did." Well, that's probably true. But if they had a better story, they could have gotten a better budget.

As for the acting, Sean Gullette was pretty good. Once again, the big problem here is the headaches. Even though Sean Gullette plays a convincing, introverted mathematician, I don't think even he really knew what to do with the headaches. They don't seem to have a basis in reality (i.e., no one has ever had anything like this before), which make them hard to portray convincingly. So, yes, Sean's performance was pretty good, but considering the story didn't make a lot of sense, he didn't have much to work with. The rest of the cast was for the most part bearable, with the exception of Pamela Hart (Marcy Dawson from Lancet Percy). I'm guessing she only has minimal experience acting, because she didn't seem to be doing it in this movie.

Overall, the concept was cool, but the delivery was wanting. The incorporation of the migraines, if that's what they were, was a copout for a story that wasn't going anywhere. Whether this was because of a non-existent budget or a bad story doesn't matter to me. Perhaps I was expecting a real 'mind trip', but what I got was just a dull, throbbing in my temporal lobe. Not recommended.