Pi

Rating:
Summary: poor effort that might give way to greater things
Review: very poorly photographed, directed, written, and acted. this movie is filled with tons of flawed logic and uninteresting techno thriller moments that make absolutely no sense. i feel optimistic that this will open the door for better things by aronofsky as requiem for a dream was a notch up the ladder, but definitely steer clear of this overpraised mess

Rating:
Summary: Steak and kidney
Review: If you ignore the presentation, Pi is actually a neat little thriller. It's easy to over-analyse it (as some have done here), but it essentially boils down to a glorified 'Twilight Zone' episode - one of the good ones. There's a groovy soundtrack featuring some Warp-esque techno acts, lots of quotable lines, and although the central story is basically Arthur C. Clarke's 'The Nine Billion Names of God', it's sufficiently intriguing to keep you watching for an hour and a half. It's not really high art, as such, but it's extremely well-made and very watchable. The DVD is good, too, with lots of extra bits, and it's cheap.

Rating:
Summary: migraine blowing
Review: I thought Pi was a great movie and everybody that suffers migraines should watch it. Also, I really like Jackie Chan movies.

Rating:
Summary: Creative to say the least
Review: I gave this one five stars because it was so imaginative. If you are not into indie films, however, you may find it to be boring (some of my friends have). I like it quite a bit though. A guy uses the hebrew torrah to try and figure out an algorithm to the stock market and to solve Pi. It's a great concept, and it's a very tense movie. It's complicated and can be somewhat confusing. You'll love it if you like to think, but if you want alot of action you'll have to stick with crap like "Gladiator."

Rating:
Summary: An Original Movie From an Original Filmmaker
Review: Every few years, a new movie is made that creates a new genre. This movie is certainly one of those. The story is quite unusual and I doubt that any movie presented a "mathematical thriller" before. The choice of black and white made the movie even more special. The director succeeded in creating a "mood" of paranoia, fear, confusion and loneliness. This movie proves that a good movie is not necessarily an expensive movie to make. This movie is a must see for all cinema lovers.

Rating:
Summary: read Roger Shattuck's Forbidden Knowledge too
Review: Some information is simply not safe for us--not because there is something wrong with its possession in the abstract, but because it is the sort of thing we humans are not well suited to cope with. There are various things we simply ought not not to know. If we did not have to live our lives amidst a fog of uncertainty about a whole range of matters that are actually of fundamental interest and importance to us, it would no longer be a human mode of existence that we would live. Instead we would become a being of another sort, perhaps angelic, perhaps machine-like, but certainly not human. -Nicholas Rescher, an essay entitled Forbidden Knowledge

In his excellent book, Forbidden Knowledge (see Orrin's review), Roger Shattuck discussed the persistence and continued relevance of one of the central themes of Western Civilization : the idea that certain kinds of knowledge have been placed, quite specifically and intentionally, beyond our reach because we do not have the capacity, at this time, to handle them, or to wield them responsibly. I've no idea if Darren Aronofsky had read Shattuck's book before making this movie, nor whether Professor Shattuck has ever commented upon the film, but it perfectly illustrates the point.

In Aronofsky's film, a brilliant young mathematician, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), believes in several precepts :

(1) that mathematics is the language of the universe (2) nature can be expressed in numbers, and (3) there are patterns everywhere in nature.

Most importantly, he believes that we should be able to perceive and interpret the patterns, to comprehend the language, and that he is on the verge of doing so. Yet, while patterns seem to emerge at every turn, from a swirl of cream in a coffee cup to a seashell at Coney Island, the meanings of these patterns remain maddeningly elusive.

Meanwhile, both a vicious Wall Street henchwoman and a Hassidic Jew approach Max about his work, the first thinking he's about to figure out the hidden patterns in the Market, the latter thinking he can decipher the numerical code hidden in the Torah. Max however has hit an impasse, including crashing his computer, and turns to his mentor for help. Like Max, he too was once a brilliant, cocky young mathematician, but he's had a stroke and now just sits in his apartment playing the game of Go.

And just in case all that isn't enough, Max has paralyzing headaches brought on by an incident from his youth, an incident which evokes Daedalus :

9:22. Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So one day when I was six, I did ... the next day I had my first headache.

Whether physical or mental in nature, Max's headaches are soon accompanied by nosebleeds, hallucinations, and a mounting sense of paranoia, as his grip on reality begins to slip away.

Aronofsky achieves some sense of the disjointed and terrifying world that Max is living in by setting the film in a decaying tenement in Brooklyn, shooting in Black and White, manipulating the film to make it incredibly grainy, actually mounting a camera on Sean Gullette (the actor playing Max) so that on tracking shots we're moving with him but looking right in his face, etc. Some of these techniques work better than others, but all serve to give the film such an unusual look that it is very much its own distinctive world.

But most of all there are the ideas. Max's hubris--his belief that the universe's secrets are lurking just beyond his line of sight or his chain of thought, and even more important, that he in particular has been given the capacity to finally perceive them and that when they are revealed he will be able to handle them--is shared by so many of the great heroes of our culture, from Adam and Eve to Dr. Frankenstein, to Faust, and so on. (Like Faust he even makes a deal with the Wall Streeters in order to get a new, extraordinarily powerful processor for his computer.) The message of the film, as in all of its predecessors, that no matter the quality of the individual--no matter the genius, or the purity, or the ambition--Man is simply not ready to share in these secrets, is so profoundly antithetical to our Age of Reason that it is a pleasant shock to find an artist who's still resorting to it. And, amazingly enough, this mythical lesson is still just as powerful today as it has been throughout human history.

You can't really discuss the end of the film without ruining it for first time viewers. Suffice it to say that the denouement is both shocking and inevitable. This is a movie that not everyone will like--mostly due to the unusual look of the film, Max's sometimes off-putting behavior, and some genuinely disturbing images--but if you stick with it and at least accept the visual style, you'll be treated to a compelling version of one of our oldest, but still most relevant, stories.

GRADE : A+

Rating:
Summary: Compelling Sci-Fi
Review: First, this film scores because it is a quality script with that does not even try for "Hollywood" style production. Second, this film meets one of my personal criteria for a very good to great film in that it offers filmmakers / photographers good content to dig into, admire and learn from. Shot in black and white, the film has a certain 1960's-frenzied cheez-sci-fi style (maybe it was the weird, buzzing ambient score?) to it, but not to such a degree that it gets in the way. The cinematography actually reminded me of some segments from "Fight Club", believe it or not. Other reviewers either liked or were turned off by the pseudo-math that supports the plot - one man's search for underlying order in a chaotic, apparently random universe. Simply put, one cannot tell if this search is a schizophrenic episode or the result of a man's mind trying to comprehend something it was not designed to. They missed the simple fact that this ambiguity drives the whole plot. Sean Gullette never gives us a clue as to whether he's a genius or an annoying axe-grinder convinced that JFK was assassinated by the Moonies / "Blue Blockers" are a government mind-control device / there is an underlying, absolute, predictable order to the universe. Okay, just #3, but still... Gullette's performance, especially in "wing nut" mode, is great. By the end, he's shaved his head and recollects the best of Robert DeNiro in "Taxi Driver" in his intensity, although his character is not required to jump off a personal cliff quite so high as DeNiro's. Like all great films, this one leaves audiences with more questions than answers. As an added benefit, the math, while simple, is presented in such a way that anyone could see what might compel a person to spend their lives studying abstract number theory. The only thing that keeps me from giving 4-5 stars is that this film is work to watch - it is NOT "entertainment" per se, and people shopping for "entertainment" tend to focus on "# stars (x out of y)" as criteria. If that's you, forget it. For the adventurous film fan, it's a worthy film.

Rating:
Summary: Enigma
Review: Pi staring Sean Gullette is one of my favorite movies. Gullette plays Max Cohen a math genius attempting to solve the age-old mystery of Pi (3.14...). Max's problems started when he was little, his mother told him not to stare into the sun & so he stares into the sun. The doctors did not know if he'd ever see again. Apparently Max does recover but from that day on he has headaches. Max is an anti-social genius who has myriad visions. Not only that but he is paranoid & has his apartment filled with computer equipment. On his quest to find the answer to Pi he runs into evil Jews & malicious businessmen. Pi has profound hidden meanings laced throughout the one & a half hours it plays. For those people out there who love enigmas & love to solve them, this is the movie for you.

Rating:
Summary: Has its moments, but still, ultimately fails
Review: The kindest thing I can say for this movie is that I watched it very intently for the nearly hour and a half that it ran. Sometimes my interest wanes in movies, and I become distracted by other things, or I can be doing something else while watching the movie, and not miss anything. This time, I didn't want to look away from the screen because I found myself mostly interested in what was going on, though I'm not really sure why that was, since I wasn't that deeply impressed by the movie.

Being the sort of movie this was, I didn't know any of the actors, but I felt that Sean Guletter, who played Max, the main character, did a good job of portraying the paranoia that he was supposed to be feeling as the movie progressed. There were others, whose names I can't remember, that also did a good job. The man who portrayed Max's mentor was a good choice, and I felt he gave the movie more of a depth than it might have otherwise had.

The general plot of the movie was that a mathematician was trying to find the numerical code that is embedded into everything in the universe, to solve the great riddle of the universe. From this, everything else evolves, the Rabbi's who want to use Max to their own ends to decipher the Torah and find the true name of God, and the wall street fatcats who want to crack the stock market. Intermixed with all this is Max's own hallucinations, caused by the severe headaches he's experienced ever since staring directily into the sun as a child, until he had lost his sight for a while.

I had several problems with the movie; one of which was when Max's mentor told him about computers becoming aware of their own existence as they approached solving the riddle of the universe, and then they would self destruct. Huh? To me, that was an assumption beyond the ridiculous, and deeply detracted from any belief in the movie. Another scene was one in which Max sits looking at a stock report running across his ticker, and is able to predict with 100% accuracy what the stocks will be at. Another head shaker as far as I was concerned.

Now, I don't mind movies that make you think a little bit at their conclusion, but generally, I like my movies to be like any other ticket I would buy. You plunk down your money, you might not be sure of all the stops along the way, but when you get to the end of the line, you know where you are. This movie presents you with an ending, but then right after that, it presents you with another one, not really leaving you knowing where you are. Personally, I would have preferred if they had stopped with the first one, it made more sense to me that way. Another thing, the ending was just sort of out there, they could have actually have put it in anywhere up to about a half hour earlier, and not really have lost anything in the story.

I can't highly recommend this movie, but it did hold my interest most of the time, so I would at least recommend you rent it once, just to see for yourself. I'm glad I saw it the one time, but it's not one I'll ever add to my collection.

Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone
Review: For originality this movie deserves 5 stars. If you do not have a strong mathematical background I recommend watching something else (may I recommend the Jerry Springer show to the general reader). If you have been exposed to some chaos theory and possibly neural networks you will appreciate the content/originality of this film. In the film, the main character, Max Cohen is obsessed with building a NN that would perfectly predict an index (this has been done in reality, but obviously with much poorer precesion). He is also being pesterred by some bankers (I wonder why) and Orthodox Jews (who believe he can help them crack what they believe to be a code in the torah). Again, the movie deserves 5 stars for its originality as a film, if you are familiar with some of the mathematical concepts you will appreciate it.