Rating: 
Summary: You have yet to put one over on me, Darren.
Review: In order to be good, a psychological drama has to involve real people. If a psychological struggle has no basis in reality, it ceases to become a struggle and just becomes some fiction perpetrated on the world by a hack. There is supposedly a psychological struggle in Pi, but it is so far-fetched and fabricated that its basis in reality is tenuous at best. Max Cohen is a genius (how?) who studies number theory (why?) to make a Great Discovery of some kind. We're not too clear on the details of this, obviously, because Darren Aronofsky is a pretentious filmmaker and not a scientist, and thus cannot give us any details that range beyond "extremely shallow." But that's okay, since the point isn't the plot - the point is all the meaningless fluff Aronofsky throws on to mask the incompetent lack of a plot. Thus, we get absolutely random shots of a pulsating brain (representing, like, his emotional stress or something, man), a smattering of Jewish mysticism (with no information that couldn't be discovered in a five-minute Internet search, mind you - wouldn't want our film to have substance, here), Oriental philosophy (a Go board! how deep!), a techno soundtrack (how edgy!), a ponderous script rife with weighty one-liners, overacting, and best of all, grainy black and white.So Aronofsky is big on style. Maybe he'd be a half-decent cinematographer, although his "innovative camera angles" strike me as soulless and banal. But he is not a cinematographer; he is a director, and one who thinks he's an artist, no less. And I'm sure he'd say I just didn't understaaand his film. Oh, but I do understand - I understand that this film banks manipulatively on the fact that most people know just about as much about mathematics, mysticism or psychology as its creator, and thus would harp upon the "depth" of these things just because they were included. Pi is not the story of a man sliding into insanity, it is the story of what an arrogant, Harvard-graduated director thinks a man sliding into insanity is like, complete with a whole arbitrarily assembled collage of previously used "symbols" that he thought were cool when he first saw them, and a veneer of Philosophy Lite - all the clever words and cool concepts without the whole profundity thing. If you find such a thing in some way interesting, feel free to watch it. I, personally, do not.
Rating: 
Summary: Lacking substance, enforcing stereotypes
Review: The movie had it's good points and bad points. It began very well, depicting the main character as a paranoid, somewhat idiosyncratic mathematician, showing his complex method of thought, taking his principles learned in mathematics and applying them to life and philosophy. As the movie progressed, however, the mathematic reasoning declined to the point that computers achieving cognitant thought came into play. The theological reasoning was extremely flawed as well. For example, Chassidic Jews (portrayed badly) wanted the 216 digit number from the main character to bring about the Messianic age, saying that the number was the Hebrew name for G-d that would allow the Kohein Gadol to bring them closer to this age. Given that it contained 216 characters, and Hebrew is not written using vowels, the Kohein would not know how to pronounce this name, even if he had it! (The niqudot were not included.) Furthermore, the movie failed to mention that the only name the Kohein Gadol used to use in the Yom Kippur service in the Holy of Holies was the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of G-d that is known today, not some mystical 216 letter name. As I said, the movie began as a culturally diverse depiction of the world of a mathematic genius, but degenerated into his fight for survival at the hands of Chassidic Jews wanting a nonexistant name which causes computers to gain self awareness.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Storyline
Review: I enjoyed the storyline. I thought the director did an excellent job of bringing the audience into the tortured world of understanding chaos. I once read a story of a scientist at Los Almos who tried to change his clock from a 24 hour day to a 26 hour day. He nearly went crazy. This movie mirrors that story. I enjoyed the acting, the black and white setting and the storyline. However, the sound gave me a headache. Maybe I am to share a headache with the main character. I understand the role sound plays in the movie. I appreciate what the director was trying to accomplish. However, like a child playing the piano, a dog barking all night or fingernails going down a chalkboard; it all still gets on your nerves. Overall, an excellent movie.
Rating: 
Summary: pi proves to be amazing
Review: I give it five stars because I honestly enjoyed it. I can't say the audio/video quality was tops, but that wasn't the point of the film. The quality of the story was excellent, and that was the point of the film. The situations in the film were not cleanly beautiful--it was set in a dingy area and followed a disturbing story line--therefore it logically follows that the audio/video quality should be less than pristine. In the words of the Pi website, "A key to creating the world of was the futuristic soundscape created by Composer Clint Mansell, Sound Designer Brian Emrich, and host of electronic music artists, assembled by Music Supervisor Sioux Zimmerman and Producer Eric Watson. From early on, the creative team set out to achieve an ultra-modern contrast to the stark Black & White 16mm images that were going to be on the screen." They have succeeded, as the score merges fully with the video and enriches the film immeasurably by adding to its hauntingly unsettling ambience. The plot centers around the downward "spiral" of protagonist Max Cohen as he searches for a mathematical basis for life, involving applications of the golden ratio, pi, and the chaos theory to real life, specifically the areas of the stock market and Kabbalah. The story proved to be interesting and thought provoking even outside of the actual film. At the end of Max's fascinating and devastatingly painful quest, the viewer is left with a mystery to be pondered. In giving this film 5 stars, I refer to the amazing story, superb visual effects, and the thoughts it made me wonder about afterwards. Another moving success from director Darren Aronofsky.
Rating:
Summary: Can one make sense of Chaos?
Review: This guy Cohen wants to find out bad! Anyone that likes hard-core (pure) mathematics will find this film a real treat...Hey! It has a great plot and story line too! If you are one of those nerds that takes a pad and pencil into a movie and tries in vain to scribble equations off the blackboard when they arise, you will probably do Okay in this one. But if you ever get tired of number theory or math in general, I don't recommend Cohen's method for forgetting about the subject! I personally believe that a lot of our pitfalls in advancing the study of applied math are a lack enthusiasm directed to youth...perhaps this film and it followings may lend some inspiration to what is "considered by the general populace" a dry and abstract subject.
Rating:
Summary: This movie is genius
Review: What an unbelievable flick this is. I had heard so much about it from friends of mine, and people on the internet. So when I saw a friend of mine had the DVD lastnight, we decided to watch it. I AM STILL SPEECHLESS. The end scene will leave quite a disturbing image in your head for some time. What else is great, is how so many, what seem to be, unrelated topics are all related. The filming of this movie is brilliant as well. The camerawork adds to the feel. You also never know when he is hallucinating or not. That's what really keeps you guessing. I may be going out on a limb here anyway, but...... was the whole film just an hallucination? If not, did the stock brokers or anyone ever come for him again? And the Brain... AHHHH! THE BRAIN! If you haven't seen this movie yet.... SEE IT. 5 Stars for Darren Aronofsky.
Rating:
Summary: A both difficult and interesting movie
Review: The aim of this movie maybe is not to get all the messages offered by it after watching just once, but instead to take the parts you are someway related to, and there are many to take from: from human relations to number theory and from business to religion. If you have a scientific background, you'll identify Fibonacci sequence, pi, chaos, computer algorithms, scientific challenges, and so on. If you know about business, you'd see what targets are to pursue about research, and that there are things that some times speak more effectively than money. If you are interested in religious matters, you'd think about a confrontment between arguments that could be from the same source, but that just are used by two people in different positions. And finally, you have to tolerate some scenes not nice to watch, to find the last question given by the movie. And there would be no absolute answer. It depends on you, your background, and the way you judge the story you have just watched.
Rating:
Summary: ACK!
Review: How dare they use the term "Number Theory" in this movie?!?!?!? I'm outraged and insulted by the nonsense that numerology would be considered mathematics! Pi is a number like any other number. There are an infinite number of numbers with the same properties as pi. So what would make pi any different? That is the one that every student of basic geometry learns about and "someone" didn't do the research to bother to find out of the plot would make any sense to anyone who studied higher mathematics!
Rating:
Summary: This movie makes you wonder
Review: It seems like one of those non-sense movies. But this movie really makes you wonder about what fixation for something can do to you. It also depicts a little bit how a genius' mind seem to work.
What I really like is the fact that CHAOS is everywhere and that CHAOS is so chaotic that it becomes organized.
Nice movie. Black and White makes it even better!
Rating:
Summary: Oh brother!
Review: Upon the strong recommendation of my brother, I sat down and endured two hours of this brainless pap. I am left with one conclusion: you would have to be a [dullard] of the first rank to derive any kind of meaning/joy from this sophomoric work.
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