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Ang Lee's Life of Pi opens 21 November 2012: USA, Canada, and--Taiwan
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: southendmd on July 25, 2012, 03:47:10 pm ---As Pi likes to exclaim, "Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu!"
--- End quote ---
If the author had really wanted to be ecumenical, he would have made that exclamation "Jesus, Moses, Muhammad and Vishnu!" ;)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/movies/new-york-film-festival-at-lincoln-center.html
Life of Pi,” Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel starring Suraj Sharma, is the
opening-night selection at this year’s New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.
(....)
The opening night selection, Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” is a lavish reminder that film nowadays is sometimes not film at all, but rather a rapidly evolving digital art form. Adapted from a best-selling novel by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, “Life of Pi” tells the story of a zookeeper’s son from the Indian city of Pondicherry who finds himself, after a terrible shipwreck, sharing a lifeboat with a large and hungry Bengal tiger. The young man’s name, Pi, turns out to be short for piscine (the French word for swimming pool), but given the movie’s blend of fuzzy, inclusive spiritualism and special-effects virtuosity, it might equally stand for piety or pixel.
“Life of Pi,” which will be shown in 3-D, is an unusual opening-night choice both for its crowd-pleasing sincerity and for its sheer visual grandeur. The screens in the Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall are gratifyingly large, but in recent years they have rarely been given over to major-studio spectacles of this scale. (“Life of Pi” is to be released by 20th Century Fox in November.) The closing-night film, Robert Zemeckis’s “Flight,” as yet unseen by critics, looks to be similarly large, with a big movie star (Denzel Washington) in the lead role, a big plane crash at its center and a big studio (Paramount) behind it.
(....)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/life-pi-review-ang-lee-374992
Life of Pi
New York Film Festival Review
Ang Lee achieves an admirable sense of wonder
in this tall tale about a shipwrecked teenager
stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
The Bottom Line:
A gorgeous and accomplished rendering of the massive best-seller.
by Todd McCarthy
11:00 AM PDT 9/28/2012
Technology employed by sensitive hands brings to vivid life a work that would have been inconceivable onscreen until very recently in Life of Pi. That great chameleon among contemporary directors, Ang Lee, achieves an admirable sense of wonder in this tall tale about a shipwrecked teenager stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, a yarn that has been adapted from the compellingly peculiar best-seller with its beguiling preposterousness intact. Like the venerable all-purpose entertainments of Hollywood’s classical era, this exceptionally beautiful 3D production should prove not only accessible to and embraceable by all manner of audiences, signaling substantial commercial possibilities domestically and probably even more so internationally. The Fox release is having its world premiere as the opening night attraction at the 50th New York Film Festival, with general release to follow on November 21.
Yann Martel’s 2001 novel was one of those out-of-the-blue one-shots, a book with a madly fanciful premise so deftly handled that it both won the Man Booker Prize and sold seven million copies. Part survival story, part youthful fable, part grade school spiritual rumination and assessment of humanity’s place in the animal kingdom, it’s man versus nature with a quizzically philosophical spin that’s easy to digest even for kids.
It’s not surprising that it took producer Gil Netter a decade to get the film made, as technology would not have permitted it to be realized, at least in anything close to its current form, until the last few years. Shot on location in India as well as in a giant tank in Taiwan where the open water effects scenes were made, Life of Pi is an unusual example of anything-is-possible technology put at the service of a humanistic and intimate story rather than something that smacks of a manufactured product.
The first enchantment is the town of Pondicherry, a former French colony in southern India that looks like paradise on Earth, nowhere more so than at the zoo run by the father of young Pi. The nimble and faithful script by David Magee (Finding Neverland ) packs a good deal of character and cultural background into the first half-hour, humorously sketching the odd watery and mathematical implications of the protagonist’s name, neatly relating his unconflicted adoption of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam at age 12, portraying the warm family life he enjoys with his parents and older brother and topped off with a taste of budding first love.
But hard times prompt his father to announce a move to Canada, where he will sell all the animals. A full hour is set at sea, beginning with a nocturnal storm and horrible shipwreck. When the air clears, the only survivors sharing space on a 27-foot lifeboat are Pi, an injured zebra, a maniacal hyena, a dour orangutan, a rat and, hidden from sight for a spell under a tarp, a large tiger.
Hunger and the law of the jungle assure that the population onboard is shortly reduced to two. To nonreaders of the novel, incredulity over Pi’s ability to co-exist with the tiger, which goes by the name of Richard Parker, is carefully addressed, and it’s essential that Pi proves adept at fashioning a makeshift raft that connects to the tiger’s lair by a rope.
Still, 227 days is a very long time to keep fed and maintain your wits on the open sea for both man and beast, and this floating journey is marked by ordeal (this must be the first film to present the spectacle of a seasick tiger) and startling sights, such as a sudden flurry of flying fish, luminous jellyfish setting the nighttime sea aglow, a breaching whale and another enormous storm that looks to spell the end for Pi and Richard Parker.
But the final half-hour offers an other-worldly pit stop before coming to roost in a framing story in which the adult Pi tells his tall tale to a wide-eyed writer in a literary conceit that, at the very end, spells things out rather too explicitly.
Meticulous care is evident in every aspect of the film. All three actors playing Pi are outstanding. The lion’s (or tiger’s) share of the burden falls on 17-year-old Suraj Sharma, the only human being on view for half the time, obliged to act in a vacuum and convincingly represent all the physical demands. Lee looked at 3,000 candidates for the role (deliberately avoiding Bollywood talent) and found an unknown whose emotional facility is quite impressive. Ayoush Tandon is captivating as the sponge that is young Pi, but absolutely imperative to the film’s success are the heart, lucidity and gravity Irrfan Khan provides as the grown-up Pi looking back at his experience.
Gerard Depardieu is in briefly to embody hulking menace as a nasty French cook aboard he ill-fated cargo ship.
Creating a plausible, ever-changing physical world was the first and over-arching technical challenge met by the effects team. The extra step here was rendering a tiger that would be believable in every way, from its violent movements and threatening stares to its desperate moments when, soaked through and starving, it attempts to claw its way back on board the small boat. With one passing exception—a long shot of the tiger making its way through a sea of meerkats that’s a bit off—the representation of Richard Parker is extraordinarily lifelike.
The leap of faith required for Lee to believe this could all be put up onscreen in a credible way was necessarily considerable. His fingerprints are at once invisible and yet all over the film in the tact, intelligence, curiosity and confidence that characterizes the undertaking. At all times, the film, shot by Claudio Miranda and with production design by David Gropman, is ravishing to look at, and the 3D work is discreetly powerful. Mychael Danna composed the emotionally fluent score.
Venue: New York Film Festival (opening night)
Opens: November 21 (Fox)
Production: Fox 2000, Haishang Films, Gil Netter Prod.
Cast: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Rafe Spall, Gerard Depardieu, Adril Hussain, Shravanthi Sainath, Ayush Tandon, Vibish Sivakumar
Director: Ang Lee
Screenwriter: David Magee, based on the novel by Yann Martel
Producers: Gil Netter, Ang Lee, David Womark
Executive producer: Dean Georgaris
Director of photography: Claudio Miranda
Production designer: David Gropman
Costume designer: Arjun Bhasin
Editor: Tim Squyers
Music: Mychael Danna
125 minutes
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117948443/
New York Film Festival
Life of Pi
by Justin Chang
[email protected]
Posted: Fri., Sep. 28, 2012, 11:00am PT
A literal crouching tiger is merely one of many visual wonders in Ang Lee's
"Life of Pi," a gently transporting work of all-ages entertainment that melds
a harrowing high-seas adventure with a dreamy meditation on the very nature
of storytelling. Summoning the most advanced digital-filmmaking technology
to deliver the most old-fashioned kind of audience satisfaction, this exquisitely
beautiful adaptation of Yann Martel's castaway saga has a
sui generis quality that's never less than beguiling, even if its fable-like
construction and impeccable artistry come up a bit short in terms of truly
gripping, elemental drama.
Following its opening-night world premiere at the New York Film Festival, the Nov. 21-slated Fox release should find itself in exceedingly friendly B.O. waters at home and abroad. That the film was lensed in 3D should further boost its prospects, and discerning viewers will be pleased to note that the format has been used here to artistically as well as commercially productive ends.
Published in 2001, Martel's Booker Prize-winning bestseller was widely deemed unfilmable due to its allegorical thrust and, more crucially, its prolonged focus on a teenage boy and a tiger spending 227 days adrift in the Pacific. Fortunately, Lee and scribe David Magee ( "Finding Neverland" ) have extracted the book's inherently cinematic qualities, turning Martel's vivid wildlife descriptions into a feast for the eyes; the film's sheer beauty is so overwhelming, so vibrant in its use of color, as to become almost cloying at times.
The visual lushness is apparent from the opening shots of Pondicherry, India, a former French colony where Santosh Patel (Adil Hussain) and his wife (Tabu) operate a zoo. The younger of their two sons is Piscine (played by Gautam Belur and Ayush Tandon at ages 5 and 11, respectively), a bright, curious child whose sense of mischief is tempered by his unusual reverence for God.
The humorous highlights of the boy's upbringing -- how he wisely shortens his name to Pi and becomes a devout Hindu, Christian and Muslim -- are recounted by his middle-aged, modern-day counterpart (Irrfan Khan). Dreamlike dissolves help ease the script's shifts between past and present, which feel clunky and prosaic even as they lay the groundwork for the slippery metaphysical questions that will arise later.
Fortunately, the framing device disappears almost entirely at the 40-minute mark, as the story proper starts and the picture truly begins to cast a spell. Having decided to sell the zoo and move to Canada, the Patels find themselves, along with a few remaining animals, aboard a Japanese freighter that swiftly capsizes in a thunderstorm, leaving 17-year-old Pi (Suraj Sharma) the sole human survivor as he manages to climb into a lifeboat.
It's an astonishing sequence, rendered all the more so by the lucidity of the direction; rather than resorting to herky-jerky lensing and editing, Lee uses relatively long takes, smooth cuts and seamlessly integrated f/x to navigate the viewer through the action. Even as the waves heave and roll (to especially fearsome effect in 3D), the film finds room for isolated moments of haunting poetry, such as the sight of the ship's ghostly white lights descending into the abyss.
Once the storm retreats, Pi realizes a few zoo denizens have made it onto the lifeboat, although the food chain soon dictates that the only remaining animal onboard is a ferocious 450-pound Bengal tiger, incongruously named Richard Parker. Pi realizes he's going to have to tame the tiger, a thinly veiled metaphor for his own inner beast, and as the days stretch into weeks and months, the relationship between these two unlikely companions shifts movingly, and almost imperceptibly, from mutual wariness into something as close to love as the laws of interspecies friendship can allow.
Even under such severe dramatic limitations, there's no shortage of incident, tension and surprise, even when Lee isn't rattling the audience with shots of the tiger lunging at the camera. The film's engrossing, often amusing midsection amounts to a practical illustration of survival-at-sea strategies, as Pi constructs a raft that provides some physical distance and protection from Richard Parker and finds ways to supplement his dwindling store of water and rations. Sharma, a non-pro making a terrifically engaging screen debut, underwent considerable weight fluctuations for the role, and he compellingly manifests Pi's physical sufferings while achieving a persuasive rapport with his four-legged co-star (achieved almost entirely through CGI and modeled after four actual Bengal tigers).
Lee and d.p. Claudio Miranda approach the technical challenges with similarly intense commitment. Shooting in the world's largest self-generating wave tank (with a capacity of 1.7 million gallons), they turn their visual restrictions into virtues. The nimbly circling camera is forever finding compelling angles on the action, sometimes bobbing gently above and below the water's surface, conveying a sense of perpetual motion that might test some of the more sensitive stomachs in the audience. Yet the images just as often have a classical stillness and grandeur, as in a scene of bioluminscent fish illuminating the water at night, or an otherworldly shot of the boat gliding atop the ocean's smooth, glassy surface.
In these moments, "Life of Pi" embodies its protagonist's spiritual devotion, infusing a tale of peril, isolation and loss with a genuine sense of grace and awe at the majesty of creation. The overall effect of such exalted yet artificially achieved visuals is to loose the boundaries of conventional realism and steer the picture into a magically heightened realm, immersing the viewer in the story without losing sight of the fact that a story, in fact, is all it is.
For all the splendor of the craftsmanship on display, from David Gropman's eye-popping production design to Mychael Danna's Indian-inflected score, what's missing is a certain in-the-moment urgency. Compressing nearly eight months into roughly 75 minutes of screentime is a tricky task, and one never gets a sense of the agonizing duration of Pi's experience, especially since the film tastefully sidesteps most of the raw, physically extreme details that made the novel so visceral. As much as it teems with color and creativity, "Life of Pi" could have used a bit more grit, substance and a touch of the grotesque. Even its warm-hearted plea for religious faith feels, in the end, like so much pantheistic fairy dust.
The film was reviewed from an unfinished print (identical to the version that will play NYFF) with complete end credits and excellent sound and picture quality, apart from some infrequent aspect-ratio disparities that will likely be finessed before release.
A 20th Century Fox release of a Fox 2000 Pictures presentation in association with Dune Entertainment and Ingenious Media of a Haishang Films/Gil Netter production in association with Big Screen Prods. and Ingenious Film Partners. Produced by Netter, Ang Lee, David Womark. Executive producer, Dean Georgaris. Co-producer, David Lee. Directed by Ang Lee. Screenplay, David Magee, based on the novel by Yann Martel.
Pi Patel - Suraj Sharma
Adult Pi Patel - Irrfan Khan
Gita Patel - Tabu
Writer - Rafe Spall
Cook - Gerard Depardieu
Camera (Deluxe color, 3D), Claudio Miranda; editor, Tim Squyres; music, Mychael Danna; production designer, David Gropman; supervising art director, Dan Webster; art directors, Al Hobbs, James F. Truesdale; set designers, Easton Smith, Sarah Contant, Huei Chen, Huei-li Liao, James Hewitt; set decorator, Anna Pinnock; sound (Dolby/Datasat/SDDS), Drew Kunin; sound designer, Eugene Gearty; supervising sound editors, Gearty, Philip Stockton; re-recording mixers, D.M. Hemphill, Ron Barlett; visual effects producer, Susan MacLeod; visual effects, Rhythm & Hues Studios, MPC, BUF Compagnie, Crazy Horse Effects, Lola VFX; survival/marine consultant, Steve Callahan; tiger trainer/consultant, Thierry Le Portier; stunt coordinator, Charlie Croughwell; associate producers, Michael J. Malone, Kevin Buxbaum; assistant directors, William M. Connor, Cliff Lanning. Reviewed at 20th Century Fox Studios, Los Angeles, Sept. 27, 2012. (In New York Film Festival -- opener.) Running time: 125 MIN.
With: Adil Hussain, Ayush Tandon, Gautam Belur. (English, Hindi, French, Japanese dialogue)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/28/life-of-pi-reviews-ang-lee_n_1923891.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment
Life Of Pi
Ang Lee's Adaptation Wows
At New York Film Festival
By Christopher Rosen
The Huffington Post
Updated: 09/28/2012 4:10 pm EDT
"Life of Pi" opens the 50th annual
New York Film Festival
Before the world premiere screening of "Life of Pi" at the New York Film Festival on Friday morning, director Ang Lee joked that his film hit the four most notorious "vices" in the moviemaking process: kids, animals, water and 3D. As it turns out, even with those built-in hindrances, Lee's adaptation of "Life of Pi" is one of the year's most beautiful, original and adventurous pictures.
Based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, "Life of Pi" tells the story of Pi (newcomer Suraj Sharma), a young man who gets stranded at sea with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker after the ship carrying Pi's family and his father's zoo from India to Canada sinks. On the surface, the film is about Pi's tale of survival -- yet "Life of Pi" holds so much more within its brisk two-hour running time. As an older Pi (played by Irrfan Khan in an Oscar-worthy performance) says to the film's audience surrogate, a writer played by Rafe Spall, the story of "Life of Pi" might make some believe in God. That's obviously an exaggeration, but audiences will likely find the film enthralling nonetheless: Visually, "Life of Pi," which mixes real tigers with computer-generated effects almost seamlessly (Claudio Miranda, who shot "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," was the cinematographer), is like nothing seen onscreen in some time. The 3D in particular is the best since perhaps "Avatar."
After the film, Lee told the New York Film Festival audience that "Life of Pi" was exceedingly hard to make. Due to weather conditions and the difficulty of corralling animals, he said only one-eighth of his planned shots were actually filmed.
Still, even with the arduous shoot, Lee was able to coax an excellent lead performance from Sharma, a newcomer who originally accompanied his brother to the audition before landing the part of Pi himself after nearly six months.
"By the end of it, I didn't feel like I was acting anymore," Sharma said after the screening. "I was an instrument, of sorts, and [Lee] pulled the emotion through me. It just went in and came out."
"Life of Pi" isn't perfect -- there's a clunky moment of exposition at the end that feels entirely too on-the-nose -- but it's one of the year's strongest films. It opens the 50th edition of the New York Film Festival on Friday night and hits theaters on Nov. 21.
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