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Ang Lee's Life of Pi opens 21 November 2012: USA, Canada, and--Taiwan
Aloysius J. Gleek:
They [Pi and 'Richard Parker', a man-eating tiger] are soon pacing around one other with the same mixture of wariness and hungriness last seen on the faces of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Lee's 2005 Brokeback Mountain.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/sep/30/life-of-pi-review-film
first look review
Life of Pi
Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's novel,
which opened the New York film festival,
is the summation of the principle powering his
career: still waters run deep
By Tom Shone
The Guardian
Sunday 30 September 2012 09.19 EDT
Suraj Sharma and tiger in Life of Pi. Ang Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's
novel has opened the 50th annual New York film festival.
In his gently astonishing new film, Life of Pi, adapted from Yann Martel's 2001 bestseller, director Ang Lee melds so many disparate elements – Aesopian fable and cutting-edge 3D technology, east and west, young and old – that he may have just succeeded in rebranding himself as the Obama of world cinema. The fiercely urgent candidate of 2008, of course, not the stealth version currently working the stump.
The sheer number of world religions given a shout-out in the film – Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist – is enough to send Donald Trump's comb-over scampering up the nearest tree trunk, looking for cover.
The film takes a while to get going, like someone roused from their morning meditation, with lots of flowers and candles and people wearing kindly, fixed smiles suggesting enlightenment, or as if they had been hit around the head with a brass pot.
In French India, the young son of a zoo owner collects world religions the way other kids collect stamps. "They were my superheroes," he says, checking off a list of deities. Such good karma, sad to say, doesn't necessarily make for good drama. You're almost grateful for the arrival of the storm that sinks the boat bearing Pi, his family and their animal entourage to the new world, leaving the boy alone on a boat with one of his father's tigers. They are soon pacing around one other with the same mixture of wariness and hungriness last seen on the faces of Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Lee's 2005 Brokeback Mountain.
One of the things that tells you the director is in his prime – a model of creative evolution – is that his films feel like total surprises when first announced but fit snugly into his oeuvre once you've seen them. Immersing himself in the latest technology — 3D, digital paintboxes, motion capture and control – as Martin Scorsese did in last year's Hugo, Lee summons delights with his fingertips. But where Hugo was cold to the touch, Life of Pi feels warm-blooded, the perfect summation of the principle powering Lee's entire career: still waters run deep. You see it both in the Zen minimalism of his compositions – check out the shots of sky reflected in a glassy ocean, the boat suspended in the middle as if hanging in thin air – and the sonar-like skill with which he sounds out the emotional depths of Martel's tale. Lee's pixels are animated by empathy.
Life of Pi feels so simple, yet knotted with resonance, that you wonder why Lee bothered with the framing narrative in which a grown-up Pi chews over the spiritual implications of his tale with a writer in Toronto. For one thing, the argument they come up with for the existence of God turns out to bear a suspicious similarity to an argument for the all-round grooviness of magic realism. For another: Toronto. A nice city, but its neat patches of parkland and grey high-rises are no match for breaching whales, phosphorescent fish and crouching tigers, or the sight if Pi, howling like Job into stormy skies.
Hollywood has been waiting for this movie. Get ready for the year of the Tiger.
The New York film festival runs until 14 October
Aloysius J. Gleek:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m7WBfntqUoA[/youtube]
Published on Sep 25, 2012 by ClevverMovies
Aloysius J. Gleek:
And just because:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G4isv_Fylg[/youtube]
Published on Oct 18, 2011 by ColdplayVEVO | #20 on the YouTube 100
TOoP/Bruce:
"Life of Pi" is my most anticipated film of the year. I was absolutely obsessional about both CTHD and BbM, and PI looks absolutely awesome!
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Review-Lee-s-Life-of-Pi-is-inspiring-3-D-art-4049957.php
Review: Lee's
Life of Pi
is inspiring 3-D art
by DAVID GERMAIN
AP Movie Writer
Updated 7:16 a.m., Monday, November 19, 2012
Suraj Sharma as Pi Patel in a scene from Life of Pi.
Life of Pi is one of those lyrical, internalized novels that should have no business working on the screen. Quite possibly, it wouldn't have worked if anyone but Ang Lee had adapted it.
The filmmaker who turned martial arts into a poetic blockbuster for Western audiences with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and made gay cowboys mainstream fare with Brokeback Mountain has crafted one of the finest entries in his eclectic resume in Life of Pi, a gorgeous, ruminative film that is soulfully, provocatively entertaining.
Lee combines a lifetime of storytelling finesse with arguably the most artful use of digital 3-D technology yet seen to bring to life Yann Martel's saga of an Indian youth lost at sea with a ravenous Bengal tiger aboard his small lifeboat. It's a delicate narrative with visceral impact, told with an innovative style that's beguiling to watch and a philosophical voice that compassionately explores how and why we tell stories.
Our playful, not-always-reliable narrator here is Pi Patel, played by newcomer Suraj Sharma as a teen and as a grown man reflecting back on his adventure by Irrfan Khan. As a youth, Pi, his parents and brother set out from India, where the family runs a zoo in a botanical garden, to Canada. Pi's father brings along some of his menagerie on their voyage, including a tiger named Richard Parker with which Pi had a terrifying encounter as a boy.
Their ship sinks in a storm, with Pi the only human survivor aboard a lifeboat with an orangutan, a hyena, a zebra with a broken leg and Richard Parker. Survival of the fittest thins their numbers into a life-and-death duel, and eventually an uneasy truce of companionship, between Richard Parker and Pi.
This could be a one-note story — please Mister Tiger, don't eat me. Yet Lee and screenwriter David Magee find rich and clever ways to translate even Pi's stillest moments, the film unfolding through intricate flashbacks, whimsical voice-overs, harrowing sea hazards and exquisite flashes of fantasy and hallucination.
Lee used real tigers for a handful of scenes, but Richard Parker mostly is a digital creation, a remarkably realistic piece of computer animation seamlessly blended into the live action. The digital detail may be responsible for most of Richard Parker's fearful presence, though no small part of the tiger's impact is due to the nimble engagement of Sharma with a predator that wasn't actually there during production, a task hard enough for experienced performers, let alone a youth with no acting experience.
Digital 3-D usually is an unnecessary distraction not worth the extra admission price. In Life of Pi, like Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the 3-D images are tantalizing and immersive, pulling viewers deeper into Pi's world so that the illusion of depth becomes essential to the story.
Not all of the images live up to Lee's digital tiger or 3-D wizardry. Water is notoriously hard to simulate through computer animation, and the waves crashing down around the sinking ship or tossing Pi's lifeboat about have an unfinished, cartoony look. Still, Lee more than compensates with a world of visual wonders, from the simple image of a swimmer framed from below as though he's stroking his way across the sky to a mysterious island populated by a seemingly infinite number of meerkats.
The rest of the cast is mostly inconsequential, including Gerard Depardieu in a fleeting role as a cruel ship's cook. The other people in Pi's life are filtered through this unusual youth's eyes, each of them catalysts in the development of his deep spirituality, which blends Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and other contradictory influences into a weirdly cohesive form of humanism.
Like Martel's novel, the film disdains our inclination to anthropomorphize wild animals by ascribing human traits to them, and then turns around and subtly does just that. Friendship cannot possibly exist between a hungry tiger and a scrawny kid alone on the open water, yet for that boy, if not the cat, the need for togetherness, some commune of spirits, is almost as strong as the need for food and water. The ways in which Lee examines the strange bond between Pi and Richard Parker are wondrous, hilarious, unnerving, sometimes joyous, often melancholy.
Pi's story may not, as one character states, make you believe in God. But you may leave the theater more open to the possibilities of higher things in the life of Pi, and in your own.
"Life of Pi," a 20th Century Fox release, is rated PG for emotional thematic content throughout, and some scary action sequences and peril. Running time: 126 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
The same review is also published here:
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/19/review_lees_life_of_pi_is_inspiring_3_d_art/singleton/
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