Ang Lee's Life of Pi opens 21 November 2012: USA, Canada, and--Taiwan

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.dgaquarterly.org/BACKISSUES/Spring2010/DGAInterviewAngLee.aspx

Interview in DGA (Directors Guild of America) Quarterly
By Glenn Kenny


(....)

Q [Glenn Kenny]: Your next film, The Life of Pi, based on the book by Yann Martel, is an adventure story about a boy stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific with a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a tiger. That sounds like a tricky film that will require lots of preparation.
A [Ang Lee]: I was very intrigued by the book when I read it in 2001 but didn’t think it could be made into a movie. Then when I was starting Woodstock, Fox 2000 approached me and said the project had become available again. This movie I think will be different because technically it’s difficult. It deals with animation, so previsualization will come into play. I hate previsualization; usually I don’t do storyboards. Sometimes I do, but I don’t follow them. Why would you cover the shot [as it was storyboarded] instead of finding something and trying to make that work for you? It doesn’t make much sense to me. But then directing doesn’t stand still. When you do shots that are expensive, you have to plan them out. You cannot afford the usual process. It’s exciting. It’s moviemaking. There are no rules.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/04/ang_lee_adds_tobey_maguire_to.html

Ang Lee Adds
Tobey Maguire
to Pi
By: Kyle Buchanan
4/8/11 at 8:00 PM

Tobey Maguire is getting a piece of Pi.  The actor has just signed on to reunite with director Ang Lee -- for the third time, following their work together on The Ice Storm  and Ride With the Devil  -- in Life of Pi,  Lee's adaptation of the Yann Martel bestseller. Maguire will play a man interviewing a young boy named Pi, who spent 227 days on a boat with a Bengal tiger. Pi sure has been through a lot lately. [Variety]

[southendmd]

Note to Ang:  forget Toby, get Jake.

[Sophia]

Note to Ang:  forget Toby, get Jake.

LOL... couldn´t agree more. 

 

[Sophia]

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/04/ang_lee_adds_tobey_maguire_to.html

Ang Lee Adds
Tobey Maguire
to Pi
By: Kyle Buchanan
4/8/11 at 8:00 PM

Tobey Maguire is getting a piece of Pi.  The actor has just signed on to reunite with director Ang Lee -- for the third time, following their work together on The Ice Storm  and Ride With the Devil  -- in Life of Pi,  Lee's adaptation of the Yann Martel bestseller. Maguire will play a man interviewing a young boy named Pi, who spent 227 days on a boat with a Bengal tiger. Pi sure has been through a lot lately. [Variety]

Haha... and I thougtht it was a movie about the mathematic symbol PI: 3,14

[TOoP/Bruce]

Trailer for "Life of Pi" released...

It looks absolutely spectacular!

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j9Hjrs6WQ8M[/youtube]

[Meryl]

Trailer for "Life of Pi" released...

It looks absolutely spectacular!

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j9Hjrs6WQ8M[/youtube]

I agree!  This looks like a perfect subject for Ang Lee, too.  I'm really looking forward to it. 

[southendmd]

Thanks, Bruce.

I too am looking forward to this one.

I'm currently reading the novel and it's fascinating.  To my surprise, the first 100 pages or so have nothing to do with the lifeboat/tiger!  It's actually more about faith.  Perhaps the rest of the book is as well.

As Pi likes to exclaim, "Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu!"

[Jeff Wrangler]

With a title like that, I thought it was a history of mathematics.   

[Front-Ranger]

just learned that this movie will be featured in New York City's Film Festival debuting September 28:

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni34047227/

[Jeff Wrangler]

As Pi likes to exclaim, "Jesus, Mary, Muhammad and Vishnu!"

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.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/04/ang_lee_adds_tobey_maguire_to.html

Ang Lee Adds
Tobey Maguire
to Pi
By: Kyle Buchanan
4/8/11 at 8:00 PM

Tobey Maguire is getting a piece of Pi.  The actor has just signed on to reunite with director Ang Lee -- for the third time, following their work together on The Ice Storm  and Ride With the Devil  -- in Life of Pi,  Lee's adaptation of the Yann Martel bestseller. Maguire will play a man interviewing a young boy named Pi, who spent 227 days on a boat with a Bengal tiger. Pi sure has been through a lot lately. [Variety]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tobey-maguire-life-of-pi-oscar-367978





Tobey Maguire
Cut From Oscar Contender
Life of Pi

by Kim Masters
8:00 AM PDT 9/5/2012




Insiders say the actor's performance wasn't working.
He might have been too famous for the role.


Can an actor be too famous for a party? Tobey Maguire had shot a brief role in Ang Lee's Life of Pi,  due in theaters Nov. 21 from Fox, as a writer who interviews the central character. But an insider says the Oscar-winning director felt the performance wasn't working -- awkward because Lee's relationship with Maguire dates to 1997's The Ice Storm.

A source close to Maguire says the actor, who eventually will appear in Warner Bros.' postponed The Great Gatsby, was too famous among the cast of relative unknowns.

In a statement to THR,  Maguire says: "I fully support Ang's decision to go a different direction for this role in Life of Pi.  Ang shared a lot of the film with me, and what I saw was absolutely beautiful." Says Lee: "To be consistent with the other casting choices made for the film, I decided to go with an entirely international cast. I very much admire Tobey and look forward to working with him again in the future." Life of Pi  is expected to be an awards contender.

The writer role now is being played by Rafe Spall, who appeared in Ridley Scott's Prometheus and played William Shakespeare in Roland Emmerich 's Anonymous.


This story first appeared in the Sept. 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter  magazine.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.indiewire.com/article/despite-shaky-screenplay-life-of-pi-is-ang-lees-best-spectacle-since-crouching-tiger


Despite Shaky Screenplay
Life of Pi
Is Ang Lee's Best Spectacle
Since Crouching Tiger
by Eric Kohn
September 28, 2012 1:28 PM


Suraj Sharma in "Life of Pi."


Yann Martel's bestselling 2001 novel "Life of Pi" followed the young Indian survivor of a shipwreck stuck on a lifeboat with a tiger -- the kind of high concept scenario both easy to comprehend and difficult to envision in movie terms. Much of the story, narrated by its spiritually minded protagonist, contains prolonged philosophical discussions and remains tethered to an extremely minimalist setting. That Ang Lee has managed to turn the limitations of his source material into his adaptation's greatest strength makes "Life of Pi" a significant achievement for the filmmaker in spite of blatant problems with structure, dialogue and other surface issues. "Life of Pi" succeeds in its most audacious moments and struggles whenever it returns to familiar ground.
 
David Magee's generally faithful screenplay deepens the sensationalistic imagery of the novel's opening setting with enjoyably ostentatious 3D that instantly leaves an impression. The title sequence is set in the lavish Indian zoo where the inquisitive Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) is raised by his secular father. From the first 30 seconds of the film, when a hummingbird hovers before our eyes and a sloth seemingly dangles off the screen, "Life of Pi" announces Lee's intention to craft astonishing visions.

But when the movie flashes forward a number of years to find an adult Pi (Irrfan Khan) living comfortably in Canada and recounting his incredible experience to a wide-eyed journalist Rafe Spall), "Life of Pi" introduces a sloppy framing device that instantly drags the exposition into problematic territory. Notwithstanding Pi's constant voiceover, Lee's insistence on returning to Pi's austere living room throughout his tale constantly interrupts the allure of a significantly engaging parable.
 
Whenever Lee abandons the contemporary setting, the movie successfully funnels its thematic conceits into an involving high seas epic. At its core, "Life of Pi" revolves around one man's ongoing attempt to reconcile his spiritual tendencies with an awareness of nature's inherently chaotic state (in the book, the character double-majored in zoology and religious studies). The early scenes that establish the adolescent Pi's burgeoning interest in world religions despite his strict father's disdain move swiftly along, aided by the exotic backdrop the zoo provides. Once the family decides to leave the zoo and set sail for Canada with their menagerie in tow, "Life of Pi" enters into a fantasy realm enhanced by the surrounding waves, which eventually subsume the weak ship.

With phenomenal underwater footage that realizes the pandemonium of wild animals run loose on a slippery vessel, the intense and supremely well-crafted scene of the ship's demise is perhaps the best of its kind since "Titanic." It's the first of several disorienting moments of lyrical beautiful to transcend the clumsy screenplay. Once aboard his lifeboat with a handful of animals including the fierce tiger curiously named Richard Parker, Pi struggles to survive the restless sea while forming an odd symbiotic relationship with the starving beast. From this point forward, the main scenario forms Lee's most spectacular achievement since "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" -- ironically enough, there's more tiger in this movie than that one, and he's a magnificently realized screen presence -- and the movie certainly represents Lee's grandest directorial achievement since "Brokeback Mountain."
 
With Pi and the tiger trapped on their tiny craft, "Life of Pi" settles into a contained drama that's enlivened with storybook imagery. Heavily reliant on CGI from the team behind "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," Pi's saga includes more than just a daunting tiger. The grandiose critters he encounters at sea include massive schools of fish, colossal whales and jellyfish that light up the ocean in the dark of night. For reasons only revealed later on, "Life of Pi" contains a tremendously involving degree of magical realism that enhances the harsh fairy tale quality of the adventure. The movie's visuals frequently transcend the plot. In one instance, Pi's cosmic hallucination of land and sea creatures morphing together against a starry backdrop easily outdoes all the soul-searching dialogue ("God, I am your vessel," Pi shouts to the heavens in one of several cases where the script overstates his crisis of faith).
 
Anchored by newcomer Sharma in the lead role, "Life of Pi" is better at conveying the young man's mounting despair than his lingering optimism. With ongoing reminders that his plight represents something beyond its superficial definition, Lee's film constantly undoes its own spell, particularly in the painfully obvious closing act. But it's still a wild ride to get there.
 
Considering its flaws, the number of elements that do connect not only stand out but actively sustain the movie's appeal. Unlike "Castaway" or other tales of marooned victims struggling against nature's indifference, "Life of Pi" manages to inspire the same kind of awe that, at other times, it overstates to cheesy effect. In its finer moments, however, Lee translates the book's prose into grand visual conceits meant for the big screen. Posited as a story that "will make you believe in god," instead it has the power to confirm one's faith in the cinematic experience.
 
Criticwire grade: B+
 
HOW WILL IT PLAY? An appropriate choice to open the 50th edition of the New York Film Festival, "Life of Pi" is being released by 20th Century Fox on November 21. It seems destined to fill the "Hugo" slot during this year's awards season for its status as a heavily effects-driven and sentimentally involving epic, but has an even greater shot at awards acclaim due to the popularity of the book.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/29/is-ang-lee-s-visually-breathtaking-life-of-pi-this-year-s-slumdog-millionaire.html



Is Ang Lee’s
Visually Breathtaking
Life of Pi
This Year’s Slumdog Millionaire ?
Oscar winning filmmaker Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain )
premiered his latest epic, Life of Pi,  at the 50th Annual
New York Film Festival. Is it an awards contender?

By Marlow Stern
Sep 29, 2012 9:25 AM EDT


Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) and a fierce Bengal tiger named Richard Parker
must rely on each other to survive an epic journey in the film The Life of Pi.



In February 2010, author Yann Martel received an envelope from the White House. Inside, there was a two-paragraph note: “My daughter and I just finished reading Life of Pi  together. Both of us agreed we prefer the story with animals. It is a lovely book—an elegant proof of God, and the power of storytelling. Thank you."

The letter was signed by President Barack Obama.

After ten years in Hollywood development hell, that saw directors M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuarón and Jean-Pierre Jeunet come onboard only to jump ship, Martel’s 2001 bestselling novel Life of Pi  has finally completed its journey to the big screen—with Oscar-winning filmmaker Ang Lee at the helm.

Like another highly anticipated fall film, the centuries-spanning saga Cloud Atlas,  Martel’s novel would have been unfilmable a decade ago. However, thanks to the rapid evolution of 3D technology, Lee’s silver screen adaptation made its world premiere as the opening-night film of the 50th New York Film Festival (it opens on Nov. 21 nationwide).

“You’re warned to never make a movie featuring kids, animals, water or 3D,” joked Lee as he introduced the film, “You’re going to see them all here.”

The film opens with Pi (Irrfan Khan), a grown man, reminiscing to a novelist (Rafe Spall) about his childhood. (Lee regular Tobey Maguire was originally cast as the novelist, but Lee cut him out of the film and re-shot his scenes, describing his presence as “too jarringly recognizable.”) Born with the name Piscine, after the most beautiful swimming pool in France, Pi grew up in Pondicherry, India, a former French colony that’s not unlike a seaside village in the Côte d'Azur. There, his father, Santosh Patel (Adil Hussain), and his beautiful mother (Tabu), run a zoo. Both the visual sumptuousness, as well as the stunning usage of 3D, are immediately evident, as a host of exotic animals tantalize—and occasionally scamper toward—the viewer.

Pi was born a Hindu, but as a young teenager, is drawn to both Christianity and Islam, and begins to follow all three religions. He even wishes to be baptized, much to the shame of his father. “Faith is a house with many rooms,” he later says.

Due to political pressures back home, Pi’s family is forced to sell their zoo, eventually boarding a Japanese freighter to transport the animals, and the family, to Canada. En route, the ship capsizes after battling a terrible storm, eventually leaving 17-year-old Pi stranded in a lifeboat along with a zebra, a pesky hyena, an orangutan and a Bengal tiger that goes by the name of Richard Parker. By the time the food chain is established, only Pi and the menacing tiger remain.

This Cast Away -like middle section provides the bulk of the film’s action, and dazzling visuals, as Pi and Parker are stranded aboard their miniature vessel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for 227 days—or 75 minutes in running time. Many of the images resemble magnificent paintings come to life; there’s a scene where a sea of bioluminescent fish ignite the water at night, and another in which a gigantic sperm whale explodes from the ocean then crashes back down into the water. The storm sequences, too, are terrifyingly realistic, enhanced by nimble usage of 3D and Lee’s engaging long takes.

As the days aboard “Pi’s ark,” as he calls it, progress, Pi, in a not-so-thinly-veiled metaphor, manages to tame the beast by a combination of Pavlovian conditioning and sheer force of will, to the point where the two form a beautiful, loving friendship (a la  Christian the Lion and his owners). And the crouching tiger (sorry for that) is rendered in gorgeous, utterly convincing CGI.

The actor who plays 17-year-old Pi, Suraj Sharma, was a newcomer selected from a group of 3,000 boys who auditioned for the role. Forced to carry the middle portion of the film while stranded at sea, Sharma delivers, imbuing Pi with deep emotional honesty. From an overall visual standpoint, those scenes combine the breathtaking vistas of Lee’s Brokeback Mountain  with the ethereal, balletic beauty of his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

This is, indeed, one of the most beautiful-looking films since Slumdog Millionaire,  although, unlike that Danny Boyle masterpiece—which was also told in flashbacks, featured an all-Indian cast and included Irrfan Khan—Life of Pi  does leave holes in the viewer’s larger vision of Pi and his character development. And the book-ended opening and closing scenes don’t quite live up to the thrilling middle.

Nevertheless, Ang Lee’s visual fairy tale should make some noise come awards season—at the very least in any and every technical category.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

At the 50th Annual
New York Film Festival--

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbVbCYkyabo[/youtube]
Published on Sep 30, 2012 by Tomris Laffly

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cVppE2zo5A[/youtube]
Published on Sep 28, 2012 by David Berov

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5sccxCnLPA[/youtube]
Published on Sep 29, 2012 by CELEBScom



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNOW9_jlSY[/youtube]
Published on Sep 29, 2012 by CELEBScom



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_BSPgp9EyA[/youtube]
Published on Sep 29, 2012 by CELEBScom



[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zpDVcX3CYU[/youtube]
Published on Sep 29, 2012 by CELEBScom

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozsIuSk6Cl8[/youtube]
Streamed live on Sep 28, 2012 by filmlincdotcom

Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee and author Yann Martel will sit down with Film Society of Lincoln Center Program Director Richard Peña for a discussion of the film adaptation of Martell's Man Booker Prize-winning book LIFE OF PI  on Friday, September 28 at 12:00pm (ET). Watch live video of the press conference right here!

LIFE OF PI is the Opening Night film of the 50th New York Film Festival. The film hits theaters November 21, 2012 via 20th Century Fox.

LIFE OF PI at NYFF: http://filmlinc.com/lifeofpi
LIFE OF PI official site: http://www.lifeofpimovie.com/
LIFE OF PI on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/LifeofPi
LIFE OF PI on Twitter: http://twitter.com/lifeofpimovie
NYFF on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/NYFilmFest
NYFF on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheNYFF

[Front-Ranger]

Thanks, John. That was great!

[Meryl]

Thanks, John!  Looks very cool! 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/edelstein-life-of-pi-2012-11/


The Movie Review
Easy Tiger
The pantheistic pleasures of Ang Lee’s
Life of Pi
By David Edelstein
Published Nov 18, 2012




For Life of Pi,  the overcontrolled director Ang Lee has gone with his strengths and made a movie that’s passionately overcontrolled. It takes place largely on a lifeboat adrift in the South Pacific that carries radically mismatched buddies: a skinny 16-year-old Indian vegetarian with the odd name “Pi” (Suraj Sharma) and a man-eating Bengal tiger with the even odder name “Richard Parker.” The lifeboat isn’t entirely lifelike, mind you. The water’s aquamarine is more like ultra-ultramarine, the sea a mirror in which clouds above seem to mingle with sharks, dorados, luminous jellyfish, even whales below. Later, on an island that’s mysteriously alive, the orange of the tiger burns especially bright in the chlorophyll-green forest of the ebony-black night. Life of Pi  looks neither natural nor egregiously fake but vivid, as if a knob had been turned way up on the color of each object’s spirit and the real world into a sort of pantheistic storybook. And that’s exactly the right look for what it is: a tale told by the older Pi (Irrfan Khan) to a writer (Rafe Spall) who has sought him out after hearing that Pi had a story to make him “believe in God.” I’m not sure how I felt about God at the end of Life of Pi,  but I fervently believed in the magic of movies.

Some of that magic comes from the 3-D, which Lee shows off in the first seconds of the credit sequence. In an Indian zoo owned by Pi’s parents, the camera lingers on paintings of animals on walls that bear a striking resemblance to cave paintings—and then look out, the animals’ 3-D counterparts are suddenly comin’ at ya. Those cave painters would freak out. But there’s also something old-fashioned about Lee’s frames. He holds the shots for a long time, longer than any major American studio head would let him if not for that marvelously immersive technology. Armed with 3-D, Lee can slow the storytelling down without worrying about modern audiences getting antsy. And he has Mychael Danna’s score, one of Danna’s East-West hybrids (Persian flutes and gamelan weaving in and out of Romantic orchestrations), providing a sense of flux when the images are static. That lifeboat goes nowhere fast.

Pi’s god (God, gods) is (are) also in flux: He’s a polymath, a Hindu who thanks Lord Vishnu for introducing him to Christ while rolling out his prayer mat to honor Allah. This kid subscribes to everything—and this in the face of his father’s blunt reliance on reason and insistence that creatures like the tiger (which gazes into Pi’s eyes and sees only lunch) have no souls. Pi’s own faith in the Higher Power(s) gets the test of his or anyone’s life when the ship bound for North America bearing his family and their animals (they’re emigrating) goes down along with most of the living things onboard. The audience, meanwhile, witnesses the uplifting arrival of the god of cinema.

In one fluid motion, a zebra (it must be CGI, but who can tell?) leaps crazily into the lifeboat and lands with a terrible, backbreaking thud. There’s an orangutan grieving for a lost child, and hiding under a tarpaulin is the piece’s real villain, a madly carnivorous hyena. Richard Parker swims aboard and carnage ensues—though far less explicit than the corresponding passages of Yann Martel’s novel. Left alone with each other and their dwindling supplies of food, Pi and Parker achieve a tense détente, though let it be said that Lee, like Martel, goes all out to avoid even a whiff of family-friendly anthropomorphosizing. Despite that name, Richard Parker remains an animal in circumstances known to turn the most civilized human into a beast. Dread forestalls dearness. Life of Pi evokes Melville’s mordant answer to the Transcendentalists in Moby-Dick : You might sit astride a mast and feel a oneness with nature, but fall into the sea and you’ll be quickly digested. Even those clunky interludes with the grown-up Pi and the interviewer (poor Spall, with so little to play) end up paying off. The movie has a sting in its tail that puts what you’ve seen in a startlingly harsh context.

It turns out Lee has more affinity for Pi the yarn-spinner than for any of his other heroes. His movies (Lust, Caution; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hulk; Brokeback Mountain; Taking Woodstock ) center on emotions that can’t be suppressed and finally burst forth—but the meticulousness of his framing and color-coordination (or that mythical cowboy iconography in Brokeback Mountain ) make his work seem one step removed, as if in a terrarium. In Life of Pi,  he finally has a story in which that very distance is the source of the emotion. Pi has designed his own terrarium to keep from staring directly into the abyss. It’s not denial. It’s faith in something else: the transformative power of storytelling. The film is transcendent.



Life of Pi
Directed by Ang Lee.
Twentieth Century Fox. PG.

E-mail: [email protected].

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

    Release dates for
Life of Pi    (2012)
 
Country          Date

USA    28 September 2012 (New York Film Festival)
USA    14 October 2012 (Mill Valley Film Festival)
Taiwan    10 November 2012 (Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival)

Canada    21 November 2012  
Puerto Rico    21 November 2012  
Taiwan    21 November 2012  
USA 21    November 2012  

Hong Kong    22 November 2012
 
Cambodia    29 November 2012  
Singapore    29 November 2012  
Spain    30 November 2012  

Vietnam    14 December 2012  

Belgium    19 December 2012  
France    19 December 2012  
Belarus    20 December 2012  
Czech Republic    20 December 2012  
Greece    20 December 2012  
Hungary    20 December 2012  
Ireland    20 December 2012  
Italy    20 December 2012  
Kazakhstan    20 December 2012  
Netherlands    20 December 2012  
Portugal    20 December 2012  
Serbia    20 December 2012 (Belgrade)
Slovenia    20 December 2012  
UK    20 December 2012  

Brazil    21 December 2012  
Bulgaria    21 December 2012  
Colombia    21 December 2012  
Ecuador    21 December 2012  
Estonia    21 December 2012  
Finland    21 December 2012  
Iceland    21 December 2012  
Lithuania    21 December 2012  
Mexico    21 December 2012  
Sweden    21 December 2012  
Venezuela    21 December 2012  

Denmark    25 December 2012  
Norway    25 December 2012  
Germany    26 December 2012  

Dominican Republic    27 December 2012  
Peru    27 December 2012  
Poland    28 December 2012  
Turkey    28 December 2012
 
Australia    1 January 2013  
Costa Rica    1 January 2013  
El Salvador    1 January 2013  
New Zealand    1 January 2013  
Nicaragua    1 January 2013  
Panama    1 January 2013  
Russia    1 January 2013  

Bolivia    3 January 2013  
Chile    3 January 2013  
Guatemala    4 January 2013  
Honduras    4 January 2013  

Argentina    10 January 2013  

Japan    25 January 2013  


Also Known As

Животът на Пи    Bulgaria

A Vida de Pi    Portugal  
As Aventuras de Pi    Brazil  
  
Berättelsen om Pi    Sweden

L'odyssée de Pi    France
La vida de Pi    Spain
Life of Pi: Schiffbruch mit Tiger    Germany

Pi élete    Hungary
Pi gyvenimas    Lithuania
Pi'nin Yasami    Turkey
Piin elämä    Finland  
Pijev život    Serbia

Vita di Pi    Italy

Zycie Pi    Poland

[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/

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/16/a_life_changing_film_for_the_young_actor_of_pi/singleton/



A ‘Life’ changing film
for the young actor of
Pi
By Jake Coyle
http://twitter.com/jake_coyle
Associated Press
Friday, Nov 16, 2012 10:45 AM EST


Suraj Sharma as Pi Patel, Life of Pi


NEW YORK (AP) — The only thing more unlikely than a movie about a boy adrift on a ship with a Bengali tiger is the tale of the film’s star.

Teenager Suraj Sharma went along with his acting brother to a Delhi, India, audition of Life of Pi  purely as a favor, motivated by the promise of a free meal.

“He said, ‘Come with me because I don’t want to go alone,’” Sharma recalled in an interview at Lincoln Center shortly before the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in September. “I said, ‘Fine, as long as you buy me a sandwich afterwards.’ That sandwich got me ‘Pi.’”

For a film about the wonder of faith, Sharma’s experience is one that stretches belief. Despite no prior acting experience or ambition, he managed to separate himself from 3,000 applicants and emerged through four rounds of auditions as the star in one of the most anticipated movies of the year.

For Life of Pi  to work, Sharma — now 19, 17 when filming started — had to succeed. And many think the film, to be released Wednesday, not only works, but is a legitimate Oscar contender — a 3-D magic act from director Ang Lee that translates Yann Martel’s 2001 best seller into a colorful cinematic language.

In it, Sharma plays Pi Patel, who, as a child, precociously combines Christianity, Buddhism and Islam into his own blend of religion. When his family is uprooted to Canada, the ship taking Pi, his family and many zoo animals, sinks in a storm, leaving Pi alone and clinging to life in a raft boat.

Making the film meant working with one of the most revered directors in movies. It meant spending months shooting in India and Taiwan, where a giant water tank was built for scenes at sea. It meant learning not only how to act, but how to swim.

“I can’t put it in words,” says Sharma, a bright and earnest kid who humbly recognizes his good fortune. “It’s too much. It was emotionally and spiritually and physically exhausting. I would never be able to tell people what I went through exactly, but hopefully it will come through in some ways.”

It was a journey Sharma’s parents (both mathematicians, fittingly) had some reluctance about, as it would mean missing a year of school. Lee argued a year spent working on Life of Pi  would be more rewarding than a year of school. Sharma’s mother performed a ceremony that made Lee her son’s guru — a new role for the director.

“I couldn’t even tell a joke in front of him. I had to behave,” Lee jokes. “I had to look after him. Normally when I work with actors, they move on and I move on. … I can pretty much say he started at the top — getting this kind of reception and making a movie. So I want to make sure he’s grounded and still getting his education — not only in school but in life. He should be OK if he doesn’t get crushed by what’s coming.”

“He’s a good boy,” adds Lee. “It seems like he can take it.”

In Life of Pi,  there’s nowhere for a young actor to hide, either. For a long stretch of the film, Pi is alone in the skiff with only the tiger, which was digitally added. Sharma had the added pressure of acting extensively in front of a blue screen, with little to go on other than Lee’s directions.

“Honestly, I still feel like I don’t know how to act,” says Sharma. “It was just him. I was just an instrument. He has this thing — suppose you’re really nervous and stressed out and going crazy — he’ll look you in the eye in a particular manner, and no matter who it is, you just go: whoosh! He’s like a Zen master or something. He makes you so calm that you just let him mold you into whatever he wants to mold you into.”

Sharma is now in his first year at Deli University where he’s concentrating his studies on philosophy.

“I’m pretty sure I want to end up in the film industry,” he says. “I don’t know if I want to act or not, but I do want to be part of making magic.”

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEv8KMN1eYs&feature=related[/youtube]
Published on Oct 30, 2012 by ndtv

Eminent filmmaker Ang Lee whose is all set with his upcoming film, Life Of Pi  talks to NDTV about his experiences in India while filming for the film and how the country turned out to be his big inspiration.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/node/59504

 


An Early Review Of
LIFE OF PI
Sails In!!

Ace Rimmer
Published at:  Nov 07, 2012 12:35:53 PM CST



I just returned from the gala screening of LIFE OF PI  (in 3D) at the AFI Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday with HITCHCOCK   and will continue with LINCOLN, HOLY MOTORS  and the Palme d'Or winning AMOUR  among others.

The screening was opened by a virtual Ang Lee, who popped out of the screen in 3D and looked pretty damn exhausted. Apparently he finished it two weeks ago and said this was the hardest film he'd ever made. Then he mentioned it was all about faith. Nuf' said.

Went into PI  more curious than excited. The novel is a really solid piece of fiction, mixing intense survival story with thoughtful meditations on God and capping the whole thing off with a semi ambiguous, rug pulling twist. In fact it's the ending that I remember best from the book. It turns a memorable ride into a very clever, thought-provoking journey. If any of this sounds boring to you, look away now.

The trailers left me a little uninterested. Visually stunning of course, but the overwhelming, uplifting score and title cards declaring WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER KNOWN IS LOST and FIND YOUR COURAGE didn't exactly peak my interest or flatter the complex source material. It seemed Ang Lee had sidestepped the unfilmable challenges of the narrative and decided to distract audiences with a smorgasbord of kaleidoscopic colors, effects and action.

Well, as it turns out, LIFE OF PI  has all that and much more. In fact, I'd say this is Ang Lee's TREE OF LIFE.  Something deeply meaningful he's been building towards his whole career. With a bit of Ang Lee's GRIZZLY MAN  and Ang Lee's CLOUD ATLAS  to boot. Still with me?

What he's done here is taken the novel's main ideas, nature, nurture and the search for God and delivered it with intensely personal panache and breathtaking visual sequences. As with those other projects, one feels the auteur's hand here as clearly as you feel it with Malick, Herzog or the Wachowskis and it is both very honest and very demanding. As with those films, some may be rubbed the wrong way here. LIFE OF PI  will not be embraced by everyone. It may not be a journey all will be compelled to take again. But I urge you to take it once on the biggest, brightest screen possible.

LIFE OF PI  is stunning. I don't use the term lightly either. There are things done here visually that left me gasping and my jaw wide open. More so than CLOUD ATLAS  or even AVATAR.  In fact, I'd argue that Ang Lee manages to fully immerse you Planet Earth style in this extraordinary world in a way James Cameron promised but failed to deliver satisfactorily with his mega-blockbuster. To see such a methodical, visual director firing on all cylinder's is an absolute joy and it would be impossible to recall more than a fraction of the exquisite, intricate details here.

Things will stick out for everyone though. For me, I have never seen the sea represented quite so magnificently as it is here. We go from terrifying, storm churning tsunami's to queasy waves, to a sun drenched, still-water paradise to astonishing, luminous, night-time underwater vistas. And much more. Throw in sharks, flying fish, a whale, zebra, hyena, meerkat and countless other creatures of all shapes and sizes, elegantly realized, and you'll wonder where Cameron can possibly go next with AVATAR 2.  The ball is definitely in his court. That goes for the 3D as well. If you're a champion of the format, this is right up there. If not, you owe it to yourself to see what a brilliant craftsman is able to do with the canvas. I still found the picture too dim and look forward to experiencing the bright colors in 2D. But you can't argue with craft.

To my relief, Lee was able to inject the imagery with the deep symbolism they need to really sing. The opening act of PI  shows a young Pi (the excellent Suraj Sharma) getting involved with multiple religions and butting heads with his family. Questions are raised and statements made that address some pretty big philosophical topics and it is here that the audience will either perk up or shut down. If they do let themselves be engaged however, viewers will find the spectacular journey that follows to be far more meaningful and the head spinning coda, far more satisfying. Or as so many did with TREE OF LIFE,  they might find the ambiguous, explicit symbols a bafflement and the earnest delivery a bore.

In GRIZZLY MAN,  Timothy Treadwell looked at wild bears and found love and meaning, while Herzog mused that all he saw was "the chaotic indifference of nature.” In LIFE OF PI,  Ang Lee gives us a ferocious Bengal tiger and two possible outcomes. In it's eyes we either see the friendly, soulful proof of God's existence, or merely a confused reflection of ourselves.

There were times during LIFE OF PI  that I found myself drifting out of the film and marveling at the spectacle from a distance. Lee performs an amazing balancing act with all the elements at his disposal but at times the philosophy felt a little unbalanced and the ending didn’t completely stick the landing. It's more about the journey than the destination here but it’s almost all captivating. The framing story contains what were in my opinion the films strongest and weakest performances (by Irrfan Khan and Rafe Spall respectively) and sometimes feels a bit dry. Their last scene together is their best though. The relationship between Pi and the tiger is something better experienced than described here. It is the centerpiece of the film and a massive accomplishment on both a technical and emotional level.

LIFE OF PI  is not a film I will watch many times over. Not because it is a failure, but like a few other survival stories, the viewing itself can feel like a bit of an endurance. In the novel, staying on a lifeboat for such a huge chunk of the story made for compelling reading but in the film, you do feel Ang Lee pulling somersaults to compensate for the one location. Beautiful somersaults.

I don't think this will have a chance at the Academy Awards, with an entirely international cast and scenes of animal on animal violence (which will definitely turn off some viewers). Some will hail it a masterpiece, others will raise eyebrows and scoff at the philosophy while admiring the visuals and astonishing animal realizations. I'll admit, the rich visuals will stay with me longer than the thoughtful story, which is saying a lot.

LIFE OF PI  is a film you will want to own because you want to show it to others. You will screen it for the more open minded, opinionated of your friends to see what they think it all means, knowing that at the very least they will applaud you on your visual taste. Or you’ll show them TREE OF LIFE.

[Front-Ranger]

I'm happy about the movie coming out, but I'm a little miffed that there's already a book called The Making of the Life of Pi. Where is the equivalent book about Brokeback Mountain after seven crying out loud years? 

[Berit]

I hope that it will be shown without the 3D thing. I'm practically blind on my right eye  so 3D doesn't work that good for me even though it is better now than when it first was used. Looking forward to the movie though 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.vulture.com/2012/11/life-of-pi-ang-lee-interview.html


Director Ang Lee
on Life of Pi,
Petting Tigers, and
His Hulk  Regret

By Jennifer Vineyard
Today at 12:30 PM

For those who haven't read the book, Life of Pi  is about a boy named Pi who is shipwrecked in the Pacific, his only company for a long time a companion called Richard Parker — a Bengal tiger who was being transported with other zoo animals and shares Pi's lifeboat. At least, that's the better version of two possible stories about Pi's survival, which hits the big screen in a wondrous 3-D rendering courtesy of director Ang Lee, who is already garnering Oscar buzz for the film. Lee chatted with Vulture about surviving at sea, petting tigers, and where he thinks he went wrong with The Hulk.

Yann Martel thanked you for being "crazy" enough to take on his book. Do you think you were crazy?
No, I was just possessed. [Laughs. ] The book is inspiring, fascinating, and mind-boggling, and I read it when it first came out and talked about it with my wife and my sons. But when I was first approached to direct it, it seemed like a crazy idea — and the book seduced me into it, because it was a puzzle to crack. It's an intellectual book, and you have to make it emotional and visual, and without Tom Hanks to help you! [Laughs. ]

There are the old adages of never work with children or animals, never shoot on water ...
I did all three! [Laughs. ]  

Plus you worked with a child — a teenager in this case — who couldn't swim at first. When did you discover that?
After I casted Suraj Sharma. He said, "Oh, yeah. I probably won't drown." [Laughs. ] So I tested him to see how long he could hold his breath, and it was only for fifteen seconds — and we had shots planned that would require him to do that for a minute long! So he had to learn. But everything else, you look at him and you see he is Pi. I remember, when we were testing him, I asked him to tell the second version of Pi's story, and to make it real, and about halfway through, he started to tremble and cry. It was heartbreaking.    

How deep was the tank? Was Suraj ever in danger of drowning?
About eighteen feet? Four, five meters deep. The wave tank could create long surges like the open ocean, so his raft could act and interact with water before it was digitally extended to the horizon. But he wasn't going to drown. [Chuckles. ]

You consulted with real life shipwreck survivor Steven Callahan. Apparently you asked him to leave you out at sea so you would know what it felt like?
I asked him a couple of times, but he wouldn't. The first time I visited him, David Magee, the screenwriter, and I went out to Maine to go on the ocean with him, and I asked him to take the sail down so we could go up and down for a while. And then we consulted with him a few more times in Taiwan, and at the time, he was fighting cancer, but he still went. And this time, we sailed out to see the north tip. We went out on a motorboat, just to go up and down on the big ocean for quite a while. I sat at the water level on a step. But we weren't allowed to be left out there on our own, with no sail, because the waves were too big and it turned out to be too crazy of an idea. The marine guys wouldn't let us, so we took the speedboat.

Were there ever any Crouching Tiger  jokes on set because you were now finally working with actual tigers?
[Laughs. ] Yes, and even just last night we were talking about that! I guess the tiger means something to Pi, because it's his inner self. I see the tiger now as not just his opponent, but also the serious beast side of himself. And the tiger is quite fascinating, because you see yourself in his eyes. You somehow relate to the animal, or it's an emotional projection. It's like in the movie — Pi can't prove it, but he sees something.

Suraj said he wishes he got to pet a tiger. That's his one regret.
Which one did he want to pet?

Jonas.
Ah, yes. He's more pettable. Our main tiger was King, who does all the posing and all the swimming, and then some of the scenes when he's hungry. And when King was sick, we had Jonas. The other two tigers were female — Themis and Minh — and they did the more ferocious scenes, because they're actually more aggressive than King. But we kept Suraj away from the tigers. There was no tiger on the boat! We did a digital tiger for the shots next to him.

How did doing The Hulk  prepare you for this? And what did you think of Mark Ruffalo's Hulk in The Avengers ?
I learned quite a bit about CG from The Hulk,  and I wouldn't have been able to do Life of Pi  without that. But it's easier to create an animal, because there exists a good reference — so a tiger or a hyena is easier than a 2,000-pound rage monster. The hardest thing to do is the weight, not the skin, because there's no reference for something that size that is agile. And the technology's improved, so you can have more details with Mark's Hulk. My problem is that I took the whole thing too seriously. I should have had more fun with it, instead of all the psychodrama! [Laughs. ]

What did you think of your son Mason's turn as Teddy in The Hangover Part II ? Do you give him any advice about films to do next?
He's a Method actor. [Laughs. ] I just told him, "Relax! It's a broad comedy. Just enjoy it." Because that's something we have in common — taking things too seriously. He's trying to make it on his own, and he doesn't want any of my influence, so he's suffering like the rest of them.

[Marge_Innavera]

(quoted) The trailers left me a little uninterested. Visually stunning of course, but the overwhelming, uplifting score and title cards declaring WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER KNOWN IS LOST and FIND YOUR COURAGE didn't exactly peak my interest or flatter the complex source material. It seemed Ang Lee had sidestepped the unfilmable challenges of the narrative and decided to distract audiences with a smorgasbord of kaleidoscopic colors, effects and action.

I've only seen one film in the current improved 3-D so far, and am looking forward to this being the second.  The ads for the movie had rather turned me off -- they considerably sentimentalized the relationship between the title character and the tiger (maybe believable if the animal was a wolf; hardly in this particular story).  But I did a 180 after watching Ang Lee's interview with Charlie Rose and seeing a clip.

The show business adage about directing children and animals is true.  In stage productions, the same is true of a gun on stage: the audience is so preoccupied with waiting for it to go off they tend to miss a lot in the meantime.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

After You've seen Life of Pi,  come back and listen to our [Audio] Spoiler Special with
Dan Engber and Dana Stevens, by clicking:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2012/11/life_of_pi_directed_by_ang_lee_reviewed.html




Life of Pi
See it stoned.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2012, at 11:24 AM ET



Suraj Sharma in Life of Pi


Life of Pi,  Ang Lee’s adaptation of the best-selling 2001 novel by Yann Martel, might be a good movie to see stoned—or maybe it’s just one that makes you feel as though you already are stoned, floating along on a sea of hyper-crisp 3-D images and evanescent spiritual insights. I suppose it’s suitable that Life of Pi  would be a movie that sets its viewers mentally adrift in this way, since it’s about someone who’s literally adrift: A young Indian man named Pi who survives a shipwreck, only to find himself stranded in a lifeboat with a hungry Bengal tiger.

Why was a tiger crossing the ocean the first place? Well, Pi’s father (Adil Hussain), the owner of a zoo in Pondicherry, has decided to emigrate with his animals, wife, and two young sons to start a new life in Canada. After a stiff frame-story setup in which a French-Canadian writer (Rafe Spall) sits down for an interview with the middle-aged Pi (Irrfan Khan), there’s an extended whimsical flashback to Pi’s childhood in India. As a dreamy grammar-school misfit (played by Ayush Tandon), he annoys his modern-minded atheist dad by incorporating Christian and Muslim prayer into his daily rituals. But later, in his teen years (as played by Suraj Sharma), Pi’s spiritual bent will serve him well. If you’re going to spend months alone in a lifeboat with a giant carnivorous jungle cat, you’d better know how to pray in several languages.

The long middle section—the movie’s strongest stretch— plays like a hallucinogenic mashup of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat,  the reality show I Shouldn’t Be Alive,  and a soothing promotional video that might play on a loop in the waiting room of a very fancy Ayurvedic spa. Many scenes involving the logistics of Pi’s struggle for survival on the raft aim for conventional verisimilitude and suspense—and achieve a surprising degree of both, given that the tiger is a CGI creation and the protagonist’s survival is already assured. But now and again Lee will veer off on lush imagistic tangents, his camera plunging to explore luminescent jellies beneath the ocean’s surface or rising into the heavens to look down on boy and tiger from a chilly stars’-eye-view.

There’s something admirable about Lee’s commitment to lavishing sheer visual beauty on the viewer. Like his God-besotted hero, the director seems passionately in love with the natural world, even as he renders it with a high degree of technical artifice. The tiger is an extraordinarily convincing (and refreshingly unanthropomorphized) digital creation, the ocean water resembles thick molten glass, and the sky, often shown in unnatural shades of peach, gold, and celadon, has a palpable depth, as if the movie were being projected inside a transparent cube. Lee doesn’t do anything especially new with 3-D, and he’s not above having characters poke or throw objects at the lens in the medium’s oldest “hey, looky here!” gambit. But Life of Pi’s sophisticated use of the technology recalls Avatar’s rather than, say, Clash of the Titans’. The image is remarkably bright, clear, and (to use the word James Cameron ’s publicists seem to have implanted in all our brains with a chip) “immersive”—even if what we’re being immersed in feels at times like a vat of warm caramel.

For Life of Pi ’s theology is as gauzy as its images are sharp. Everything happens for a reason in this best of all possible worlds, it seems—unless that world is a godless arena of dog-eat-dog carnage, which is also a distinct possibility. The story of the boy and the tiger in a boat wants to be both a magic-realist fable and a tense survival adventure, two modes of storytelling that undercut and sometimes undo one another. If this is all some symbolic parable about the soul’s struggle with itself, why bother to invest in the practical questions of how Pi will find fresh water or keep his food supply dry? If the tiger isn’t just a tiger but a stand-in for God or nature or the universal Other, do we still need to worry about him chomping off Pi’s arm?

In the disappointingly tiger-free last 20 minutes we hear Pi recount his incredible story, first to investigators at a Japanese shipping company shortly after his rescue and later, as an adult, to that wide-eyed French-Canadian novelist we had completely forgotten was sitting in Pi’s living room. The movie’s energy peters out in a series of book-club conversations about divine will, the power of storytelling, and the resilience of the human spirit. The ending’s pious dullness is enough to make you wish you were back on that lifeboat, where the most pressing questions weren’t spiritual but gastronomic: What’s on the menu for lunch, and what can I do to make sure it isn’t me?

[southendmd]

I saw this last night with Lynne and her cousin Chris.  It's showing in both 2-D and 3-D and we chose the latter.  I'm not really a big fan of 3-D and I'm not sure it added that much, except near-seasickness.  

Very true to the novel, which I had read this past summer.  Of course, it's visually stunning, but also emotionally compelling, even exhausting.  I jumped out of my seat more than once.  There are some brutal details in the novel, and the film, rated PG, doesn't dwell on these, thankfully.  Still, there are some very intense moments.  I noticed a few people walked out of the theatre.

The performances of the three Pis are nothing short of wondrous.  I still can't believe that the tiger--named Richard Parker--wasn't real.  

Lynne remarked on Ang's love of ambiguity, and it's no different in this film.  The ending is just like in the book (don't let anyone spoil it for you), and includes a scene filmed in a stark white background.  Sound familiar?  

This film stays with you.  I even greeted the cat with "Hello, Richard Parker" this morning.

[Meryl]

Thanks for the review, Paul.  I hope to see it in the next few weeks.  I happened upon a livestream Q & A with Ang from France the other day on youtube.  He's out and about doing promotion now. 

[Penthesilea]

I saw this last night with Lynne and her cousin Chris.  It's showing in both 2-D and 3-D and we chose the latter.  I'm not really a big fan of 3-D and I'm not sure it added that much, except near-seasickness.  

Very true to the novel, which I had read this past summer.  Of course, it's visually stunning, but also emotionally compelling, even exhausting.  I jumped out of my seat more than once.  There are some brutal details in the novel, and the film, rated PG, doesn't dwell on these, thankfully.  Still, there are some very intense moments.  I noticed a few people walked out of the theatre.

The performances of the three Pis are nothing short of wondrous.  I still can't believe that the tiger--named Richard Parker--wasn't real.  

Lynne remarked on Ang's love of ambiguity, and it's no different in this film.  The ending is just like in the book (don't let anyone spoil it for you), and includes a scene filmed in a stark white background.  Sound familiar?  

This film stays with you.  I even greeted the cat with "Hello, Richard Parker" this morning.

Now I want to see it. In 3D. And feel like I'm stoned, lol.
It will come out on Dec. 26th in Germany, so it's not a long wait this time.

[Meryl]

I just saw on Life of Pi's Facebook page that Ang will be hosting a discussion of the movie at the Apple Store on Prince Street in Soho tomorrow night, December 7, at 7:00 p.m.  I have theater tickets, but tell any Brokies you know in the area. 

apple.com/soho

[Front-Ranger]

Congratulations to Ang Lee and Life of Pi on the Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture! Do we know how to pick them, or what?

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Congratulations to Ang Lee and Life of Pi on the Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture! Do we know how to pick them, or what?

Ha! Also: Best Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables” (Do we know how to pick them, or what?)

 

[Meryl]

Also saw Anna Faris on "Top Chef" with her fiance.  She knows how to pick them, too.    BTW, she's preggers. 

I saw "Life of Pi" last night.  Beautiful film!  And in proper Ang fashion, it leaves you with more questions than it does answers.  The tiger is gorgeous.  Surely tigers are the most beautiful creatures ever made. 

[Front-Ranger]

This film stays with you.  I even greeted the cat with "Hello, Richard Parker" this morning.

When I got home from seeing the movie I told my cat, Diva "Hey we just saw a movie about your big brother!"

[Front-Ranger]

I agree with you in part, Meryl. Tigers have the most exquisite fierce beauty. But for overall perfection, I would go with the ruby throated hummingbird or some fish or insect. They can be beautiful like a precious jewel. Even some snakes like the coral snake, are very beautiful. And then there's the horse. What could be more beautiful than a magnificent horse at full gallop? Tigers and lions, though regal, have a tendency to rest a lot unless they are pursuing their prey. Give me a horse or a pronghorn, springing over the prairie. I'd better stop here because I keep thinking of more animals I want to mention!

[Penthesilea]

I agree with you in part, Meryl. Tigers have the most exquisite fierce beauty. But for overall perfection, I would go with the ruby throated hummingbird or some fish or insect. They can be beautiful like a precious jewel. Even some snakes like the coral snake, are very beautiful. And then there's the horse. What could be more beautiful than a magnificent horse at full gallop? Tigers and lions, though regal, have a tendency to rest a lot unless they are pursuing their prey. Give me a horse or a pronghorn, springing over the prairie. I'd better stop here because I keep thinking of more animals I want to mention!

You say horse, I say Arabians.
Both tigers and Arabians make my personal top-list of most beautiful animals.

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

I love that poem. It was in a book about tigers I read as a teenager, both original and translated version. One of my first encounters with the beauty of the English language.


Back to the movie:
Guess who's seeing Life of Pi right now? My daughter. I wanted to go to the movie together with her. Since Kerstin moved away, my daughter is my movie-partner. Today she visited a friend, then called in she will be late, they're seeing Life of Pi. I hope she likes it enough to see it a second time. Can't wait to hear her opinion.

[Front-Ranger]

I feel hopelessly inadequate to review this movie after seeing it yesterday, but I will plough forward anyway. I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible. The first question is, with the plethora of good movies out there right now, why choose Life of Pi? I'm sure Brokies can answer that quite easily, but I'll give some other more general reasons. First and foremost, Pi is a beautiful movie, revealing our watery Earth in all its glory as well as the full range of animals, fish and the single solitary man who becomes Adam in the story. (He also refers to himself as a modern-day Noah in his ark).

Secondly, Pi is a very satisfying adventure story with a bit of morality and spiritualism gently sprinkled in. It seems like the screenplay is hinting that Pi's early religious training and character development bolstered his inner strength, allowing him to survive in a boat with a tiger. That may be so, but I believe, and Pi also wrote in his journal that having a tiger as his travelling companion kept him alert and was the source of his strength as much as anything. There are many references to gods, symbols and events in various different religions, but they are not done in a heavyhanded way.

I'm told the movie respects and follows the story closely. Based on our experience with Lee's previous films, I beleive it. I once picked up the book and made it about a third of the way, but then I got distracted and never finished it. I will certainly do so now. However, I suspect the plot is rather straightforward in the story as it was in the book and the strengths lie in the character development. The movie also has the sheer spectacle of the ocean, the shipwreck, the special effects (including the tiger), and it will be interesting to see if the book conveys these as well.

One aside, the Bengal tiger is rendered mostly through CGI technology. I read that a real tiger was used for the swimming scenes. This made me laugh because the tiger in the water scenes were my favorite! The face of that big kitty as it paddled towards Pi was adorable, and yet terrifying as well. Could Richard Parker be the new jaws, LOL? It was ingenious to see how and whether Pi outwitted the swimming tiger and how or whether he safely got the tiger back in the boat.

I'll write more later and I also will write some of my more personal reactions in my blog, again trying to avoid spoilers other than what's in the trailer.

[Penthesilea]

Thanks for your review. I haven't seen the movie, but knowing your abilities to dissect movies I'm sure it's anything but inadequate!

[Front-Ranger]

Since Kerstin moved away, my daughter is my movie-partner. Today she visited a friend, then called in she will be late, they're seeing Life of Pi. I hope she likes it enough to see it a second time. Can't wait to hear her opinion.

It's a bummer to lose your movie-partner. My daughter dragged me to see Brokeback Mountain. It was her Christmas present to me in 2006. I miss her so much!

[mouk]

Lynne remarked on Ang's love of ambiguity, and it's no different in this film.  The ending is just like in the book (don't let anyone spoil it for you), and includes a scene filmed in a stark white background.  Sound familiar?  

The familiarity of that ambiguous scene in a stark white background really struck me, then I wondered if my BBM obsession was taking me too far. So glad (and reassured) that 2 other brokies saw it with the same eyes!!

[Penthesilea]

***SPOILER***  ***SPOILER***  ***SPOILER****

If you haven't seen the movie, skip this post. I'm not sure there will be spoilers, but just to be on the safe side. I don't want to cencor myself right now.

I feel hopelessly inadequate to review this movie after seeing it yesterday, but I will plough forward anyway. I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible. The first question is, with the plethora of good movies out there right now, why choose Life of Pi? I'm sure Brokies can answer that quite easily, but I'll give some other more general reasons. First and foremost, Pi is a beautiful movie, revealing our watery Earth in all its glory as well as the full range of animals, fish and the single solitary man who becomes Adam in the story. (He also refers to himself as a modern-day Noah in his ark).

Secondly, Pi is a very satisfying adventure story with a bit of morality and spiritualism gently sprinkled in. It seems like the screenplay is hinting that Pi's early religious training and character development bolstered his inner strength, allowing him to survive in a boat with a tiger. That may be so, but I believe, and Pi also wrote in his journal that having a tiger as his travelling companion kept him alert and was the source of his strength as much as anything. There are many references to gods, symbols and events in various different religions, but they are not done in a heavyhanded way.

I'm told the movie respects and follows the story closely. Based on our experience with Lee's previous films, I beleive it. I once picked up the book and made it about a third of the way, but then I got distracted and never finished it. I will certainly do so now. However, I suspect the plot is rather straightforward in the story as it was in the book and the strengths lie in the character development. The movie also has the sheer spectacle of the ocean, the shipwreck, the special effects (including the tiger), and it will be interesting to see if the book conveys these as well.

One aside, the Bengal tiger is rendered mostly through CGI technology. I read that a real tiger was used for the swimming scenes. This made me laugh because the tiger in the water scenes were my favorite! The face of that big kitty as it paddled towards Pi was adorable, and yet terrifying as well. Could Richard Parker be the new jaws, LOL? It was ingenious to see how and whether Pi outwitted the swimming tiger and how or whether he safely got the tiger back in the boat.

I'll write more later and I also will write some of my more personal reactions in my blog, again trying to avoid spoilers other than what's in the trailer.

Just coming back from the theater. Saw the movie with both of my daughters (Hannah and her whole group accidently went into the wrong movie last week, can you imagine? ).

I've read your review again after seeing the movie and must say it's excellent!


Compliments to all my Brokie buds, you have a fine reception when it comes to movies (which doesn't come as a surprise of course).

Lynne remarked on Ang's love of ambiguity, and it's no different in this film.  The ending is just like in the book (don't let anyone spoil it for you), and includes a scene filmed in a stark white background.  Sound familiar? 

Oh yes, Paul and Mouk. Totally, totally made me think of the Twist house. And as second thought, I remembered that you both mentioned the same.

I loved the ambituity of the ending. Also a familiar Ang Lee trademark, as well as the beyond beautiful pictures.

I even greeted the cat with "Hello, Richard Parker" this morning.

You landed a good one with this comment with my daughters! When we came home the cat sat in the kitchen and I bent down, petted him and said exactly the same thing, thinking of you. "Hallo Richard Parker"
The girls laughed and I credited you for the joke.


All in all I'm sure I will watch the movie again once it's on DVD. I don't have the desire to see it again in theater, but I've only had that once in my life. Other than BBM, I never go to the theater twice for the same movie (not to mention six or so times ).

One thing I also liked, but haven't seen mentioned so far (didn't read the whole thread) is the humor in it. Even if it's not much, it stood out for me. I have a thing for the absurd, and for absurd names and thus liked that the tiger was named Richard Parker and why.

And Gerad Depardieu as the cook! Even if he's a mean character, I absolutely loved how he reacted when being told Pi's family was vegetarian. Putting a snipped of green on the plate "Oh yes, vegetarian, I understand - here ya go" LOL. Yeah, what an asshole, but I loved the whole exchange.

[Penthesilea]

***SPOILER***   **SPOILER***

Now this post will definitively contain a major spoiler. You are warned.


Two minor points of criticism; the first may be due to dubbing: When they're still in India, people talk German with a distinct Indian accent. Not the family when they're among themselves, but sometimes when talking to other people. Did they do the same in English?
It might be different for English, since it is widely spoken in India and probably with its own accent different from UK, USA, OZ, etc. But it doesn't make any sense to have Indians in India talking German with an Indian accent.


The second one is a major spoiler, so this is your last chance to quit reading:
The Meercats ruined much of the ambiguity for me. I can accept much of the dreamlike stuff, but it stops with the Meercats. Maybe I'm strange that way.
Meercats live in the dry areas of Southern Africa, and only there! Pi could not have encountered them on his odyssey. No effin' way. I can believe sweetwater turning to acid at night (barely, but of course the whole thing is parable like), I can believe a shipwrecked guy hallucinating, mixing reality and fantasy, I can believe the older Pi being simply a good storyteller by making it somewhat phantastic, etc.
But not the Meercats. They live in a different part of the world, in very much different surroundings (dry!) and in so much smaller groups (families). Everything about them was just - wrong.




And another small thing I noticed, no criticism though, something funny: older, storytelling Pi looks much like Jeff Goldblum.

[Front-Ranger]

Chrissi, in the US the characters spoke English with a British accent and some of the characters had a bit of the Indian lilt to their voices. I can rarely tell the difference between Indian English and British English, but their is a sing-song cadence to the former sometimes.

Didn't you love how being on the ocean was so eventful? It seemed like something was always happening. I've found that to be true in my sojourns in the mountains as well. Once you slow down your life you find out how much you are missing.

I didn't know meerkats only live in one dry place so that didn't throw me off the story. Come to think of it, I've only seen pictures of meerkats in sunny sandy places, but it didn't sink in.

[Penthesilea]

Chrissi, in the US the characters spoke English with a British accent and some of the characters had a bit of the Indian lilt to their voices. I can rarely tell the difference between Indian English and British English, but their is a sing-song cadence to the former sometimes.

Thanks for telling me about the OV!

Didn't you love how being on the ocean was so eventful? It seemed like something was always happening. I've found that to be true in my sojourns in the mountains as well. Once you slow down your life you find out how much you are missing.

Yeah. I admit, I had feared the time on the ocean might be a bit boring, but it wasn't. Should have known better, with Ang Lee making the movie.

I didn't know meerkats only live in one dry place so that didn't throw me off the story. Come to think of it, I've only seen pictures of meerkats in sunny sandy places, but it didn't sink in.

Wrong animals in movies are a pet peeve of mine. It bugged me enough to look up how it was in the novel. And there it were already meerkats. Why not Mungos (Indian mongoose)? Makes me wonder if the author of the book simply confused both animals. Maybe he encountered Indian mongoose on his travels in India and simply identified them wrong. Now that would be some sloppy research on his part however. I admit it's more likely he really inteded it that way, with meerkats in the wrong place.

Oh well, his book, his choice.

[Monika]

I´l jump right into the discussion so SPOILER WARNING




SPOILER













I just got back from the cinema and yay! I thought it was a delight to watch. I´ve never understood the point of 3D-cinema but Ang really made the most of it. I must admit, my expectations weren´t really that high as I thought I might get bored - I mean - a boy and a tiger alone at sea for 2 hours - but I was wrong. I was thouroughly entertained.
I also took great pleasure in recognising - just like the rest of you did - some of Ang´s old tricks - the open ending and the play with names. I loved the ambiguity of the name Richard Parker - was it the name of a tiger or did it refer to a (from wiki) "Richard Parker (shipwrecked), the name of several real-life and fictitious seamen involved in cases of shipwreck and cannibalism" - who in this case may have been Pi himself.

The movie had a magical quality to it that left me feeling...glowy as I re-entered the windy winter night.

[Front-Ranger]

With 11 Academy Award nominations, Ang Lee's Life of Pi is now being called his most celebrated film ever. As much as I loved the movie, it didn't delve nearly as deep as Brokeback Mountain, and BBM garnered more awards especially on the international scene. Plus, the set decoration was a bit on the sparse side. No wonder bread (didn't Wonder Bread have a tiger on the package, though?) 

[brianr]

Chrissi, in the US the characters spoke English with a British accent and some of the characters had a bit of the Indian lilt to their voices. I can rarely tell the difference between Indian English and British English, but their is a sing-song cadence to the former sometimes.

Have just seen it, definitely not a British accent but an Indian accent, actually annoying as it is the accent we get on help lines when trying to solve computer problems. Drives me balmy.
My sister has an Indian doctor who speaks perfect Aussie  English. One day he answered his phone and apologised to her that he needed to talk to his brother and he changed to the sing song accent.
I am afraid I did not enjoy Life of Pi at all. I was not hopeful but everyone is going and it has been nominated for so many awards I thought I should not miss it. Some great scenery but I thought it would never come to an end. I guess there is stuff to think about (My bishop raves about it and has read the book 3 times). To me it was just too unreal.

[Sophia]

Ok, I am part of the group now. Last night I saw the movie. Oh my god, what it scared me. At one point I even covered my eyes (3D-glasses) out of fear of being drained in urin. 

[Penthesilea]

Ok, I am part of the group now. Last night I saw the movie. Oh my god, what it scared me. At one point I even covered my eyes (3D-glasses) out of fear of being drained in urin. 

 
And we all know how bad cat piss smells.
As kids my friend and I went to the local zoo and took a neighbour's dog with us. The doggie was sprayed with cat piss from a tiger. The trip home in the bus was not pleasant. I'm sure the poor fellow passengers agreed.

[Sophia]

 
And we all know how bad cat piss smells.
As kids my friend and I went to the local zoo and took a neighbour's dog with us. The doggie was sprayed with cat piss from a tiger. The trip home in the bus was not pleasant. I'm sure the poor fellow passengers agreed.

 

pour doggie, I wonder what it smelled like, for him. With his three time strongers sensors then ours.

[SFEnnisSF]

Just back from seeing this.

Don't know why, but I CRIED, and I mean liiterally BAWLED, through the whole movie beginning with the ship wreck. 

Movies and stories that deal with death and survival and spirituality always really emotionally effect me. 

Also, I have been very depressed lately, and perhaps this was the trigger I needed to let my emotions come out?

I almost had to get up and walk out when he surrendered himself to God, and accepted that he (and the tiger will die).  I've NEVER felt that emotional in a movie theatre before, and I had to actually look away and couldn't contain myself.  WTF?

I reckon' this movie touched on certain things for me.....

[Front-Ranger]

Well sometimes we all need a good cry, friend. I hope you feel better now. Yes there is something about Life of Pi that touches a deep nerve within us.

[SFEnnisSF]

I just spent some time on the IMDB message boards.   

Seems what I took away from it was what most other folks took away from it too.

Chrissi, I just need to tell you, that you can stop worring about the Meerkats.  They were an illusion/metaphor.  (As I had suspected...)

[SFEnnisSF]

My only fault with it was I thought it was a little too reserved to get the PG rating. We are dealing with some heavy handed stuff here. Shoulda went all out and got the PG13...

[southendmd]

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVfTX1qJdzA[/youtube]
Congratulations to Ang.

[Meryl]

He's such a lovely man.  Hurrah for Ang, the Director Almighty!     

[Meryl]

I could have sworn we had a thread titled Ang, Ang, Ang, but I can't find it.  Am I nuts? 


Anyway, here's a nice article about Ang Lee's patient path to success:

http://jeffjlin.com/2013/02/23/ang-lee-and-the-uncertainty-of-success/

[Front-Ranger]

Here it is, it was quite buried:

http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,21937.0/all.html

My goodness, we used to be a talkative bunch!

That's a great article, Meryl, and would be inspiring to young people.

[Meryl]

Here it is, it was quite buried:

http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,21937.0/all.html

My goodness, we used to be a talkative bunch!

That's a great article, Meryl, and would be inspiring to young people.

Thanks, Lee!  I had no idea it had been so long since someone had posted there.