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

[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