Customer Reviews

Pi (Widescreen)

5 star:		(232)
4 star:		(68)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

I must say I was hoping for something stimulating and thought provoking. Note that I love off-the-wall movies such as Eraserhead and Enter the Void but this one has ambitions of depth and misses the mark completely. The protagonist spends his time popping pain killers, avoiding social contact, and squinting at rows of numbers trying to discern the secrets of the universe by perceiving patterns through force of will alone. Lots of shouting between the characters in the meantime. We are supposed to be impressed. I couldn't wait for it to end.

I don't know if this is as good as my rating, but it's so odd, brave,
idiosyncratic and haunting, that I want to forgive it it's flaws.

Made on a shoestring, but using those limitation to create a unique
look and style, this is a psychological thriller about paranoia and
ideas, that puts you inside the lead character's head as he slowly
cracks up, trying to figure out the mathematical basis of all life. He
gets mixed up with Hassidic Jews who think he may have found the true
name of god, and wall street traders who want his secret for riches.

Full of surreal touches, it's not always clear what's real and what's
in our lead character's head - but rather than being annoying, that
only pulls you in deeper. To me it recalled great surreal earlier films
like "Eraserhead", and "Seconds", but on speed.

This movie is excellent. The direction is phenomenal. In all honesty this movie actually has the ability to drive a sane person out of their mind. It's creative and takes math to a whole new level...and i hate math, but i did love this movie, mainly because i like chaos theory and other interesting philosophical viewpoints. It's always interesting to explore these ideas. I watched this movie once, and then watched it close to three more times before i finally understood everything that was going on, but honestly i think it was well worth it. The acting is top notch, and on top of all that, the direction is superb. Incredible film, but not everyone's cup of tea. If this review has sparked your interest...don't miss it.

on this one. You either love it or you hate it. I loved it, so did one of the two friends I watched it with, but the other hated it, and my parents hated it. RENT IT FIRST and see if you like it before buying it! There is nothing worse than buying a movie and finding out you hate it. I have not watched this movie in quite some time, so I will not attempt to post a real review of it, but at least get this from my post:

DO NOT BUY THIS UNTIL YOU HAVE WATCHED IT!

The two worst things you can do in a review are over-hype and give away the ending (especially for movies that build to the end) - here's looking at you 'The Aphasic Android' (other reviewers gave away the ending too). This movie is somewhat pretentious and suffers from some neo-classical art-house direction tricks; however these flaws fail to take much away from a truely intersting storyline. I guess this movie isn't for everyone - sort of the equivalent to listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain.

I was amazed when I saw this movie. But I wasn't amazed at special effects, nor was I amazed at an all-star cast. This movie didn't need any of that. This movie is, in short, awesome.

Throughout the movie you enter the chaotic world that is the mind of Max Cohen. The chaos grows increasingly intense both visually and mentally. The many metaphors allow the movie to play with your brain, and tell a story at the same time. If the thought of a movie made about a mathematician walking the line between sanity and insanity searching for an answer to a seemingly unsolvable problem doesn't interest you, maybe the genius ending will. I beg of you to go see this movie today. You'll thank yourself.

I wanted to spend some time with my son,and he suggested Pi,which had been sitting on the shelf for a few months,as it was part of a two-pack with Requiem for a Dream{a very good film}.Big Mistake!Grainy black and white with annoying soundtrack,the high point being an orbital tune{the girl with the sun in her head,i believe}.The most offensive sounds were when Max,the protagonist,was having his many migraines,which increase in intensity.The plot concerns Max's search for meaning through numbers.He becomes obsessed and his life becomes a downward spiral of pain and paranoia to the final,drill-induced resolution.If this sounds like your cup of misery,enjoy,and don't forget the advil.

I watched the movie after several people urged me to watch it. They must have thought that since I am into Math and even number theory myself I would enjoy it. The opposite is true. The bombardment of pseudo-mathematical lingo and random High-School-level math tidbits is agonizing if you have any knowledge of higher Mathematics. Paul Erdos (one of the greatest number theorists ever) is turning in his grave after this movie. So, if some people with negative reviews state that you shouldn't watch it unless you are a Math geek they are wrong. Don't watch it if you *do* like Math.
In addition, the movie feels agonizingly long, though it's just over 80 minutes long. The reason is that over long periods the movie is incredibly slow, interrupted by regular acute pain attacks of the main character Max. I was so bored, I was thinking to myself "Must be time for the next migraine attack."
I actually hope that the true interpretation of the movie is that everything was just pure imagination, a hallucination created by a tumor in Max' brain. A little bit like John Nash's futile search for patterns in chaotic systems in the movie "A beautiful mind" that was made a couple of years later. The parallels between the two movies are plentiful: John Nash and Max Cohen are both mathematicians and think they are being chased by powerful enemies (secret service vs. powerful Wall Street firm). When Max marks numbers with a pencil and connects the marks to find geometric patterns it looks exactly like John Nash trying to find patterns in newspaper articles.
Admittedly, this is contrary to the interpretation of a lot of other people who want to see a deeper meaning in this movie, but unfortunately it is the only way to reconcile this pseudo-scientific babble.

This movie challenges religion and society in a way that would be appalling anywhere else. Somehow, in this movie, one hardly notices. It wraps the viewer into insanity, turns them into the protagonist in unprecedented ways. Its grainy and confusing filming style is perfect: this movie moves away from complexity and definition into the unwavering band of light at the core of life. The only thing comparable is E. Elias Merhige's Begotten.

Since I just recently reviewed director Darren Aronofsky's sophomore effort, I figured I might as well review this one too.

I like it a lot myself, but it won't be for all tastes (even for all who like _Requiem for a Dream_). It's bizarre in all the right ways, but if you don't like things a little surreal, you won't care for this film.

The setup is simple enough: Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is looking for 'patterns in pi' -- the famous transcendental number that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter and that (like Euler's number e) keeps cropping up all over the place in mathematical investigations of pretty much everything. Max is convinced that if he could grok that pattern (and through it, the underlying pattern of all of nature), he'd be able e.g. to predict the ups and downs of stock prices.

Is he a 'mathematician'? Hardly. We do see some evidence that he's a lightning calculator, but -- despite some brief references to actual mathematics here and there -- Max's own 'investigations' look like the same sort of nonsense long perpetrated by pseudomathematical cranks. He's also subject to really nasty migraines that send him careening into hallucination. And yet -- his mentor Sol (Mark Margolis) suggests that at one time Max _was_ a promising and even brilliant mathematician, and at one point Max's stock market predictions appear to be uncannily accurate.

Overall, though, Sol is on the mark when he implies that Max has gone in for numerology. Somebody else thinks so too, and regards that as a good thing: Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman), a Hasidic Jew who is investigating number patterns in the Torah in order to discern the Name of God. He gloms onto Max and starts teaching him not only about Torah observance (there's a nice scene where the two of them put on tefillin and start to recite the Shema) but also about Kabbalah -- specifically Hebrew numerology, a.k.a. gematria, although the film doesn't use that word. (The gematria stuff is accurately presented but, again, the math is not; at one point Max suggests -- and a rabbi appears to agree -- that the Hasidim have actually tried intoning the phonetic equivalents of every single possible 216-digit number, a feat that, with a hundred people at a time each intoning one name per minute, would have taken them on the order of ten-to-the-208th-power years.)

There's also some corporate entity after Max's secrets as well. So Max, whose 'research' looks to be nothing more than sheer crankery, is nevertheless at the center of a whirlwind of conspiratorial activity for some reason. Is it because he's really onto something? Or is this all just -- a la _Foucault's Pendulum_ -- an echo of Eco?

You probably won't be sure of the answer to that question even _after_ watching the movie -- even after watching it repeatedly. At least, after nunerous viewing myself, _I_ still don't know exactly what's supposed to have transpired here. But some people (like me) enjoy that in a movie. (At any rate, the internal resolution of Max's distress works out about the same way on any interpretation of the external events.)

The film was produced on a budget of, I think, about a dollar and eighty-seven cents, so don't be looking for ILM-level special effects here. The whole megillah is brilliantly shot in grainy black and white and backed with a spare, disturbing score by Clint Mansell. Gullette pretty much carries the entire film, with the help of an excellent but very small additional cast.

This is, in short, the sort of thing you'll like if you like this sort of thing. It's pretty gonzo and probably not for everybody.