Life of Pi Chart

I am very, very disappointed in myself.

I stupidly set up the poll to decide the Best Picture winner for the Grahammies before I saw one of the year's best movies. It should have been up there instead of Chronicle, and now any hope I had of announcing the winners on the day of the Oscars is moot. Seeing as I can't change the poll now (it's already closed), I will simply go back to change the other Grahammy nominees. Not to mention, of course, the fact that I've already edited the nominees to include Prometheus, and (if all goes as planned) I will see Zero Dark Thirty AND Silver Linings Playbook this weekend. Yeah, I'm one dedicated f**king movie reviewer. Thank me later.

Anyway, I just saw Ang Lee's Life of Pi, and (big shock) it was friggin' amazing. As I've said before, I tend not to go nuts over brand-new movies, but this is one spectacular film. Based on the novel by Yann Martel, the story is practically Greek mythology. It centers around Pi, a boy in India whose father runs a zoo. After some trouble with finances, he is forced onto a ship to leave his home country for Canada, along with all the animals.

Although the plot requires you to suspend your disbelief for the first half, it's totally vindicated in the second. The story transcends believable and unbelievable, and the audience can basically choose to accept whichever version of reality they want. Because at the end, Pi retells two versions of the story, one with the animals on the boat, and another where the animals are other people. Note: If you don't believe the story about the tiger, you are most likely dead inside.


There's also a trippy dream sequence that rivals those in 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Big Lebowski. However, the film owes most of its accolades to Suraj Sharma's performance as Pi, not to mention Irfan Khan as an adult Pi. Plus, the CGI tiger (Richard Parker) was mind-boggling. I will never look at my cat P-nut the same again.

Final Score for Life of Pi: 9/10 stars. Yeah, settle down-- I know I haven't mentioned a single problem with this movie, but here's the thing: At the end, when he reveals a second story, the audience realizes that the whole story with the tiger may have been a fabrication. Basically, the plot is a metaphor for religion. Although the tiger wasn't 'real', it still provided a far better story than the one with actual people. This leaves the audience with a painful feeling of "But... but... tiger..." I am not amused.

Bye!