“A story that will make you believe in God,” is how one character describes the events that take place in “Life of Pi”, the latest film from Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility", “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Brokeback Mountain”).
Wednesday 6 February 2013
Life of pi movie video
“A story that will make you believe in God,” is how one character describes the events that take place in “Life of Pi”, the latest film from Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility", “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Brokeback Mountain”).
Saturday 2 February 2013
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Life of Pi movie cast and crew
Directed by
Ang Lee
Suraj Sharma
Irrfan Khan
Ayush Tandon
Gautam Belur
Adil Hussain
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Tabu
Ayan Khan
Mohd Abbas Khaleeli
Vibish Sivakumar
Rafe Spall
Gérard Depardieu
James Saito
Jun Naito
Life of Pi movie overview
“A story that will make you believe in God,” is how one character describes the events that take place in “Life of Pi”, the latest film from Ang Lee (“Sense and Sensibility", “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, “Brokeback Mountain”).
Though religious epiphanies may vary from viewer to viewer, there is no denying that “Life of Pi” is a very, very beautiful film to look at. While the same could be said of any number of computer-imagery-assisted films these days, very few of them have, at their center, a compelling, emotional story being told by a master filmmaker.
Adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name by Yann Martel, “Life of Pi” tells the story of Piscine “Pi” Patel, a young boy growing up in Pondicherry, India on the grounds of a public zoo that his father operates for the local government.
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From the outset, Pi is shown to be a precocious, inquisitive boy, living an idyllic life until the day his father makes the announcement that the family is relocating to Canada. Now sixteen, Pi does not take the news well, but nevertheless complies with his father’s wishes.
The Patel family, consisting of Pi, his father, mother and older brother, say goodbye to their friends and family and board a cargo ship, taking with them all the animals from their zoo, which are to be sold in Canada. En route, the ship encounters a massive storm, forcing a too-late evacuation that results in Pi being the only survivor.
Well, the only human survivor, anyway. In a situation that sounds like the set-up for a joke (but plays as anything but), Pi ends up sharing a lifeboat with perhaps the worst travel companions ever assembled: a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Lost at sea, with only wild animals as his companions, the trials and tribulations Pi is forced to negotiate – with nothing but his wits – occupy the bulk of the film.
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First time-actor Suraj Sharma portrays Pi throughout his ordeal, giving a remarkable, praise-worthy performance that runs the full gamut of human emotion while lending credibility to the tenacity, resourcefulness and MacGyver-like ingenuity his character employs to survive.
Visually, this is Lee’s most accomplished film. Working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, the imagery on display – both in concept and execution – is of a level so seamlessly, sublimely, transcendent it is impossible not to be impressed. Where other films’ stories hit the brakes to make an event of their big reveals, “Pi” foregoes showiness, allowing its visuals to enhance the narrative, rather than the other way around. Many are the moments that you will be staring at something for several seconds before realizing the sheer majesty of what you’re witnessing.
As someone who finds very little to like about modern cinematic 3D presentations, it is with astonishment that I must admit awe and wholeheartedly advise that you see “Life of Pi” in 3D.
This is the 3D we were promised since the format’s inception, and its use here is astonishing.
In staging a story set mostly on water with only one human character for the majority of the running time and large-scale integration of motion capture and computer-generated trickery to realize Sharma’s four-legged co-stars, Lee has raised his already impressively-high bar to new heights. As one of the most versatile filmmakers working today, Lee possesses an almost chameleon-like ability to find the emotional core of his subject matter – regardless of genre – be it gay cowboys, flying martial artists, or a Bengal Tiger named Richard Parker.
The film is bookended by sequences of a grown-up Pi (Irrfan Khan) telling his tale to a writer (Rafe Spall) looking for a good story. While the journalist (and the audience) is left in perpetual ambiguity as to the veracity of the elder Pi’s recollections, one would be hard-pressed to argue that it isn’t a hell of a good yarn, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what we go to the movies for?
Life of Pi movie review
The Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a US civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).
He adopts different styles to fit his new subjects, and while there are certain recurrent themes, among them the disruption of families and young people facing moral and physical challenges, there are no obsessive concerns of the sort once considered a necessity for auteurs. He has a fastidious eye for a great image but he also has a concern for language.
His magnificent new film is a version of Yann Martel's Booker prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, adapted by an American writer, David Magee, whose previous credits were films set in England during the first half of the 20th century, Finding Neverland and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. From its opening scene of animals and birds strutting and preening themselves in a sunlit zoo to the final credits of fish and nautical objects shimmering beneath the sea, the movie has a sense of the mysterious, the magical. This effect is compounded by the hallucinatory 3D, and in tone the film suggests Robinson Crusoe rewritten by Laurence Sterne.
The form is a story within a story within a story. An unnamed Canadian author whom we assume to be Yann Martel himself (Rafe Spall) is told by an Indian he meets that there is a man in Montreal called Pi who has a story that will make you believe in God. He's Piscine Molitor Patel (Irrfan Khan), a philosophy teacher, and he tells the curious story of his own extraordinary life, beginning as the son of a zookeeper in Pondicherry, the French enclave in India that wasn't ceded until 1954.
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The movie's two central characters both obtained their names by comic accident. The deeply serious Piscine (played by Gautam Belur at five, Ayush Tandon at 12 and Suraj Sharma at 16)was named after an uncle's favourite swimming pool, the Piscine Molitor in Paris, but changed his name to the Greek letter and numinous number Pi after fellow schoolboys made jokes about pissing. He later became fascinated by a Bengal tiger in the zoo caught by the English hunter Richard Parker who called him Thirsty. On delivery to the zoo their names were accidently reversed and the tiger became Richard Parker. Was this fate or chance?
Growing up, the ever curious Pi becomes attracted to religion and the meaning of life, a spiritual journey that the film treats with a respectful wit as the boy rejects his father's rationalism and creates a personal amalgam of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. His faith is tested as an adolescent when his father is forced to give up the family zoo, where Pi realises he's been as much a captive as the animals themselves. A Japanese freighter becomes a temporary ark on which the Patel family take the animals to be sold in Canada. But it's struck by a storm as dramatic as anything ever put on the screen, and Pi becomes a combination of Noah, Crusoe, Prospero and Job. Alone above the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific, he's an orphan captaining a lifeboat with only a zebra, a hyena, a female orang-utan and the gigantic Bengal tiger Richard Parker for company.
This is grand adventure on an epic scale, a survival story that takes up half the movie. It's no Peaceable Kingdom like Edward Hicks's charming early 19th-century painting, where the lion sleeps with the lamb. This is a Darwinian place that Pi must learn to command. Using state-of-the-art 3D and digitally created beasts, Lee and his team of technicians make it utterly real, as they do a mysterious island that briefly provides a dangerously seductive haven. The 227 days at sea are a test of physique, mental adaptation and faith, and Suraj Sharma makes Pi's spiritual journey as convincing as his nautical one.
He confronts thirst and starvation, finds a modus vivendi with the fierce tiger, endures and wonders at a mighty storm, a squadron of flying fish, a humpbacked whale, a school of dolphins, a night illuminated by luminous jellyfish. This brave new world is observed by a young Chilean director of photography, appropriately named Claudio Miranda. The movie does for water and the sea what Lawrence of Arabia did for sand and desert, and one thinks of what Alfred Hitchock, who used 3D so imaginatively in his 1954 film of Dial M For Murder, might have done on his wartime Lifeboat had he been given such technical facilities.
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