The Classical Music Guide Forums

Well, I saw it Sunday night.

Was somewhere in the neighborhood of what I expected it to be....our local moviehouse manager put on the marquee "A Visual Miracle".....and I certainly can't argue against it.

Was fine, too, to see one of my fave contemporary directors, Ang Lee, walk off with his second Best Director Oscar; a shame neither of his films won Best Picture, though (and the first wasn't even nominated!).

My only gripe was in the story resolution, where Pi tells his "alternate" story to the documentarians--I simply couldn't get all the monologue in this section.

But, as noted above, very, very impressive visuals.

_________________
If I could tell my mom and dad
That the things we never had
Never mattered we were always ok
Getting ready for Christmas day
--Paul Simon

The incredible thing about both Life Of Pi and Brokeback Mountain is how Ang Lee packs so much into only two hours' time--each seems like a much, much bigger movie.

Movies like that are reatively rare experiences.....Alan Parker's Birdy is another example.

_________________
If I could tell my mom and dad
That the things we never had
Never mattered we were always ok
Getting ready for Christmas day
--Paul Simon

I don't know why there's no reply; it's a truly magnificent movie! Perhaps more than half of it is out at sea with a very small cast of one human actor and several animal ones -- zebra,hyena, orangutan, tiger, flying fish, tuna, sharks. Like the Old Man and the Sea, that in itself is a remarkable achievement.

Once an unbelievable story about a young man managing to tame an extremely hungry, totally cornered, storm-traumatized, tiger has been made believable, the possibility emerges, at the end of the movie, that he was the tiger, the orangutan was his mother, the hyena was a nasty ship cook (played by Depardieu), that it had all been about a desperate human fight for survival in a life boat.

Two different versions, the first of which also involved a magic but dangerous unknown island that emerges out of nowhere when the two last survivors are about to perish at sea. Neither of these stories really mattered as an explanation for the loss of that ship. "Which story do you believe?," he asks at the end