Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

0416010156 PERSONAL NOTE

Just got done viewing Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, the independent 1998 hit. I had a chance to see it during spring ’99, when Matt, a fellow math tutor at York College, mentioned a screening. Busy with the second semester (we had three: fall, spring and summer) of my senior year, I didn’t go. Hearing a lot of buzz about Pi since then, I’ve regretted missing it.

Finally, after viewing it alone, I wish I’d seen it with someone into weird movies and interested in numbers—we’d have had interesting talks. Loneliness is the price I pay for solitude.

I’m lucky.

Max Cohen, a mathematician holed inside a triple chain-locked and single padlocked apartment, searches for universal patterns. I need to view it again if I’m going to review it, this time taking notes.

But I’m a bit tired now: busy day. I just thought of a neat day to post this if I do write something about this black and white tale of obsessive search. Why black and white? Is mathematics just black and white? But I don’t have time for such questions now. Need sleep.

Sleep! Hah! I bet Max doesn’t sleep, or, like the Reeves character in The Matrix, sleeps on the chair staring at his computer.

Never mind. If I ever ‘publish’ this review… it started here.

Estimated Time of Viewing: 1800. Huh, Max and I use military time.

0416011945 PRESS PLAY

ETV +45 minutes. Lunch lasted longer than expected. Notes taken will be transcribed as time allows.

0417012331 TRANSCRIPTION OF NOTES

Assumptions: 1. Math is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature.

Evidence: Cycling of disease epidemics, caribou populations... the rise and fall of the Nile...
Observation: Stock Market—the universe of numbers that represents the global economy... millions of human hands at work... billions of minds, a vast network... an organism... a natural organism, thus...
HYPOTHESIS: The stock market has patterns... hiding behind the numbers.

Maximillian Cohen, a rclse matHM DAMN IT EXCu my sweatring pleae,but I ned to replae the battrries on this wireless kyboard, im tireed of fighting it1

There we go! Amazing what four fresh AAA parcels of power will do! Please forgive my outburst; it seems like something Max would do, but like him, I really don’t mean it (though he’d never admit it). It’s just that sometimes... little things can really tick me off! So, as I was saying...

Maximillian Cohen, a reclusive mathematician living in The Big Apple’s Chinatown, seeks patterns in the stock market. We never quite find out why he does this. But, published at 16, Ph. D. at 20, the star student of Columbia’s Dr. Sol Robeson, we can give Max some latitude and chalk it up to one of those things math people do. A search for fundamentals, if you will.

So we’re not surprised to find Max’s apartment practically bristling with wall-to-wall computing equipment. Or the micro stock ticker over one of his computers. The windows are shuttered, probably due to Max’s reclusion, leaving everything bathed in the glare of overhead lamps.

The bathroom is left as the only space not bursting with barebone electronics, only because it’s filled with pharmaceuticals and medical paraphernalia. You see, Max has this problem-WOW! I’m feeling a bit woozy, long day with too much biking around and it’s 0418010028 now...

Time to put the computer to sleep. CTRL-S, ALT-F4, select Go... (I renamed the Start... button on my computer), select Power Down... (renamed from Shut Down...) and click on the OK button on the Shut Down Windows window that appears.

0429010018 CONTINUATION

So where was I? Ah yes, Max and his headaches.

In a refrain Max narrates a number of times, he explains how his mother had told him not to look at the sun when he was young. So at six, he did.

I stared at the sun at seven. Stupid. A contest with my younger brother—let’s see who can stare the longest. I still remember the tears streaming down my face, and the fiery afterimage when I finally closed my eyes. It left us with thick glasses.

It left Max with massive periodic migraines. Attacks overwhelm him, warning him through a twitching arm before bursting on him, often leaving him mewling on the floor with nosebleeds. In one of his narratives, Max clinically recounts the treatments he has tried so far: beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, violent exercise, adrenaline injections, high-dose Ibuprofen, marijuana, acupuncture, homeopathics, steroids, caffeine, Percodan…. The film is punctuated by short three-segment refrains of Max’s hand twisting a bottle cap, popping pills into his palm, and slamming them into his mouth, marking yet another migraine attack.

As Max comments at one point about his work, No results… no results…

So one day Lenny Meyer runs into Max at a coffee shop and strikes up a conversation. We eventually learn that Lenny’s a caballist, a numerologist searching for esoteric messages in the Torah. While demonstrating some numerical curiosities, he gets Max thinking on track of the mathematical concept known as the Golden Ratio. Max codes this idea into his computer program, Euclid, which predicts a massive stock market crash before spitting out a number and crashing.

Sol seems interested in that number, but Max had thrown away the printout. Things move quickly. The market does crash. It turns out Lenny’s group is looking for a 216 digit number. And Lancet-Percy (LP), the Wall Street firm Max has been assiduously avoiding attempts to tempt him with a powerful top-secret microchip. But a migraine attack cuts that meeting short.

Max eventually accepts the LP’s offer and takes the chip. Looking at some Torah decoding software he got from Lenny, his computer gets fried again after spitting out a number.

This number seems to be a touchstone of a greater truth, judging by the number of groups scampering to get it from Max. Agents from LP, as well as members of Lenny’s group of Hasidic Jews want to get their hands on the number, which means getting their hands on Max. If Max can avoid them, perhaps, perhaps he can figure out how to cure himself…

CTRL-S ALT-F4 Go... Power Down... OK.

0502011453 TRANSCRIPTION OF CONVERSATION

For a while, no one seems to know or wants to tell Max what the number he seeks means. After he badgers Sol for a while, Sol talks.

Sol: Certain problems cause computers to get stuck in a particular loop. The loop leads to a meltdown. But just before the crash, they become aware of their structure. The computer has a sense of its own silicon nature.
Max: Studying the pattern made Euclid conscious of itself. Right before it died, it spit out the number. That consciousness is the number?
Sol: No. no, it’s a nasty bug!
Max: It’s more!
Sol: It’s a dead end. There’s nothing there!
Sol: No. no, it’s a nasty bug!
Max: It’s a door, Sol, it’s a door!
Sol: A door at the front of a cliff. You’re driving yourself over the edge of a cliff! You need to stop!
Max: You were afraid of it. That’s why you quit.
Sol: Max, I got burned! It caused my stroke.
Max: That’s bullshit! It’s mathematics! Numbers… ideas! Mathematicians are supposed to go out to the edge! You taught me that!
Sol: There’s more to life than mathematics.

The conversation captures the essence of Pi. Sol, the veteran warrior who has stormed the mighty gates of knowledge and failed, tries to impart his wisdom to young hotheaded Max. As is so often the way of brash youth, Max rarely heeds the words of his mentor.

0506010213 PERSONAL NOTE

Perused reviews of a book I eventually want to read: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. From what I’ve read, readers of the book might be interested to know Sol is in a manner a mathematical version of that book’s narrator, Phaedrus, whose search for the nature of reality once drove him insane.

Sol calls Max his Icarus. Apparently, once upon a while, Sol too was an Icarus, before he gave up on a similar search for patterns in the number pi. So Pi poses an interesting question. The Flight of Icarus has been seen by some as signifying mankind’s search for knowledge (see Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge). Will there always be a toll to pay on the path to wisdom? Will the wax on Mankind’s wings melt if they get too close to the sun of surety? Must the pursuit of knowledge always be accompanied by pillars of salt and Faustian bargains?

That tidbit is all I have for now. Term paper due Monday, have spent two nights at school this week. I’m sure Max has spent many a night feverishly searching for the answers he desires. Night! His room is always in perpetual night with the shades tightly drawn and the crowd of computer equipment eclipsing the feeble light from the light bulb. Sleep to him is probably either a vague memory or a vexing distraction... but I must sleep!

CTRL-S ALT-F4 Go... Power Down... OK.

0524011924 MISCELLANY

In the acting department, Sean Gullette (Requiem For a Dream) does a creditable job portraying Max. His manic, focused stare only seems to soften, ever so slightly, in presence of Sol, or Devi, his neighbor. When sitting down, he has a way of peering up through hooded eyes that gives me the creeps.

Mark Margolis (from the awful 1492: Conquest of Paradise), playing Sol, mangles his way through his dialogue. It’s as if someone decided along the way that professors should always have strange accents.

Ben Shenkman (Joe Gould’s Secret) plays Lenny Meyer as a cheery, happy fellow who can be a bit pushy at times. He must be perpetually high on his Torah number crunching, for surely he can’t be doing blow on the side, even though it is New York… But Shenkman’s overplaying pales next to Pamela Hart’s as the suave oily LP agent.

The camera does some beautiful work, capturing various structures in dynamic mathematical systems, such as cream dissolving in coffee, swirling smoke, or wavelets lapping at a beach. As mentioned in the introduction, the film unrolls in black and white—switching between gritty and high contrast. While it might be a statement on the nature of mathematics, this captures Max’s world in all its paranoia. Sinister faces materialize into the light from pools of darkness. Shadows vie with feeble light in the Stygian gloom of Max’s room.

In his walks outside, Max is often just a head filling up the screen while the narrative rolls, with scenery streaming by in the background. Chase scenes are snapped with handheld cameras. During his disorienting hallucinations, the camera stays focused on Max while the surroundings lurch and sway.

The soundtrack is a definite plus for Pi. The electronica specially works synergistically with the visuals during Max’s fits to leave viewers disturbed to some extent with its screeching mechanical whines and squeals and shrill whistles.

0611010104 PERSONAL REACTION

So. An indie cult classic. A film I should have liked. And yes, I enjoyed parts. The soundtrack combining with the black and white lines of pain crawling across convulsing Max’s face makes viewers wince in sympathetic pain. The scene near the ending with Max at the mirror will also settle in the minds of viewers like a dread weight. His apartment is an architectural masterpiece in claustrophobia.

But. Look, I’m no filmmaker, unless you count that time I forgot to turn off the video camera and captured glorious footage of grass and my innocent shins. But there should be a law in the books somewhere stating that waving handhelds in busy NYC streets, mixing jagged editing with an often jangling soundtrack does not a good indie film make, even if done in anti-establishment black and white along with a chic word-of-mouth-only publicity campaign.

Getting down to specifics, there’s the subplot with Marcy of Lancet-Percy (motto: 86% accuracy [only God is Perfect]). She starts out as an unwanted intrusion into Max’s life. After a while, I was starting to think that her subplot was an intrusion—surely the writers could’ve found a simpler and less annoying way to get Max a powerful computer chip. Swallowing the idea of Wall Street types roughhousing Max on the open streets is as easy as believing Bush when he yammers about saving the environment. An since they’re in the film anyway, where are the Wall Street boys at the end of the film? They know Max’s address—why don’t they show up? And why am I wondering this when I should be thinking about the nature of the number Max found?

And speaking of the number, what’s the big deal with 216 digits? Max gives a speech to the Hasidic Z. Z. Top lookalike tryouts about how it’s not the numbers that matter, but what’s between the numbers, the syntax. Very pretty. But viewers are kept in the same dark as the great bearded ones about how Max decodes and uses the number. And talking about Max’s talking, I’m sure that there exists a fundamental movie theory that states that even if the script calls for a mumbling character, the viewers must be able to hear and decipher those mumbles even if they don’t possess the hearing of a Giant Indian fruit bat.

Finally, I find it wholly implausible that Max, immersed in numbers every picosecond, hadn’t come up with the Golden Ratio insight that puts him on track of the magic number prior to meeting Lenny. Max evidently visits the coffee house regularly. He must have watched the cream swirl in his coffee countless times. Max is a mathematician! To claim that he never thought about the Golden Ratio is like talking of the ideal politician who never lies, or creatively bends the truth around the obstacles on the campaign/reelection trail, as it’s called in the business. It just does not happen!

My best recommendation is to watch Pi with a like-minded group, and discuss it right after watching. Perhaps you’ll continue to discuss it… great! Or you might find yourself moving on to better things. Ah, maybe I’m being grumpy since I re-watched this after the brilliant Das Boot. Perhaps I’d have been more supportive had I watched this following After Glow. The truth as I see it is that this Pi in the sky can’t stand on its own feet, oh wait, is that what they mean by mixed metaphors? It doesn’t deserve the flying colors most people give it.

CTRL-S ALT-F4 Go... Power Down... OK.

0627012042 OTHERS PI-BEARERS

Wow, I left this real late!

Most of the epinionauts reviewing Pi gave it high marks. I have a feeling that this can be chalked up to self-selected reviewing: mainly those who liked it spent the time reviewing it… such as the self-confessed geek janesbit1 (07/04/00). However, scott_25 (06/25/00) thinks that this low budget movie succeeded since it had big ideas.

Quite a number of epinionauts, such as knix (07/21/00) mention that viewers are dragged into Max’s paranoia. Many praise Gullette’s performance, such as snakeayez (06/12/00), who calls Gullette a painful pleasure to watch. The migraine scenes impressed scoresian (07/15/99), who thinks viewers can feel Max’s pain. Startlingly, kwee (07/01/00), after writing about the jarring images made from mundane subjects, suggests that the movie can be experienced better while in pain! And now that I think of it, it starts to make some sense.

wokelstein (03/19/00), mentioning Kafka and Scorsese in his review, thinks that this would be perfect film to demonstrate cinematic techniques to a film class. For some techniques, I can agree. max_dobberstein (09/30/99) makes the excellent point that the steady camera focused on Max with his surroundings swaying around him portrays Max’s single-minded pursuit.

If you’re wondering about the Fibonacci sequence briefly mentioned by Max, take a look at rendored’s (11/17/00) offbeat epinion, where he claims that the film is about him.

I find in travissk (04/29/01) a brother in arms… someone whose thoughts on the film I’ve mostly mirrored here. In a premium putdown, mike_bracken (02/05/01) complains that after the first half hour, the recurring footage of Max’s attacks ended up giving him a headache! fez_monkey (07/07/00) asserts that the instant popularity of Pi tells of the shallowness of a film world that auto-worships anything non-Hollywood. I wouldn’t go that far. Perhaps the expectation of something beyond the ordinary creates a sense of insecurity in viewers who find themselves unable to enjoy an indie release—they blame themselves rather than the release.

Reading over the epinions present, many epinionauts connect Max’s ability with numbers to his staring at the sun when six years old. I don't see the connection. Given the state of competitive living known as keeping up with the Joneses (and the Pierres and Chois and Patels and…), if the experts declared a connection existed between staring at the sun and extraordinary mathematical aptitude, you can bet your TI-83+ that there’d be parents stapling their kids’ eyelids to their foreheads and tipping their heads up to the sun.

CTRL-S ALT-F4 Go... Power Down... OK.

0627012337 TRANSCRIPTION OF CONVERSATION

Sol: Our world can’t be summed up by math.
Max: Though we’re not sophisticated enough to be aware of it, there is a pattern.
Sol: This is insanity!
Max: Or maybe this is genius!

... and that I think may be the problem with this movie: I don’t feel it’s insane, but I can’t be convinced that it’s genius either. Perhaps I’m not sophisticated enough to understand it, to perceive the patterns, to distinguish the signal from the noise. Aronofsky’s Pi is spoiled because its lurid world of math lacks the very thing Max really wants to find… something we will call, for the want of a better word… soul.

0628011514 TIMESTAMP: Press Enter.

CTRL-S ALT-F4 Go... Power Down... OK.

0910012211

A trio of excellent epinions on Pi has been released by alex_itis (09/03/01), artbyjude (09/08/01), and ticktockman (08/29/01) which contain many interesting details on the details and history behind the making of this film.

Newcomer Network

alex_itis
http://www.epinions.com/content_39444909700
artbyjude
http://www.epinions.com/content_40181075588
mike_bracken
http://www.epinions.com/content_8227360388
ticktockman
http://www.epinions.com/content_38523211396

t-edication

This one goes out to KCH, mathemagician.

t-mark

I don’t think I’ll be trying too many movie reviews. For one thing, I don’t get to watch all that many movies. But now and then, I’ll see something that seems enough off the beaten track to write about. Please let me know how I’m doing.

Seen a movie that blew your socks away? Or one that just blew? Why not write and ring in the praises or warn the world about it? If you're a non-epinions member reading this, please consider joining this wonderful community of movie reviewers just like you!

I hope you enjoyed the time you spent in getting to this point of my analysis. Please remember to rate this review.

Without your comments, this epinion is unfinished.

04.16.01- 04.18, 04.29, 05.02, 05.06, 05.24, 06.11, 06.26-8
08.10.01
Update as noted
Changed title. Previous title: "Aronofsky Miscooks His Pi in the Sky? Needs More Filling"

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older
Special Effects: Well at least you can't see the strings