Pi - 4/5

Told you I mainlined the movies in the past day or two.

Anyway, Pi is Darren Aronofsky’s debut (he also did Requiem for a Dream… and nothing since, though it looks like he’s got some projects lined up in the near term). Pi is edgy, shot in high-contrast, grainy, black and white. It follows Maximillian Cohen, a mathematician observing patterns in nature… or in this case the stock market. His theorem is:

1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

As he gets closer to the solution, there are kabbalists and a wall street analyst firm tring to control him. Or are they? Is it real or is it a paranoid delusion? Cohen is sick… it could all be in his head. You never really know. And that’s part of what makes Pi great.

I really don’t mean to be this nice to so many films in a row, but I guess it’s selection bias - I pretty much only have good movies in my collection, so it’s to be expected. I’ll have to increase my Netflix quota o’ crap.

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