This month, I watched the movie Pi, recommended to me by my roommate, Dan. Pi is the breakout film of Darren Aronofsky. You might remember the name because he also directed Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and the newly released Noah.
Pi was his first film to hit theaters and you can definitely see the flight path of his work.
Pi is shot in high contrast grainy black and white, making everything seem all the more surreal, as though it were a fuzzy memory or a bad dream.
The film follows Max Cohen, a brilliant young man with a mind for numbers. However, Max's passion borders on obsession as he works to find a pattern in the apparent chaos of the stock market, which is somehow connected to a mysterious 216 digit number.
As the movie goes on, Max becomes more unhinged, experiencing nightmarish hallucinations and bouts of paranoid psychosis. While he struggles to keep his head, he is also pursued by people who are interested in using the 216 digit number for their own ends.
Now, I'm not gonna give everything away, but I will say that Pi's ending is way less depressing than some of Aronofsky's other films, so there's that.
I definitely enjoyed this film. Even if some scenes were slow, the pure aesthetic of what was on the screen was enough to keep me entertained.