And so we reach the end of another season and it's time for our AGM. We generally try to choose a film that is going to be popular and this year our choice is Ang Lee's Life of Pi.
Here are my notes:
Life of Pi
One of the costly elements of the budget was Lee’s decision to film in 3D. He explained this choice in an interview:
"I thought this was a pretty impossible movie to make technically. It's so expensive for what it is. You sort of have to disguise a philosophical book as an adventure story. I thought of 3-D half a year before Avatar was on the screen. I thought water, with its transparency and reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3-D, would create a new theatrical experience and maybe the audience or the studio would open up their minds a little bit to accept something different."
“A
3D adaptation of a supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Ang Lee's Life of Pi achieves the near impossible—it's an astonishing
technical achievement that's also emotionally rewarding.”
Here's the trailer:
Here are my notes:
Life of Pi
USA 2012 127
minutes
Director: Ang
Lee
Starring: Suraj Sharma, Tabu,
Gerard Depardieu and Rafe Spall
Awards and Nominations
- Won
four Oscars including Best Director and Cinematography, and nominations
for seven further Oscars including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay
- Two
Golden Globe nominations including Best Film and Best Directior
- A
further 52 wins and 70 nominations
“[Ang Lee’s]
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.”
Philip
French
The film is based on
the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, a fanatasy about an Indian boy called
Piscine (“Pi”) Patel who survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on
a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker as
his companion. The book became a global
best-seller – although many of its readers must have thought it was unfilmable.
Several other
directors had planned to direct the film before Ang Lee took on the project. The initial plan was for M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) to direct, but after he
chose to direct Lady in the Water,
the studio discussed the project with Alonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban and Gravity). He passed on the opportunity in order to
direct Children of Men, and there
were subsequently discussions with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie and Alien Resurrection),
who began work on his own screenplay but made no further progress. In 2009 Fox Pictures finally hired Ang Lee to
direct, and although the projected budget of $120 million caused a further
delay, filming finally started in January 2011.
One of the costly elements of the budget was Lee’s decision to film in 3D. He explained this choice in an interview:
"I thought this was a pretty impossible movie to make technically. It's so expensive for what it is. You sort of have to disguise a philosophical book as an adventure story. I thought of 3-D half a year before Avatar was on the screen. I thought water, with its transparency and reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3-D, would create a new theatrical experience and maybe the audience or the studio would open up their minds a little bit to accept something different."
The film opened to
widespread critical acclaim, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes stating:
Here's the trailer:
