hugh_shanahan Reviews

Pi (1998)

The mathematician as paranoid obsessive migraine sufferer.

[4/10 · 15 March 2000]

This is a pretty disappointing affair, which is a pity given the interesting premise. Max, a mathematician who lives in a tiny apartment in New York which houses a large computer he seems to have built literally out of spit and bale wire is attempting to understand how the stock market works, not to make obscene amounts of money but simply because he finds it a beautiful problem. His life is a pretty dismal affair, as he suffers terribly from migraines, and has no friends apart from his retired supervisor whom he plays Go with. As he gets closer to the answer, all sorts of strange things start happening to his computer and various parties, i.e. a shadowy brokerage company and a very far out sect of Conservative Jews start paying an inordinate amount of interest in his work.

Unfortunately, apart from a reasonable understanding of high school mathematics, a thundering jungle soundtrack and lots of grainy black and white cinematography "Pi" desperately wants to be another Frankenstein movie : a rather condescending attitude that the attempt to understand the world is inherently dangerous and we'd all be much happier if we didn't fill our heads with nasty hard thoughts, to keep the audience interested there should be lots of gratuitous violence, blood and gore (given the budget of this movie, much of this is just plain ridiculous and doesn't in any way move the plot forward). In the second half of the movie, the script-writer really loses faith that the audience can keep up with the hard math and instead of Max's enlightenment becoming more complex and deep, it is irritatingly simplistic. I would consider the ending is a complete cop-out, which any Hollywood script writer would be proud of.

A wasted effort, alas.

Magnolia (1999)

The best movie I've seen this year....

[9/10 · 12 March 2000]

This is a wonderful, rambling story set in the Los Angeles area. Many will see parallels with Robert Altman's "Short Cuts", as both are large long movies with characters that shuffle in and out of each other's life. This should not be seen as a criticism of "Magnolia", I think it's as good as Altman's work and there's clearly a rich vein that can be worked here.

There's not much point in trying to explain the plot, simply because there's so much going on, just when you think you have some part of the story figured out it turns in a completely unexpected fashion. There are great performances by John C. Reilly, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Jason Robards......look there're all great. The soundtrack by Aimee Mann provides a perfect Greek chorus to the story. My one quibble is that Paul Anderson has put in a couple of Supertramp numbers for no reason at all (except that maybe he likes them), but hey nobody's perfect.

Do yourself a favour and go and see this, but make sure you don't drink too much soda pop at the start since this goes on for three hours....

Jirai wo fundara sayônara (1999)

Occasionally moving portrait of a war photographer

[7/10 · 6 March 2000]

This is the story of a young Japanese photographer, Taizo Ichinose, who worked during the conflicts of Vietnam and Cambodia in the early 1970's. At the start of the movie, his only wish is to become a successful war photographer getting his photos on the front page of the New York Times etc.. He becomes increasingly obsessed with taking a photograph of Angkor Wat in North Eastern Cambodia, which was at that time held by the Khmer Rouge, initially as a means of acheiving the above, but it eventually becomes the goal itself. This is based on a true story, and I don't know what parts have been embellished but some of the elements of this movie has been well covered in other movies; battle scar'd war journalists, friendly locals, the outsider, the statutory beautiful Vietnamese woman etc. etc. Having said all that, I still enjoyed this movie, mostly because of Tadanobu Asano, who plays the lead role. He creates an intensely likable character; brave, genuine, curious (though not intrusive), intelligent, optimistic of human nature in the face of so much horror, able to learn and accept the diversity of the world. A hero for our time perhaps ? There's also some lovely shots of Angkor, which could be described as being to Asia what the Pyramids are to Africa.