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<\/a>Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. <\/strong> <\/p>\nJonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. <\/em> <\/p>\n
Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net<\/a>. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim<\/a>, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com\/ReThinkReviews<\/a>. ReThink Reviews’ theme song is by Restavrant<\/a>. <\/p>\n
Life of Pi<\/strong><\/p>\n
The film \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 is directed by Ang Lee and is based on the award-winning, best-selling 2001 book of the same name by Yann Martel about an Indian teenager named Pi who spends 227 days stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. That\u2019s pretty much the whole story, and since it\u2019s being told in flashback by an adult Pi, you know that Pi survives. But Pi\u2019s journey is supposedly more than just a tale of survival, since, as Pi tells an inquisitive writer, it\u2019s a story that will make you believe in God. That would be quite an accomplishment since first, I don\u2019t believe in God, and second, \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 strikes me as a story that doesn\u2019t prove the existence of God, but actually argues the exact opposite.<\/p>\n
Irrfan Khan plays the adult Pi who now lives in Canada with his family and is telling his story to a struggling writer, played by Rafe Spall. Pi tells the writer about his childhood growing up in Pondicherry, India, where he became interested in Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, and his dad owned a zoo, which included a tiger named Richard Parker. Pi\u2019s dad decides to move the family and sell off the zoo\u2019s animals, but the ship they\u2019re taking to Canada sinks in a storm, leaving a teenage Pi (played by first-time actor Suraj Sharma) on a lifeboat with several animals, including Richard Parker.<\/p>\n
Thus begins a tale of survival, with Pi trying to figure out how to coexist with Richard Parker while attempting to keep both of them alive through rough seas, starvation, dehydration, encounters with marine life, and perhaps a bit of magic realism. All this is done with beautiful computer-generated 3D imagery, including state-of-the-art technology melding real and CG tigers that I found, for the most part, to be totally believable.<\/p>\n
With \u2018Life of Pi\u2019\u2019s promises of spiritual discovery, its main character being a half-naked Indian boy who hangs out with a tiger, the fact that the book\u2019s author is a white Canadian man, and its popularity amongst western New Age readers, one might expect \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 to traffic in the sort of orientalist fetishism of eastern religions that has become fashionable along with yoga and meditation. But for better and worse, \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 isn\u2019t that specific, since with just a few adjustments, it seems like Pi and his family could come from any country with zoos.<\/p>\n
However, this lack of specificity complicates the film\u2019s central theme that Pi\u2019s story is one that will make you believe in God. \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 never digs in to the truly messy aspects of religion, like the contradictions between Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam that would make it hard for Pi to harmoniously believe in all three. Are the gods of these religions supposed to be the same one, and why would he sink a boat full of innocent people and animals? Isn\u2019t the natural beauty Pi witnesses while at sea, like a school of flying fish and blooms of bioluminescent algae, better explained by science and evolution than the creative whims of a magic sky monster? And if mass drownings don\u2019t complicate the notion of a benevolent, unifying God, there\u2019s a twist near the end that if anything, would confirm that if there is a God in control, he\u2019s a cruel, sadistic jerk.<\/p>\n
Maybe the book of \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 does a better job of hitting the right faith buttons, and this isn\u2019t to say that \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 is even a bad movie. It\u2019s visually interesting to watch, the performances are good, I never knew what would happen next (other than Pi surviving), and I think it\u2019s great that a major studio threw a big budget behind a movie with a weird story like this with no major stars. But in the end, \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence of God and why he seems to enjoy inflicting so much suffering and death on unoffending humans. In the end, \u2018Life of Pi\u2019 not only doesn\u2019t answer any of religion\u2019s big questions, it doesn\u2019t even ask them.<\/p>\n
\u2018Life of Pi\u2019 is rated PG and is in theaters now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today. Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films. Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com\/user\/jsjkim, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rethink-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32797"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32797\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32819,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32797\/revisions\/32819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}