Life of Pi: or how I learned that to stop caring and pass two hours that I’ll never get back.

Life of Pi is life affirming and shit. There’s the review that everyone wants to read. They got that half right.

This is a very pretty movie. The plot is not very good. Also, there’s surprisingly little tension for a film about a boy trapped in a boat with a tiger. This is largely because the tiger is a metaphor for primal rage and the like. Hell, the twist at the end all but says this. But yeah, the movie can largely be summed up as “ah, who cares about empirical evidence, I like Jesus and all his pals and I think I’m better/more bohemian than you”. It’s like a self help book about “finding yourself”. What people need to learn is that all you need to find yourself is a Japanese exchange student with ties to the dojima clan to life coach you into a better person. If you’re very lucky, something horrible will happen and you’ll become an x-men.

Speaking of X-Men, Life of Pi (along with every other “high brow” film) had a trailer for Salman Rushdie’s new film “Midnight’s Children” which seems to be equally life affirming and Indian (I swear that there’s needs to be a better word for “like slum-dog but not as good”) except that I’m not sure what it’s about. Two kids are born at midnight on the day of India’s independence, but because one’s rich and one’s poor, the doctor switches them to even things out for the new India. According to Indian Science, inheritance is an inherited trait. Anyway, nouveau riche seems to grow up to be a cunt, and nouveau pleb (who has rich people genes, so he’s better?) he...well here’s where I’m not sure. They trailer makes mention of this a lot, but doesn’t actually show it. Apparently, Pleb can give the people around him superpowers. And not like subtle ones, flying and shit. So yeah, Indian x-men.

So at one point Pi gets to an island full of meerkats, which is shaped like a sleeping man, and there’s this lotus flower malarkey that was kinda foreshadowed way at the start so I immediately called dream sequence. But it kinda wasn’t. See, the story pi’s been telling is a delusion full of metaphor he made up to assuage his guilt at having had to kill things (hence the tiger).  Pi is a murderer. He killed a man, and hid it from his family. But hey! That doesn’t change anything! In either story all the peeps end up dead, what does it matter if it was in a shipwreck or by a vengeful teenager! Spiritualism! The worst part is, the actually true story sounds like a much better film. Less pretty obviously, but with, y’know, characters and a plot and tension.

So yeah, don’t watch life of pi. I’ve spoilt it. Or rather, there was a monkey, a tiger, and a blog post, and the tiger posted info about a film on the blog while I sat enthralled by it’s predatory majesty and the monkey didn’t like it.