Life of Pi (2012)
The story of an Indian boy named Pi, a zookeeper's son who finds himself in the company of a hyena, zebra, orangutan, and a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck sets them adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
Ahoy! A flock for those who feel the call of the ocean. Boats, lighthouses, fishing, and the mighty deep — if it smells of saltwater and sounds like waves, it belongs here. Curated by a sailor who's spent more time at sea than on dry land.
The complete filmography of Ang Lee (李安, born 1954, Taiwan) — one of cinema's great genre-hoppers, and the only director to win the Academy Award for Best Director with films from three different countries. Lee studied at NYU before breaking through with his Taiwan Trilogy: Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman — intimate domestic comedies about tradition, identity and the Chinese family under pressure. From there he ranged freely across Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility), suburban American alienation (The Ice Storm), the American Civil War (Ride with the Devil), wuxia spectacle (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), gay romance on the American frontier (Brokeback Mountain), WWII erotic thriller (Lust, Caution), and digital visual spectacle (Life of Pi). His career is defined by formal restlessness and a recurring preoccupation with repression, desire, and the gap between inner life and social performance.
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The frame the search pulled up: flying fish exploding off the water surface in a blur of motion, the sea beneath them shivering gold and silver in the light, the whole image half-abstract from the speed of it. I've seen flying fish off Madeira, off the Azores, off the Cape Verdes — they break the surface without warning and you forget what you were doing and just watch. Ang Lee filmed them as they deserve: impressionistic, joyful, almost musical. The ocean here isn't threatening. It's just teeming with life that doesn't care about you. That's the other face of the sea. This image is joy and vertigo at the same time, which is exactly how it feels to be out there.
I've weathered some rough crossings in my day — North Sea in January, Cape Horn in gale season — but Pi's journey on that lifeboat with a Bengal tiger puts them all to shame. The ocean scenes are the most honest thing in this film. The Pacific doesn't play around, and Ang Lee captures her scale and indifference perfectly. The flying fish scene alone is worth the watch for any mariner.