Life is Just a Slice of Pi by Bruce Cantwell Darren Aranofsky disguises his low budget by using such grainy, high contrast black & white photography and quick cuts that by the time you can figure out what you're looking at, you're...trying to figure out what you're looking at. Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a mathematics wiz who thinks that all of life's secrets (and therefore the secrets of the New York Stock Exchange) lie in number theory. In other words: Max is a black or white kind of guy. When Max was a lad of six, we learn, he stared at the sun and before screwing up his vision, experienced a moment of unexpressible clarity. That moment drives his obsession to run numbers on the Frankenstein macro computer that has swallowed most of his Chinatown living space. The other residual effect of the eye damage are a series of paralyzing migraine headaches. A recluse, the only one Max willingly talks to is his mentor, Pi theorist Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis). In a telling moment, Sol relates a story of how Archimedes' wife helped the genius relax enough to come to a moment of clarity. Max is too obsessed to pick up on the moral. Among the people who want to talk to Max are Lenny (Ben Shenkman) the friendly Hassidic and Marcy Dawson (Pamela Hart), a representative of an investment firm who is very very interested in his stock market hypotheses. The story threads fray before the conclusion, but since this is more of an excercise in style than storytelling, that isn't a huge negative. Pi is worth seeing for its look, for its oddball subject and for its originality.

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