Life of Pi (2012)

Ang Lee directed this film based on the 2001Canadian fantasy adventure novel of the same name by Yann Martel, which won the Booker Prize. Life of Pi  is not the kind of book one might typically expect to be adapted to a big budget film, its structured kind of odd, and the protagonist is an Indian boy, and there are a lot of animals, and the boy becomes lost at sea with some of them, and one of them is a tiger. The film can be appreciated in a few ways, one of which is as a giant trick on the audience, but I'm going to avoid going into that in any detail save to say the film is kind of a mediation on story telling and the nature of truth. The movies got some great atypical visuals too it and (like the last film I reviewed Five Easy Pieces) it took it a while to get me, but it sure got me. Darned if I can think of another film like it. ***1/2