Must see films.

Ah, the idiot box, our childhood companion/minder let us speak of your marvellous ways and bask in your shiny technicolour.
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Matt
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Post by Matt » Fri Mar 09, 2007 1:51 am

Pi (1998)
Max is a genius mathematician who's built a supercomputer at home that provides something that can be understood as a key for understanding all existence. Representatives both from a Hasidic cabalistic sect and high-powered Wall Street firm hear of that secret and attempt to seduce him. Written by Anonymous

The mathematician Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) is tormented by a severe migraine since he was a kid, and he uses many pills to reduce his painful headaches. He is a lonely man, and his only friend is his former professor Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis). Max has the following assumptions, which rules his life: (1) Mathematics is the language of nature; (2) Everything around us can be represented and understood from numbers; (3) If you graph the numbers in any systems, patterns emerge. Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature. Based on these principles, Max is trying to figure out a system to predict the behavior of the stock market. Due to his research, Max is chased by a Wall Street company with obvious interest in the results of his studies, and by an orthodox Jew follower of the Torah, who believes that this long string of numbers is a code sent from God. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

In Manhattan, behind six locks, lives Max Cohen, a mathematician and computer whiz. Since staring at the sun at age six, he's had terrible headaches; plus, he can't abide human contact except with an aging professor, and he's obsessed with finding numeric patterns. His current obsession is the stock market; his theories bring him to the attention of Wall Street traders. He also keeps running into Lenny, a fast-talking Hasidic who fronts for a cabal that wants to rediscover long-lost mathematical mysteries in the Torah. Neither group is benign, and they pursue Max as his hallucinations and headaches worsen. Does nature offer any solutions? Can Max find them?
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Barton Fink
In 1941, New York intellectual playwright Barton Fink comes to Hollywood to write a Wallace Beery wrestling picture. Staying in the eerie Hotel Earle, Barton develops severe writer's block. His neighbor, jovial insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, tries to help, but Barton continues to struggle as a bizarre sequence of events distracts him even further from his task. Written by Scott Renshaw {as.idc@forsythe.stanford.edu}

Set in 1941, a newly successful New York playwright accepts an offer to write movie scripts in LA, and finds himself with writer's block when required to do a B-movie wrestling script, the only relief coming from a traveling salesman living next door. Written by Ed Sutton {esutton@mindspring.com}

Barton Fink (John Turturro) is a troubled New York playwright obsessed with bringing his new idea of "Theater of the Common Man" to the producers he loves to hate. After his first budding success his agent convinces him to travel to Los Angeles to write for Capital Pictures. When he arrives he checks into the dark Hotel Earle and meets with Capital Pictures President Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), who tells him of the movie he's writing: a B-Movie wrestling picture for Wallace Beery. Fink travels back to his hotel room to begin, but when he arrives he types one sentence and then falls into the horror of writer's block. He tries getting help from his neighbor, "Common Man" Charlie Meadows (John Goodman); famed writer Mayhew (John Mahoney); Mayhew's girlfriend Audrey (Judy Davis) and producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub). But as Fink drifts further away from his script strange things start happening, and eventually two detectives show up at his door
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Both films are unfortunately laden with Jews (joke), but it's ok. They're great films and the Cohen Bros can't half write.

Out of these two, I really enjoyed Pi more than Fink. I thought being in black and white would put me off, but it didn't. I was pretty glued to my seat. A very interesting prospect, it was. As for Barton Fink, I was struggling to understand what the fuck was going on. But by the end of the film I started to realise it wasn't supposed to just make sense, a lot was left to your imagination. I personally got a kind of message about holocaustic Europe, different characters being certain social groups of the era. I'd ahve to watch it again to clarify that some more.

Both can be found of naughty pirate sites. These'd be hard to find in rental stores.
Last edited by Matt on Fri Mar 09, 2007 1:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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