Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” is a lavish reminder that film nowadays is sometimes not film at all, but rather a rapidly evolving digital art form. Adapted from a best-selling novel by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, “Life of Pi” tells the story of a zookeeper’s son from the Indian city of Pondicherry who finds himself, after a terrible shipwreck, sharing a lifeboat with a large and hungry Bengal tiger. The young man’s name, Pi, turns out to be short for piscine (the French word for swimming pool), but given the movie’s blend of fuzzy, inclusive spiritualism and special-effects virtuosity, it might equally stand for piety or pixel.
“Life of Pi,” which will be shown in 3-D, is an unusual opening-night choice both for its crowd-pleasing sincerity and for its sheer visual grandeur. The screens in the Walter Reade Theater and Alice Tully Hall are gratifyingly large, but in recent years they have rarely been given over to major-studio spectacles of this scale. (“Life of Pi” is to be released by 20th Century Fox in November.)
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