Repetitious to the Nth Power

Rating: Null/10 (30 April 2000)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.
I saw this film when it first came out at an art house in L.A. It's about a mathematical genius who gets worsening headaches and I got a worsening migraine while watching it; not because of the theme, but because of the use of the same footage no less than 20 or 30 times of the man opening his medicine cabinet, popping some pills, closing his cabinet, ad naseum.
The man is obsessed with finding the Universal Constant,(the film never fully explains what it is), and is not a very likable guy. He wants to be left alone by everyone, and its hard to watch a film about a non-likable guy that wants everyone, including the audience, not to watch him. I kept wanting to honor his request. Naturally, the world won't leave him alone and proceeds to bribe and threaten him into giving the secret info. he hasn't even discovered yet. How they know he is researching this since he speaks to no one is never explained.
As he gets closer to the truth, his headaches worsen, as do the repetitive scenes of him popping pills and injecting himself with a hypo gun. There are many David Lynch-like unexplained visuals that are either too obvious or don't work, like him finding a living brain on the subway tracks and deciding to poke it with a pen for the hell of it.
The ending is appropriately nonsensical. In the last two minutes he decides to take a power drill (apparently he can't afford a gun) and drill a hole in his own head, to end his suffering, or our suffering, it's not explained. I think I've seen every drill-in-the-head movie both in the United States and the Ukraine, and of the seven movies I've seen that end with a man drilling a hole in his own head, I felt that this one was the most anticlimatic.
Pi is a transcendental number that never ends. This movie is not transcendental, yet I thought it would never end.