Talk:Pi (film)

message: I'm not sure, but there is written about hallucinations, and headaches. I'm a migrenic myself, and I find the hallucianations in this movie, similar to the hallucinations during very strong migraine strike.
I would change this little fragment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.201.36.36 (talk • contribs) 15:14, 14 July 2009
:Max's medication list is consistent with migraines.  In particular, he lists caffergot suppositories.
2001:470:8917:9:6CBE:6D1A:4EDA:E875 (talk) 17:32, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: They are cluster headaches, as the article states. Aronofsky himself said they were based on a friend's experiences with cluster headaches, which can suicidally (literally) worse than migraines. As for medications, there is an intersection of treatments for both, such as immediate inhalation of pure oxygen. This link discusses both cluster headaches and their (infernal) inspiration in the movie: www.vice.com/en_us/article/gvvenq/the-worst-pain-clusterheads-have-headaches-that-feel-like-a-hand-in-their-brains JohndanR (talk) 06:49, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Migraine 

message: I have not seen this film, nor have I read much about it, but I saw the number 216, and I remembered that number as a third power. It is 6 raised to the 3rd power... 6*6*6... three sixes... 666... the number of the beast... . I wonder if this is just a coincidence? 68.200.98.166 (talk) 00:33, 7 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Coincidence?  Helll no!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.113.32.63 (talk) 06:42, 2 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The number 216 

message: I firmly believe the title of this page should be π (film). That is, after all, the true title of the film. Does anybody know how to change a page title? Thanks! Armonkny (talk) 06:51, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page Title - π 

message: While Max and Sol play Go, Aronofsky deliberately focuses on the placement of stones by each player.  Sol places stones in the preferred manner of veteran Go players using his fore and middle finger whereas Max places stones like you would an American Checkers piece.  Perhaps this has deeper implications about how Aronofsky feels about the conversation at hand or characters at large.  I'm not one to decide, perhaps Wikipedia is not the medium to discuss the topic at all.  I figured since the Go wiki page devoted a small blurb about how to "correctly" place stones, it might be of some relevance in the description here.
Cheers.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.255.143.16 (talk) 23:56, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: This was discussed before here.--– sampi (talk•contrib•email) 19:13, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section on Go 

message: ..that someone should fix
in the last plot paragraph it says "Later, when a girl with a calculator comes to the apartment asking math problems" -- I think the little girl (his neighbour, not just one random kid) approaches MAX in the park..  [A] 10:19, 20 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  little mistake 

message: I dispute this statement because it's not even really true.  There's no evidence to suggest Max is in love with Devi or that he even likes her (he barely makes eye contact with her).  He's a socially awkward person around pretty much everyone in the film and that's common behavior among genius minds.  I'm going to delete this, unless someone objects...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.5.76.24 (talk) 03:35, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Devi, Max's friendly neighbor with whom he is in love." 

message: "Like most of Aronofsky's films, Pi centers on a protagonist whose obsessive pursuit of ideas leads to severely self-destructive behavior. However, the strong psychosexual elements of the director's later work are not present."
I feel like these two sentences are overkill. It could be argued that the first sentence does not apply to 'most' of his films. And other than Black Swan, which of his films is psychosexual?!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Colin496 (talk • contribs) 05:40, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aronofsky's Films... 

message: The article quotes Berardinelli as saying the film "Pi" should be rated 3.1415.  The quote's reference (Berardinelli, James, "π (Pi)," see http://www.reelviews.net/movies/p/pi.html ) actually states that the rating is "3.1416," which is the properly rounded value of pi to four decimal place.  Noah Spamoli (talk) 03:32, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: So fix this. :) Debresser (talk) 16:35, 29 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Berardinelli Misquoted 

message: Instead of writing "... as well as extreme paranoia, hallucinations, and social anxiety disorder", one could simply write "... and suffers from paranoid schizophrenia"  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Felix Tritschler (talk • contribs) 18:16, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: While this was an old request, I admit having wondered this myself.  However, none of the existing sources discuss the movie in the context of psychosis or schizophrenia.  While the Combustible Celluloid reference does mention schizophrenia, it is in another context, that of movie making, in an interview with the director.  No matter how obvious, to add this conclusion we'd have to also find a supporting source.  It could even go in the Themes section if we can support it with sources, but not otherwise.  That said, a lot of the existing article is not well referenced.  —PaleoNeonate - 21:14, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paranoid schizophrenia 

message: The digits of pi are wrong. — Preceding unsigned comment added by OosakaNoOusama (talk • contribs) 
:Which digits and how are they wrong? Jim1138 (talk) 07:31, 23 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Title clip is wrong 

message: Below are a few links to interviews with Aronofsky where he talks about this particular element of the movie. It might be good to include how he drew from his own experiences with Judaism and in Israel and how seriously he took the subject's presence in Pi. ...But the links look like mirrors of long-dead sites and magazines which conducted interviews when he was still a smalltimer. I can't in good conscience add a link to Tripod or Myvideostore.com, but if anyone can find better sources... 
*interview
*interview
--Rhododendrites (talk) 03:42, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kabbalah 

message: Those of you ever saw Fox's 2012-2013 Touch (TV series), with Kiefer Sutherland and Danny Glover, may recall its similar premise of competing conspiracies seeking a mentally handicapped math savant with a world-changing secret; in this case, an autistic 11-year-old boy under his widowed father's care. – •Raven  .talk 05:50, 13 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''Touch'' (TV series) 

message: It's a story that seems kind of lost to time now but maybe is still interesting to people. But when this film came out it it had a pretty nice looking interactive website and the film makers were lauded for how they were using the internet to market the film. The Blair Witch Project website was another from the same time that was being praised for this - like it was this huge deal, these small films using the cheap internet to promote themselves successfully. Anyway, the funny thing with the Pi website is that after not too long it was  discovered that the entire designed was plagiarised, just completely ripped from another site. Basically they just changed the images and the text. And that became a big story. And the other interesting thing is the site designer, the guy who ripped it off, was the star of Pi. He later ended up apologizing, admitting he did wrong. 123.3.87.17 (talk) 21:20, 24 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Website Plagiarism When It Came Out 

message: I have strong doubts that the sequence with the wall street agents and the Rabbis is suggested to be real in the movie. It seems to me that they could just be part of Max' hallucinations as it is frequently suggested that he has very sophisticated hallucinations, for instance when he believes to be touching a brain on the floor in the metro.
I also doubt that Max survives the drilling of his head given the ugly splashing of blood that emerges. The final scene could be a possible alternative ending. 
If there is evidence, for instance from interviews with the director, for the hypothesis that all these elements are considered to be real, it should be provided.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.130.29.155 (talk) 20:53, 22 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plot Summary assumes everything is real 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for speedy deletion:
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You can see the reasons for deletion at the file description pages linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 03:52, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commons files used on this page or its Wikidata item have been nominated for speedy deletion 

message: 1. Linking to a medical journal about schizophrenia doesn't make the case that this film has schizophrenia as a theme. A citation for this should come from the film's creator, or a reputable analysis of the film.
2. Speculation about which events were diagetically real (and not hallucinations) should not be be used to support schizophrenia as a theme. Schizophrenia is a specific mental illness with a whole host of symptoms and specific behaviors. Hallucinations and vivid dreams, someone seeming to be there one moment and gone the next, these are all phenomena with multiple explanations. 
3. The visual language of Pi doesn't leave much ambiguity about which events are diagetically real and which aren't. Even deep into the film, hallucinatory or dreamed moments are distinctly fantastical (a disembodied brain on the subway steps that summons a train when prodded with a pen). Hallucinated moments are also proximal in time to Max's episodes
4. The things max goes through are corroborated by reliable parties. Max's one-time mentor very probably approached the same breakthrough Max makes in this film, and believes it was the cause of his stroke. It is implied that returning to the pursuit is what finally killed him. What this tells us is that in the world of Pi, this number, this idea, whatever it is, actually is dangerous to the mind. Max appears to handle it a little differently, probably because of his prior exposure to some kind of mathematical clarity from his sun-staring episode as a child, which leads me to...
5. If Max had Schizophrenia, it would have been identified by the numerous doctors and psychologists he's had to see in order to get the numerous prescriptions he's constantly cycling through. Max is a thoroughly examined person. He's past the age where most schizophrenics have had the initial onset of the condition.
6. The film already gives us a cause for the way Max is. He stared into the sun as a child, and saw the spiral. He updated his program after talking to Kabbalists, the computer became slightly self-aware (as implied by Sol) and the number it spat out after that is the key to some truth too profound for the human brain, and the closer Max gets to the nature of what he glimpsed that day as a child, the more his mind recoils in horror. It may be pure science-fiction mysticism, but film analysis is not meant to find more realistic explanations for on-screen events than the movie offers. It would be more realistic for the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be a hallucination by a human Gandalf, but that's not how speculative fiction works. It is necessary to analyze a story on its own terms. 
7. Looking at the film as a series of delusions and hallucinations makes it more boring. Any film in the world can be speculated to be a dream or a hallucination. Taking anything that seems magical or special and dismissing it as, "I guess he was just crazy" makes it pointless to analyze films at all. The Wedding Planner could have bee J-Lo's dream for all we know. 
I'm picking nits here, but the section opened with "strongly suggests". It's not impossible that Max could be intended to have schizophrenia, but with this amount of evidence, you could say the same thing about almost any other character in any movie who daydreams. It is not a strong suggestion. It is a possibility, and a weak one at that. Unless Aronofsky or someone else has come forward to say Max has schizophrenia, I hope the other people who keep track of this page will agree with my removal of the section.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.192.204.44 (talk) 20:22, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Better source needed to make the claim that the film "strongly suggests" Max is paranoid schizophrenic  

message: Is there a reliable source that supports the article's claim that the procedure with the drill is trepanning, as opposed to, say, lobotomy or cingulotomy? Ibadibam (talk) 19:16, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Trepanning 

message: The 'Release' section originally claimed that this was the "first ever film to legally be made available for download on the Internet". The provided source did not remotely make reference to this and (needless to say) failed verification. Finding the claim quite interesting, I went hunting for a legitimate source, and found this WSJ article stating that Pi was "the first film sold by download". Digging a little deeper, I found a book stating that "SightSound [sold the] first movie on [the] Internet as PPV (Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, 1998)", and a NYT article stating that Pi was streamed "in a pay-per-view window through Sightsound.com". 
As it stands, the WP article lists all three sources and states that "Pi was the first ever film to legally be made available for download and streaming on the Internet". What do we think of this? The sources just say that it was the first film to be sold as a download (WSJ) and PPV (book), leaving the possibility that some other film was legally available for download and/or streaming earlier, but was just not sold. In fact, the latter is quite plausible if you look at the book, which lists several platforms that hosted films before SightSound. 
I think the article should read: "Pi was the first ever film to be sold as a download or pay-per-view on the Internet. On the website Sightsound.com, the film was available for purchase as a download, as well as streaming in a pay-per-view window."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by ComeAndHear (talk • contribs) 00:51, 20 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Since no one objected, I have made the above changes. ComeAndHear (talk) 01:46, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  First ever film to legally be made available for download and streaming on the Internet?