VIP Class Notes (Ally)

Find a Chinese poem/sonnet and translate it + tell me about the poet

Vocabulary

junkie: addict

condescending: 居高临下的; 表现出优越感的;

Grammar

horrible (adj) movies vs horror(genre) movies

Grammar

nature of adj
– is it really an adj?
– ocean drift(type) vs oceanic drift(description)

imply+statement
ie. What are you implying by that?

Before Ang Lee, no one in China could create/has ever created an international movie that foreigners may accept.

My favorite movie

All of the movies I’ve ever watched, the Life of Pi is the most ravishing one which impress me a lot.
Of all of the movies I’ve ever watched, the Life of Pi is the most ravishing one which impress me a lot.

Let me show you a brief account of this movie. Pi is raised in a Hindu family, but at 12 years old, he is introduced to Christianity and then islam, and decides to follow all three religions as he “just wants to love God”. His mother supports his desire to grow, but his rationalist father tries to secularize him. Pi’s father owns a zoo, and Pi takes interest in the animals, especially a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. After Pi gets increasingly close to Richard Parker, his father forces him to witness the tiger killing a goat. The purpose of this arrangement is to secularize pi, because the father is an atheist.

When pi is 16, his father tells all the family members that he decides to move to Canada where he intends to settle and sell all of his animals. unfortunately, pi and his parents were in/suffered a shipwreck and almost everyone died in the accident except pi, and four animals including a zebra, a orangutan, a mouse and a tiger. After they fight for their survival, they kick off a fantastic drift in the ocean/at sea for 227 days. The following storyline follows “the law of jungle”, and the tiger eats all of the survived animals and then. For sake of winning rights to live/life/For sake of peaceful coexistence, pi fights with the tiger and eventually takes the initiative. It is remarkable, that during their journey at sea/on the ocean, Pi has the chance to kill the tiger, however, his humanity defeats his animality, and Pi finally relates the tiger when they arrive at an alienated jungle.

What surprised me is the narrative structure of the movie. For example, an inclusio pattern. Specifically, from the beginning to the end, there are two distinct stories/lines/tangents of pi’s drift. The former one recounts a thrilling journey of pi and Richard Parker(the tiger), and the latter one is a story of a lonely boy. All of the survivors/animal who survived/animal survivors are just images that actually mirror/symbolize real people. For instance, tiger is pi himself, orangutan is pi’s mother, zebra is a crew. In order to conceal his animality, pi refuses to confess that he eats other animals/survivors to survive, so he make up part of the real experiences of his drift. This type of narrative structure creates dramatic tension. Even better, two contrasting stories delicately set a suspense to audience and give a memorable experience to them.

Based on his syncretic cultural settings, Ang Lee is a rare Chinese director who is capable of combining oriental connotation with western expression. Life of pi is typical of his style, it enables you to recall certain Chinese/oriental elements such as patriarchal system(pi’s authoritarian father), atheism(pi’s father tries to secularize him) and implicit metaphor(different images). Depending on its adventurous storyline at sea(its provenance is Robinson Crusoe)and technical methods, these kinds of expressions are typical of tactics of the American film industry. Ang Lee is such a movie master who is able to strike a delicate balance between two different cultures. This, in short, is a basic benchmark to weigh whether the director is up to an international standard in film industry. For this reason, Ang Lee is an excellent film master.

Besides, this movie also extremely excels at applying technical methods such as 3D, CG. In detail, one of the leading role, Richard Parker which looks vivid is fashioned by CG technology. The view of marine world and jungle are also picturesque and magnificent. What’s more, a great deal of advanced film technology in this movie is not at the expenses of sacrificing its plots. Unlike most specious 3D movies, 3D technology in Life of Pi is in line with the requirements of its plot setting. And so does other movies of Ang Lee, such as Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, while this movie received mixed reviews, for my perspective, the using of technology in this movie is tentative and meaningful. The Iraqi battlefield desert scene has a strong sense of illumination. When using the OS BU-201 screen, it can present stronger brightness and darkness than ordinary low-gain screens and feel the heat in the desert.

Life of Pi also enlightens us by accounting a story of a lonely boy who struggles to believe in his belief or not. Actually, belief lies not so much as in persuasion of other people as in your spontaneity. That is to say, compare to father’s infusion of atheism, Pi determines his faith by his own experiences. There is still another enlightenment for us: humanity is so complex that it is necessary for us to permit the existence of gloomy sides of us, much as Richard Parker to Pi.