Film Review (Life of Pi) Movie Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Film (Life of Pi) - Movie Review Example However, in a serious context, there is much to the movie than what it discernibly professes to be. The movie tends to rake the consciousness of the unsuspecting viewers at many levels, provided they are patient and willing to extend to it the time and the scope that many modern day movies seldom demand. The movie besides being a tale of adventure and courage undeniably tends to have a spiritual facet that is brought out and embellished by the director Ang Lee using a range of thematic approaches and the commensurate technological innovations that amply succeed in bringing out the actual quintessence of the story. As far as the genre of Life of Pi is concerned, the tale indeed happens to be a modern day masterpiece of magic realism. The movie pokes the viewers’ attention with an ever shifting setting into which the director intends to weave a vivid sense of abject realism so far as the representation of ordinary and mundane facts are concerned, embellishing it much with descri ptive details and nuances, yet brining out the philosophy and message inherent in the movie by resorting to a dreamlike and fanciful imagery, borrowing a lot from sources like fairy tales and myths (French 21). Though, the settings in the movie are deeply etched in the pragmatic realism, yet the visual appeal owes much that could be interpreted and reinterpreted by the viewers in an utterly personal subjective context. The writer of the script of Life of Pi tends to retain much of the realism when it comes to hunger, animal instinct, survival and persistence, thereby making the viewers have a sense of the inevitable and the unavoidable; while at the same time the writer tends to insert in much of the fantastical elements like a bio-island infested with meerkats and the trees that happen to be carnivorous. Doing so, the script enables the viewers to deviate from the mundane realities of the real world, even though for a moment, to allow oneself to be immersed in a creative space wher e it is possible to reconcile the baser human instincts that are akin to bestiality and animalism, with the best that is inherent in the human mind that is expressed as theology, philosophy, empathy, respect for all forms of life, resolution, persistence and hope, thereby making way for an experience that is both human and bestial at the same time. If Life of Pi has been able to emerge as a creative and commercial success, much credit goes for this to the director Ang Lee. Lee has been able to successfully weave a web of survival and coexistence, where the religious iconography and an abjectly Darwinian struggle for survival coexist with each other, hand in hand to bring forward the fact that not only the life is sacred, but as long as there is a trace of life existent on earth, it will do everything at its disposal to survive and sustain (Stern 36). However, it goes without saying that Lee to some extent overestimated the scope and power of the visual effects at his disposal (Gilbe y 84). Many a times the seascapes contrived by Lee though appearing fantastical and attractive, somehow ended up as being imbued with a childlike fancy and appeal, which could have been a bit difficult to be accepted or perhaps digested by the adult viewers (Quinn 44). Yet, much of these shortcomings could be ignored by the realization that Life of Pi happens to be a movie that is as much a technological marvel as a

Private Language in The Philosophy of Wittgenstein Essay

Private Language in The Philosophy of Wittgenstein - Essay Example In the Tractatus Wittgenstein argued that there is much deeper connection between words and the world than that the mere notion that words stand for things. Wittgenstein saw a structural similarity between language and the world, so that the structure of reality could actually be read off the structure of language. The notion of correspondence, with its attendant conception of meaning as static, was abandoned in the later philosophy. In the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein (1953) writes, "For since beginning to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrote in that first book" (p.vi). What Wittgenstein came to recognize was that it is ill conceived to think that words always have fixed meanings. Rather, meaning is dynamic in the sense that it can only be determined by the interpretation that language users give it as they use it. In section 43 of Investigations, he tells us, "For a large class of cases— though not for all—in which we employ the word meaning it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language." The idea of meaning as use is the principle idea advanced in the Investigations. Searle (1998) points out that whereas Wittgensteins earlier philosophy revolves around the metaphor of language as a picture, his later philosophy revolves around the metaphor of language as a tool. The difference between the two metaphors is crucial. When Wittgenstein said that words are like pictures, he was operating on the assumption that words, like pictures, represent. When Wittgenstein said that words are like tools, he was trying to stress that words, like tools, can be used in many different ways and for many different purposes. Wittgensteins contention that in most cases, the meaning of a word is its use suggests that the same word could mean different things at different times