Schabe

In my view, this is what you might call a "litmus test" film. You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to it.

The dimmer bulbs will complain they just didn't get it. The plot leaves a lot up to the viewer -- if you don't pay attention and try to fill in some of the blanks on your own, this movie will lose you in the first half hour. Most of what's going on is never explained, and must be inferred -- I think a lot of people will have to see this one twice.

The moderately bright will be impressed by the film's treatment of mathematics, patterns, and a conspiracy that spans reality itself. This is inherently cool stuff, but has already been handled better by the likes of William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson. Ultimately, the mathematics angle falls flat... I had to suppress an outright laugh at lines about machines becoming self-aware after being fed a certain equation, or the main character -- a mathematician -- accusing some rabbis searching for the True Name of God of "already trying every 216-letter combination" -- a feat which would require more time than our planet has been in existence.

The places where this film shines are in the editing, the soundtrack, and the overall look of the film. The plot is ultimately shallow, a story that could probably have fit on a single page, but the film is techno-noir eye candy de luxe. I am looking forward to see what the director does with the formidable writing talents of Frank Miller on his side in the forthcoming "Batman: Year One" movie. As for "Pi", I probably won't be springing for the DVD anytime soon -- but I *will* be purchasing the soundtrack.

Here's a first: a movie so unbelievably awful even I was unable to watch it all the way through.

From the title, I was expecting some kind of "It's Alive!" slimy puppet show... Instead I get the lamest "four teenagers enter the woods..." story ever scripted. The title character isn't a baby at all, he's a poorly socialized 14-year-old named Danny, and not particularly mutated at all. As far as special effects, there's a radioactive bunny sock-puppet that's amusing for a few minutes, and a couple of well-done corpses, including one whose small intestines are inexplicably tied in a bow, but by 20 minutes into the film, it's clear they've used up all their good ideas. A quarter-hour after that, the plot finally expires altogether, and the movie does something I've never seen before -- it launches straight into its own sequel: "Plutonium Baby II: Danny Takes Manhattan".

In this phase of the film, it's ten years later, and Plutonium Baby is now Plutonium Man, with a girlfriend (from whom he must hide his Terrible Secret, of course) and a festering leg wound. He's being stalked through the streets of New York by the now horribly deformed scientist whose radiation experiments caused his plutonious state. The tension *really* fails to build here, as by now you've lost interest in the survival of any of the characters, and the chances you're going to see somebody attacked by a radioactive squirrel or pigeon or something appear to be slim. Apparently the whole thing builds up to some kind of Highlander-esque final showdown, with creator facing creation in a battle royale, but I just couldn't take any more. I still haven't returned the video, so maybe I'll find out how it ends sometime this week, but I'm not sure I have the strength...