Classic Movie

Ventilate your cranium

Pi (1998)

The plot: Obscenely introverted, big-foreheaded maths legend, Max Cohen, refuses to use his number-crunching genius to good effect down the bookies, preferring instead to uncover a definitive formula behind the rise and fall of the stock exchange, and ultimately try to unmask a universal mathematic principal which he believes underlies all existence.

So what happens? As well as driving him slowly bonkers to the point of ventilating his own cranium with a drill, Max is pursued by a nefarious Wall Street brokerage firm and an orthodox Jewish sect who think he may have found what they've been looking for for thousands of years - the true name of God. Rather unsurprisingly, considering the gargantuan nature of his task, Max makes a surreal descent into paranoid dementia. His obsession with Pi (rather than 69ers or football shirt numbers), sees him go madder than Paul Gascoigne's rubber parrot. In his pursuit of one true order, all Max encounters is chaos.

Why's it a classic? Darren Aronofsky conjures up a sinister and highly engaging movie (on a budget that would just about pay for the ad break in I'm A Celebrity...) tackling a subject that would frighten off his more glamour-hungry Hollywood cohorts. His use of black and white imagery colours the environments and characters much more starkly than any CGI could muster, with Cohen's mental breakdown brilliantly depicted by the punctures, abrasions and obscure formulae printed on his bulging skull.
Yes, it's got lots of big, complicated ideas for a small movie, but it manages to deal with them all and, even though described rather pathetically by some as a "thinking man's thriller", Pi easily outdoes A Beautiful Mind, which the Academy so publicly gushed over.
What's more, if all else fails and you kind of got the gist of what was going on, at the end of the movie you'll feel smarter. And when doesn't that feel good?