Life of Pi is ten bazillion times better than Argo

I watched Argo this past week and I thought it was fine. It's an amazing story, considering it's true, and it was fairly well done but it didn't feel Best Picture Good in the way that some Best Picture winners do. But I wasn't too disturbed that it won in general; I mean, it glorified Hollywood, of course it's going to win.

Until a couple days later when I watched Life of Pi.

And now I'm just SO mad that Argo won that I have to blog about it to process my anger.

I tried to read the Life of Pi book a few years ago, but I never got into it. I didn't even get as far as the ship wreck. Of course, now I'm going to go back and read it, but I knew very little about the story going into the movie.

While I usually don't have a problem spoiling stuff for others, I'm not going to do that here. I'm really surprised that people aren't going around saying how this story ends because it's a little... shocking. And amazing. And I can't stop thinking about it. And crying.

While I apparently found the beginning of the book slow, the beginning of the movie is plenty entertaining and really quite funny. And then the ship wreck happens and he ends up on the lifeboat. With drugged, seasick, bickering animals.

The visuals are, of course, stunning, and the line between what's real and what's not is blurred perfectly. The movie stars Suraj Sharma as Pi, and he's an amazing actor and a good looking dude.

See? Very good looking.

The cast also includes Irrfan Khan and Tabu, two actors who are in pretty much every British/American movie that needs Indian people to be in it.

Maybe I'd be a little less emotionally distraught right now if I had finished the book and knew the story. Because the story is actually amazing. I need to start reading analyzations and interpretations of it because I can tell it's packed with symbols, but I haven't figured out very many of them.

Life of Pi is simply epic. There are great performances, breathtaking cinematography, and it packs an emotional wallop. It's the kind of film that sticks with you. Argo is not this way.

I would like Argo a lot more if it hadn't STOLEN Best Picture from Life of Pi. But the acting is nothing impressive, and it seems the writers thought about including some character revelations, but only dipped a toe into that pool. And then tried to end the movie with warm fuzzies about this guy's family. And I'm like, soooo I'm supposed to care?

Life of Pi leads to deep conversations about life and God and self. It's truly spectacular and is the epitome of how affecting a film can be. Isn't that what the Academy should honor?