Movie Reviews: Bee Movie, Darfur Now, Primo Levi's Journey

GO PRIMO LEVI’S JOURNEY Sixty years after the Italian writer and Holocaust chronicler Primo Levi left Auschwitz and hitched a long, digressive ride home with a Russian convoy, filmmaker Davide Ferrario follows in his footsteps with a camera, a vivid imagination and intellectual ambition to burn. Tracking the journey that Levi described in his book The Truce (retitled The Awakening for American publication), this remarkable documentary takes us from the Polish concentration camp through Eastern and Central Europe, to Germany, and on back to Levi’s beautiful home town of Turin, where Ferrario also lives. What emerges is one visual essay on the rise and fall of communism after World War II (with guidance from Polish filmmaker Andrei Wajda and heroic Soviet propaganda footage), and another on the decline of the West that includes creeping corporate outsourcing and the resurgence of extreme nationalism. Part of the movie’s charm is Ferrario’s openness to happenstance: His arrest by overzealous KGB apparatchiki in Belarus, and their subsequent “help,” makes its way into the movie, as does the day the filmmakers wandered into a meeting of neo-Nazis in Germany, where a woman who has had it up to here with apologizing for the Holocaust all but spits into the camera. Ferrario’s richly idiosyncratic portrait of 21st-century Europe drains attention away from Levi’s subjective experience (narrated from the book by actor Chris Cooper) and draws what may be an overly straight line from Auschwitz to 9/11. But that’s a tiny price to pay for this fascinating film, which does Levi (who appears in footage of his own return to Auschwiz) the supreme honor of refusing to guess at the reasons for his suicide in 1987. (Music Hall) (Ella Taylor)

GO QUANTUM HOOPS: THE CALTECH STORY The documentary Quantum Hoops is firmly rooted in a premise that Americans love and hold dear as a reflection of our collective mythological character: the story of the feisty underdog battling seemingly insurmountable odds. The underdogs in this film, however, are some of the most intellectually gifted people in the country, and the battle they’re waging is less a matter of life and death than one of simple pride. Director Rick Greenwald follows the 2006 Caltech basketball team as they try to break the school’s 21-year losing streak — that’s over 240 consecutive conference losses. The Caltech Beavers are a surprisingly charming group of overachievers who prove to have as much heart on the court as they do brains in the classroom (almost all team members had perfect math scores on the SAT), which helps in the moments when the film’s energy flags. That happens mostly toward the beginning, as Greenwald spends what feels like too much time on the history of the school, its many noble prizewinners and the decline of its once-glorious athletic past. All that context pays off beautifully, though, in a final game that’s filled with so many nail-biting twists and turns that, were this a Hollywood film, the audience would scoff at being so cynically manipulated. (One Colorado) (Ernest Hardy)

SAW IV In keeping with the series’ preference for the literal over the mythic, Saw IV offers no miraculous, Michael Myers–style resurrection for torture artiste John “Jigsaw” Kramer (Tobin Bell), who went out with a bang at the end of Saw III and makes his first appearance here as the toe-tagged specimen in an autopsy scene so gruesomely detailed it could be used as a med-school primer. But if Jigsaw is gone, he’s hardly forgotten: Soon, someone is up to Kramer’s old tricks, which this time means subjecting SWAT team commander Rigg (Lyriq Bent, a series regular since Saw II , which may make him the longest-surviving black character in horror-movie history) to the obligatory gauntlet of damned-if-you-do/don’t puzzle boxes and Old Testament moralizing. But like the movie’s mysterious Jigsaw doppelgänger, Saw IV is itself a poor substitute for the original (or even the first two sequels), from the ho-hum deathtraps that seem designed by Rube Goldberg’s less prodigal younger brother to the “twist” ending surprising only in its Agatha Christie obviousness. Much more gripping are the handful of flashback scenes that bring Kramer (and, in turn, the excellent Bell) back from the grave and offer new insight into the making of the movies’ most insidiously appealing quasi madman since Hannibal Lecter. May I propose a full-tilt prequel: Jigsaw Rising ? (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)

SHARKWATER As cinema progresses past some of the awareness-raising limitations of conventional journalism, we’re watching more docs on genocide, abortion, global warming, that whole pig-fuck of a war — and just when you thought it was safe to take what’s in the water for granted, illegal finning operations are wiping out the shark population. Toronto-based wildlife photographer and first-time filmmaker Rob Stewart spent five years on this ode to his lifelong aquatic obsession, which became a platform after Stewart fell in with Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson and his merry crew of boat-ramming eco-pirates. Rather than paint a disembodied, March of the Penguins –style nature portrait, or what might have been fantastic in an unbiased director’s hands — a film about Watson’s fanatical crusade — Stewart is his own star, a would-be Speedo model and whoa-dude narrator whose droning reflections get in the way of his stunning cinematography. No matter how much Jaws -hugging zeal he brings to the deck, Stewart has made a vain polemic that never addresses the finning industry’s deep-seated cultural significance in Asia (where, rightly or wrongly, shark soup is a symbol of economic prestige), or elaborates on how the disrupted ecosystem affects us humans. (Beverly Center; Nu Wilshire) (Aaron Hillis)