[promoted by BooMan. Title shortened]
When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts begins tonight on Home Box Office. Check listings in the link.
As the world watched in horror, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. Like many who watched the unfolding drama on television news, director Spike Lee was shocked not only by the scale of the disaster, but by the slow, inept and disorganized response of the emergency and recovery effort. Lee was moved to document this modern American tragedy, a morality play witnessed by people all around the world. The result is WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE: A REQUIEM IN FOUR ACTS. The film is structured in four acts, each dealing with a different aspect of the events that preceded and followed Katrina’s catastrophic passage through New Orleans. Acts I and II premiere Monday, August 21 at 9pm (ET/PT), followed by Acts III and IV on Tuesday, August 22 at 9pm. All four acts will be seen Tuesday, Aug. 29 (8:00 p.m.-midnight), the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
I’d like this thread to be a place where people can talk about their responses to this film, and about their feelings about New Orleans one year later.
Reviews of “Requiem,” which premiered in New Orleans last week, are here, there and everywhere.
…it starts right after Harry Potter 3.
tune in now.
Title’s still too long BooMan!
Almost makes it worth getting HBO.
Hope it gets to DVD in not too long.
It’s not a pleasant thing to watch Ask. It’s disturbing, and it undermines what little faith might be left in the goodness of those whose job it is to protect the citizens of this country. That doesn’t even begin to address the moral abandonment of our people……
It is as awful to watch toay as it was when it was happening.
If it’s possible, it’s even MORE stunning to see this a year later. The coverage at the time was so overwhelming, coming from so many directions. To see it distilled like this, gathered together, a kind of chorus of screams …
It’s moving to see the people who worked so hard to help people, and incredibly disheartening to see the way our institutions fail so manifestly.
I’m so ashamed of this country.
Thanks to Mr. Lee for doing this, gathering these cries together in one place, and fuck each and every person that I’ve heard and read BITCHING about how “one sided” this documentary is, that it’s fucking POLITICAL.
WHAT IS MORE POLITICAL THAN THE WEALTHY AND COMFORTABLE LETTING THEIR NEIGHBORS DIE?
We need a fucking class war in this country, because right now only one side is fighting it, and they’re winning. Anybody who’s waiting for the entrenched leadership of this country, including the Democrats, to do anything is a fool.
Fucking MOUNTIES got there faster, fer Christ’s sake.
I actually think it is pretty balanced. I mean, it’s not like there is any excuse. Nagin’s getting rough treatment. Blanco didn’t get any passes.
it seems pretty fair to me, too, but I read some reviews, and comments on reviews online, that claimed that it wasn’t, that it ignored whites in other states, etc.
It seems like I’m seeing a pretty fair representation of ONE CITY and how it came thru a terrible disaster.
I’d argue we’re ALREADY in a class war, but when wealth is redistributed upwards, no one talks about it. It’s only when it starts going the other way that the war becomes overt.
i have a feeling that part two is going to be more hard hitting.
Especially if he has something more to say about the dispersal of families and how hard it is for people to return and the resegregation of the city and on and on. And Bush. And Nagin.
Douglas Brinkley, in his book about New Orleans, just laid into Nagin and his hypocrisy. It’s something to see them both being interviewed.
Thanks, Boo. Turn around and see myself front-paged. Amazing.
I kept trying to see anyone that I knew in those crowds of frustrated and horrified humanity. I couldn’t.
Brinkley was really good in this.
Required viewing for every single voter in this country cause after you have seen it there is simply no way that you will be able to vote for any republican candidate.