Tonight at 9 on HBO, should be good.
An excerpt from a review.
Regular folks, grand portrait gallery
As survivors speak their piece, director Spike Lee paints a captivating picture.
By Paul Brownfield Times Staff Writer August 21, 2006
Totaling four hours over two nights, Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" is a considerable thing — a mural of sorts, protest art erected in ironic dismay over the governmental embarrassment and social disaster that New Orleans remains today.
Lee was at the Venice Film Festival when Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29; he arrived in New Orleans with a film crew three months later, returning seven more times. By then, it's clear, he had long since arrived at his conclusion: An act of nature had coupled with an act of bureaucratic criminal negligence to reveal how aspects of the slavery and Jim Crow eras remain.
It's this levee, not the literal one, that Lee really means to explore. That the disaster revealed the still-ingrained inequalities for the country's black underclass is hardly an unusual thesis; the live feed from the city's predominantly African American Lower 9th Ward told us that.
The Lower 9th "became, in the aftermath of Katrina, a vortex of overwrought emotion and intemperate rhetoric, a stand-in for conflicting visions of the city's future," Dan Baum writes in the current issue of the New Yorker, in a piece subtitled: "Behind the failure to rebuild.
"Into this vortex steps Lee, whose last such project for HBO was the 1997 documentary "4 Little Girls," about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham, Ala., that became part of the fabric of the civil rights movement.As a citizen journalist and witness to history, Lee in both projects is able to get his message about race across without coming off as didactic, something that has plagued him in the past as a filmmaker (see "Bamboozled").
I'd kind of given up on what Lee had to say about the world, much in the way that Woody Allen fans have given up on his movies — a sense that the voice is only repeating itself now, hollowing out (while also attending Knicks games).
But "When the Levees Broke" is a reminder that Lee, like Allen, is at heart a natural-born comedian and keen conveyer of life as divine absurdity. Much of the footage and storytelling here is heart-rending, but it isn't just: Lee's eye and ear for street characters returns, the director-as-listener — what enabled the late comedian Robin Harris, playing sidewalk pundit Sweet Dick Willie, to steal Lee's 1989 film "Do the Right Thing."
