August 14, 2006
Spike Lee's Requiem.
"Spike Lee is not the warmest guy in the world," decides Ariel Levy in a long profile for New York. "He cares about people, but it's unclear how much he likes them." The piece delves into aspects of Lee's life we rarely glimpse: his wealth, his wife, the "Blackistocracy." And then, finally, a visit to New Orleans:
It's all so insane, so bad, so unsubtle. Black people waiting on their roofs in the liquefying heat for rescue that never comes. Children drowning in the streets. Old women left to rot on the steps of the Convention Center while the director of FEMA announces on national television that he's somehow unaware of the 25,000 people waiting there for help. Condi at Ferragamo. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police showing up on horseback in New Orleans before the National Guard. Massive crowds herded into the Superdome and left for days on end without food or water or sewage. And the fat, rich, white mother of the president saying - actually saying! - "This is working very well for them."
It's all so over-the-top. It's like a Spike Lee movie.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts premieres on HBO on August 21 and 22, and Allison Samuels has a backgrounder in Newsweek: "In Lee's devastating film, [Phyllis] LeBlanc is a frequent, and frequently hilarious, presence, a fuming Greek chorus of one who still can't believe that, for nearly a week, her country left her and her neighbors for dead."
Earlier: Felicia R Lee in the New York Times.
Update, 8/15: Larry Blumenfeld in the Voice: "Lee's film deftly tells a story on a personal level: We grasp the human cost of this crisis in ways simply not conveyed through headlines and soundbites. And beyond analysis of government inaction and faulty levee policy, Lee forcefully reminds us that the culture of New Orleans - the music and food, patois and attitude we celebrate as our nation's soul - is imperiled."
Updates, 8/17: For the Times-Picayune, Michelle Kruppa reports on last night's screening in New Orleans. More from the AP's Stacey Plaisance and, in the Houston Chronicle, Eric Harrison reports on how Lee is responding to some critics claiming "that the movie focuses too much on black people in the Ninth Ward and not enough on other ethnic groups in other parts of the city."
Belinda Acosta in the Austin Chronicle: "I'm not sure if this could be called the definitive documentary on the subject, but if not, it comes very close.... [T]he film - like the disaster itself - becomes a bellwether, confirming what had been suspected but not fully visible: that an underclass is alive and not so well in the US. In New Orleans, at least, it seems that underclass is kicking."
Robert Abele in the LA Weekly: "[I]f you think the first two hours - the hurricane, the floods, the convention center, the absent FEMA - is the disturbing part, brace yourself for the stories in the last two hours: dispersed families, stagnant rebuilding efforts, people finding the dead bodies of their loved ones in houses that were carelessly marked by search teams as having no corpses, the special hell of dealing with insurance companies, etc."
Updates, 8/20: Cynthia Joyce was at the screening in New Orleans and evocatively conjures the scene for Salon. As for the film, it's "a sort of Cliffs Notes to Hurricane Katrina, Volume 1, and though the subject is dense, the conclusions drawn are as simple and straightforward as Kanye West's 'George Bush doesn't like black people' comment (which also gets full treatment here): Louisiana needs to stop being an oil colony for the rest of the country. And, oh yeah - somebody ought to go to jail over this."
Joe Leydon in Variety: "Spike Lee's extraordinary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts renders the worst natural disaster in US history... as a perfect storm of catastrophic weather, human error, socioeconomic inequity and bureaucratic dysfunction.... [T]he real 'stars' of the documentary are the locals who witnessed, reported and/or endured the devastation." And at his movingpictureblog, he adds, "In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a New Orleans native. I should also add that if I have offended anyone with my remarks about the Bush Administration's response to the devastation of New Orleans - well, as Edward R Murrow once said in a completely different context, I'm not the least bit sorry."
Updates, 8/21: Nicholas Kulish: "There are two Spike Lees. One is an artist capable of directing exceptional films, the other a public personality who suffers from flare-ups of foot-in-mouth disease and a fondness for conspiracy theories. Both sides of Mr Lee's personality express themselves in his new HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. As a result it is by turns powerful and frustrating."
Also in the NYT, Stephen Holden: "What breaks your heart is the film’s accumulated firsthand stories of New Orleans residents who lost everything in the flood after Hurricane Katrina, and the dismaying conclusion that a year after the disaster, the broken city has been largely abandoned to fend for itself."
"[T]he film has a warmth and affection that leavens the many heartbreaking images of dead, bloated bodies and immense destruction," writes Patrick Goldstein, who talks with Lee for the Los Angeles Times.
John Rogers: "And keep telling yourself, when a loose nuke goes off in your city, that the government response will be much faster. It will."
For Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in the Star-Ledger, it's "one of Lee's greatest and most deeply personal works."
A "monument of oral history," writes Troy Patterson in Slate. "Without fanfare, Lee orchestrates a multivoiced blues for the common man."
Updates, 8/22: "[A]n essential new chapter in the unfinished story of the struggle for civil rights in America," writes Sheerly Avni at Alternet and Truthdig: "Lee's team devotes a great deal of time and craft to the argument that the devastation resulted from an event in political history - not an event in weather."
Alex P Kellogg makes a vital point in the American Prospect:
[E]ven given the film's critique of the Bush administration, blame can be placed at everyone's feet. Though Lee's film doesn't address this, the nation's Democratic leadership stood on the sidelines and said little other than inconsequential niceties. What's more, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, appeared hardly up to the task throughout the ordeal. Where were Al Gore and John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton when it was clearly time to criticize the Bush administration's response? By the official count, over 1,300 people lost their lives. More than 500,000 people were displaced. An entire city was nearly wiped off the face of the earth. Yet Lee seems to have heard more outrage from the Reverend Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte than I've ever heard from prominent Democrats. And we wonder why race is invoked when the birthplace of jazz and the hometown of Mardi Gras felt abandoned by the nation.
Updates, 8/23: Edward Copeland on Acts I and II and on Acts III and IV.
A "moving, righteously upsetting, heart-afire experience," writes Tim Lucas.
Posted by dwhudson at August 14, 2006 7:41 AM
WATCHING "LEVEES". WE NEED TO GET THIS FILM ON A NETWORK. WE NEED TO GET THIS FILM SEEN ANYWHERE WE CAN. KATRINA WAS THE FIRST INSTANCE THAT OUR GOVERNMENT COULD NOT LIE ABOUT IT'S FAILURES BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL THERE ON TV. WE HAVE GOT TO GET THESE PEOPLE OUT OF OFFICE AND "LEVEES" WOULD HELP SO MUCH.
HELL, GIVE THE DVD AWAY FREE
I am not a fan of Spike Lee, however I respected and understood the message that was conveyed in "Levees". I agree that the blame needs to be spreaded around.
Unfortunately we live in a country that deems you invisible if you are apart of the underclass. The devastastion and the current situation continues to be an embarrasment to the Bush Administration and the USA. Instead of figuring out where to place the blame, why haven't we figured out how to rebuild this city.
You cannot live in these areas and stay when you have been told to leave. These are mega disasters that you to take action and responsibility. It is not race -- it is choice to live and stay in areas that are dangerous!
Hurricane chief foresees 'mega-disaster'
Max Mayfield says U.S. setting up for storm worse than Katrina
MIAMI, Florida (Reuters) -- If you thought the sight of New Orleans flooded to the eaves -- its people trapped in attics or cowering on rooftops -- was the nightmare hurricane scenario, think again.
Max Mayfield, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, says there's plenty of potential for a storm worse than Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,339 people along the U.S. Gulf coast and caused some $80 billion in damage last August.
"People think we have seen the worst. We haven't," Mayfield told Reuters in an interview at the fortress-like hurricane center in Florida.
"I think the day is coming. I think eventually we're going to have a very powerful hurricane in a major metropolitan area worse than what we saw in Katrina and it's going to be a mega-disaster. With lots of lost lives," Mayfield said.
"I don't know whether that's going to be this year or five years from now or a hundred years from now. But as long as we continue to develop the coastline like we are, we're setting up for disaster."
Looking back nearly a year to the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, and the third-worst hurricane in terms of American lives lost, Mayfield said Katrina itself could have been a greater disaster.
More than two days before Katrina struck the Gulf coast August 29, the hurricane center had predicted its future track accurately and also warned it could become a powerful Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
New Orleans was squarely in the danger zone, and emergency managers and residents had plenty of time to prepare.
"One of my greatest fears is having people go to bed at night prepared for a Category 1 and waking up to a Katrina or Andrew. One of these days, that's going to happen," Mayfield said.
Katrina went just to the east of New Orleans, sparing the city the worst of a massive storm surge and the strongest winds. But the city's protective levees failed.
Storm surge could go up the Hudson River
The worst-case hurricane scenario? Mayfield has many in mind. A stronger hurricane closer to New Orleans. A direct hit on the vulnerable Galveston-Houston area, the fragile Florida Keys or heavily populated Miami-Fort Lauderdale.
Or how about a major hurricane racing up the east coast to the New York-New Jersey area, with its millions of people and billions of dollars of pricey real estate?
"One of the highest storm surges possible anywhere in the country is where Long Island juts out at nearly right angles to the New Jersey coast. They could get 25 to 30 feet of storm surge ... even going up the Hudson River," Mayfield said.
"The subways are going to flood. Some people might think 'Hey, I'll go into the subways and I'll be safe.' No, they are going to flood."
Mayfield, a silver-haired, 34-year veteran of the hurricane center who became its public face in 2000, is a tireless campaigner for hurricane preparation, warning the 50 million people who live in U.S. coastal counties from Maine to Texas that they are all in the path of a future storm.
Confidence can be dangerous
He is mystified by a study that found 60 percent of people in hurricane-prone U.S. coastal areas have no hurricane plan -- which to disaster managers means up to a week's worth of food and water squirreled away, a kit with flashlights and other gear, and an established evacuation route to higher ground.
"After Katrina and after the last two hurricane seasons you can't understand why more people are not taking hurricanes seriously," Mayfield said.
Katrina, he says, killed people who stayed in their homes with confidence because they had lived through 1969's Hurricane Camille. Camille was a much stronger storm than Katrina when it crashed ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi as one of only three Category 5s to hit the United States in recorded history.
"There were a lot of people who lost their lives because they thought that they had already lived through the worst they could possibly live through," Mayfield said.
"Experience isn't always a good teacher."
Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
I call this one-sided BS. Hey, Spike, you want to be fair and unbiased? Are you sure you're not racist? Then, come back and interview the true criminals in this horror. A mayor who should be held criminally responsible for doing nothing to get his people out before, during or after the hurricane. This was even after Max Mayfield with the Hurricane Center called him personally at his home days before the Katrina to implore him to get out. Hell, he left his people high and dry hours after the hurricane, and never once addressed the masses of homeless and confused. From hiding, he then moved to Texas where he put his children in private schools. He abandoned his city. Likewise, Governor Blanco should be arrested for her criminal neglect also. A true lack of leadership. She was asked... no begged days before the hurricane by Red Cross, Salvation Army and yes, the President, to please make the deicision to let them in N.O. before the storm to be ready to help. Her response? She asked for twenty-four hours to decide if she should let them in. She didn't want to appear to be dependent, or need others to be in charge. Why don't you interview those people? Our state leaders were the true criminals here. I challenge you, Mr. Lee, to now come and find out what is really happening to the funds in Louisiana. It is not going to the victims, but into the hands of the same good ole' boy network that has kept us imprisoned here in my beautiful state. You have a way to share with the world what happened, and yet, you slant it for your own racist agenda. Please, please, come and bring salt and light into a very corrupt state government, and you will find that our political leaders here, both black and white, do not look out for the people, but for themselves. Your narrative shows one tiny piece of what's going on here, and it's terribly distorted. The oppression and depedence you saw was what the leaders here kept them in. They gave the poor a check once a month to barely exist, instead of giving them self-worth and independence. They needed to keep them in that fish bowl called their voter base. Why don't you interview Landrieu? She bought her votes that way; gave tanks of gas to the poverty-stricken, many who have never voted in their lives, and drove them out..... IN BUSES to vote. Where was everyone after the storm? No, people of New Orleans, it wasn't the United States that left you, it was your own leaders.
Tell both sides, Spike, I dare you. You can even call me, I will help you find out whatever you need to know.
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