Spike Lee's "When The Levees Broke" Parts 1 & 2

When it was announced that Spike Lee was filming a documentary about Hurricane Katrina the big 'is that necessary' was the first thing to pop in my head. Watching the first of two parts last night I've got to say I was all kinds of wrong. It is one of the best docufilms I've seen in a minute. He's on a roll: first Inside Man, now this.

I watched the news coverage from the weekend before Hurricane Katrina hit the shore. You know how crazy the storm season was last year. Any fuzzy mass on the doplar radar was reason to turn to the Weather Channel for the strange entertainment value of hearing minute to minute coverage as it pushed along.

Katrina was the megablockbuster of all the storms, and Spike Lee charted the path of destruction and the aftereffects in the most thorough way possible. The biggest point he makes is that Katrina didn't do most of the damage it was the breaching of the levees that caused the devastation. There you might think, well Katrina caused that, but you know people talk. The way he handled the rumors that the levees were purposely blown open was a nice detail. Instead of leaving it to the voices on the street, which can be easily dismissed as crazy, paranoid people. He mixed it up with a proven fact that black sections of Mississipi were intentionally flooded in 1927, and a story that the levees were suspected to be dynamited in 1965's Hurricane Betsy that caused the Ninth Ward to flood to save the richer sections of New Orleans. The Betsy situation was never investigated. Just left out there to wither away. Kinda like Katrina.

Beyond that I watched with a nod and smile at the people being interviewed. Swamp Thing was a cool ass dude; some woman with a striped shirt looking and sounding like a person that everyone knows (and loves) in their neighborhood; and the Radio Raheem-like rap at the the end was - well, hilarious, to me. It was the sudden break into song that got me. He busted a tear, so I apologize for diminishing his passion.

The impact of Hurricane Katrina only came through because of the people literally dying on TV screens across the globe. Which only makes it all the more crazy that FEMA Brown got on CNN and said he had just learned about the people at the convention center four days into the thing. I knew that before the storm hit. There were reporters interviewing people going into the Convention Center for hours. Spike brought the CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien on who broke character on her show to basically ask Brown if he was serious.. oh, he was serious and firing off emails about his colorful ties.

"It was baffling to me how you could have what was at that point an official estimate of 50 thousand peope at the convention center and not know about it. And have no idea.. The other thing that was surprising to me was that he seemed to have no intelligence. At one point I said, 'How can we have better intel than you have? Because I have a research file prepared by my 23-year-old production assistant, and I'm getting better intelligence than you're getting?'"

Without the small moments like Mayor Nagin going off on radio, this Brown thing, and the not so small thing.. news crews filming and reporting 24 hours a day, you wonder just how long the people would have had to wait to get any help. Best believe one other thing FEMA hadn't anticipated was the response of the media.

It defies any kind of logic to figure out how it takes four-five days for the government to move in and help. With yes, just the basics. A bottle of water. Not even food. Some tap water in a bottle. What drives it over the edge is hearing the politics behind the slow response. Bush calls Nagin for a meeting (after he bitches) with the governor, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, FEMA Michael Brown.. everyone is pointing fingers at the other person, talking about who signed what papers and what calls weren't made or should be made so that the i's and t's can be crossed and dotted, faxed, copied and filed in a polished cabinet before any help can begin to be on the way.

You mean to tell me legal issues prevented them from helping those people?

That's the biggest crime ever. When it comes to an emergency like that, who cares who has to declare it an emergency. It's obvious to anyone with two eyes.. or even a bad eye. Watch that floating bag of laundry. Oh, that's a dead body.

By the end of the show I was just as pissed off as Spike Lee is when people question his film's intentions.

Didn't plan on it. I was laughing for awhile, got pissed and then reflective.

Why make a movie about Hurricane Katrina? Because it'll go down as one of this generation's biggest fuck-ups. Spike is simply getting the truth on the table. For sure, a film like this wouldn't have come from anyone else. And it surely wouldn't be this long... can't imagine how he fills another.. 2 hours is it?. We'll see. Acts 3 & 4 tonight.