HurricaneKatrina Tagged Articles at Cinematical

"The roots of our music, our culture, had suddenly been wiped out.." When the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans was devastated. Among the multitude of victims was the "cultural gumbo" of the city's vital music scene, built up over many decades. The city is "the crucible of music," says U2's The Edge. "Without New Orleans, there'd be no rock 'n' roll."

Music Rising, now available for free online viewing courtesy of our friends at SnagFilms, documents the efforts of musicians to help their fellow artists to continue playing and performing -- and to encourage musicians who had been forced to leave the city to come home. The film begins on a somber note, as the devastation is recapped. One musician sadly surveys the ruins of his home before leaving town, declaring that he will never return; he is emblematic of the many departed musicians. Record Producer Bob Ezrin, whose quoted words open this article, toured the city and admitted he could not quite process the extent of the damage that had been done. Along with The Edge and Henry Juszkiewicz, Ezrin was one of the creators of Music Rising, a campaign whose first phase was intended to replace musical instruments lost in the flood.

The documentary, directed by Canadian filmmaker Don Young, provides an overview of that first phase. It ends in September 2006, with many questions left unanswered. The campaign continued, but, tragically, the future of New Orleans remains cloudy. More information about the film is available at the official Music Rising campaign site and at SnagFilms.

Watch Music Rising after the jump!

Will Smith, his production company Overbrook Entertainment, and Sony have bought the rights to the life story of Hurricane Katrina hero, John "The Can Man" Keller. While John Lee Hancock will be writing the script and directing The American Can, Sony has also bought a spec script about Keller from writer and producer Adetoro Makinde. Keller himself is also one of the associate producers.

Keller, who was a resident of the American Can Company at the time of the storm, helped the other residents of the building -- many elderly and/or handicapped -- and a few refugees stay safe while the flood waters raged outside. Keller also documented his story with photos and videotape. He told The Times-Picayune in 2007, "There were other people rescuing people. But they didn't hot-wire boats, hot-wire cars, swim to the grocery store, come back with food, cook for all those people, organize them, get the thugs off them." In the end, 244 people were evacuated safely with help from Keller.

On Sunday, I got really, really excited about going to see the documentary Trouble the Water, which was playing in Brooklyn as part of the Sundance @ BAM series. But when I went to buy my tickets on Moviefone, the single showtime was sold out. "Oh well," I thought. "I'll just see it when it's officially released to theaters." Then I discovered that, despite winning the non-fiction Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival and despite garnering tons of great reviews, including one from New York Times critic Manohla Dargis calling it "one of the best documentaries in recent memory," the film had no domestic distributor.

Two days later, I'm finally relieved. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Hurricane Katrina doc has been picked up by Zeitgeist Films for a platform release beginning August 22. Fans of the film (including our own Kim Voynar, who picked it as her favorite at Sundance -- read her review here) should be happy that it will at least receive Oscar-qualifying runs in NYC and LA, because everyone who's seen it seems to agree that it will definitely get a nomination. Those of us who haven't seen it should also be happy that it's likely to be given a proper expansion, at least to the major U.S. cities.

Trouble the Water was directed by longtime doc producers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (Fahrenheit 9/11) and depicts the tragic events of Hurricane Katrina mostly through the eyes and camcorder of Kimberly Roberts and Scott Roberts, who shot footage before, during and after the storm and its subsequent effects.

... and they say to the bartender, "Bet you never expected the three of us would team up on a film?" The bartender takes a good look at the three, goes back to cleaning a glass and replies, "Nah, I kinda expected it." Then Dylan McDermott, Brian Presley and Charles Winkler (son of Irwin Winkler) walk into the bar, and go, "Now what if we told you the three of us were involved too -- with Charles directing! And it's called Streets of Blood!" The bartender, tending to his glass, simply replies, "Nah, expected it." Fed up, Charles Winkler throws down his fist and shouts, "And it's gonna be a damn good film too!" Bartender drops his glass in a fit of laughter, looks up and cries, "Now THAT'S something I did not expect!" Everyone laughs and Erik will never become a comedian. The end.

Variety tells us the film centers on two cops dealing with "the lawlessness of New Orleans in the post-Katrina environment." Production begins next month. Another post-Katrina story, huh? Is it just me or is Hollywood really milking Hurricane Katrina? Perhaps I see more of it because I attend a lot of film festivals, and currently there are tons of Katrina docs and narratives on the fest circuit. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you, it just seems like a lot and we're getting close to overkill. This one, however, does sound like it has promise. Plus I've always wanted to see Kilmer, 50 Cent and Stone together in one film. Why not, right?

Many critics consider When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts to be the best documentary of 2006, but it wasn't eligible for the Academy Award because it was released on HBO rather than in theaters. Fortunately the film and its director, Spike Lee, are getting recognition from other places, such as the George Polk Awards, which honors the best in journalism from the previous year. Lee and producer Sam Pollard were named as winners of a television documentary prize, which they'll receive at the annual awards luncheon April 12.

As far as I can tell, a Polk Award for film or television documentary is rarely given -- the previous one was handed out in 1994 (though Fred Wiseman did win a career award in 2005 for his contributions to film journalism) -- so this is a very special honor. It is also probably a great convenience to Lee since Long Island University, which gives out the awards, is literally around the corner from the filmmaker's 40 Acres and a Mule production offices in Brooklyn (too bad the luncheon will be in Manhattan instead of on campus). Read Ryan's review of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and check out the doc, still airing on HBO and available on DVD.

"President Bush can kiss my ass, the United States government can kiss my ass, and St. Bernard Parish can kiss my ass." Random comment from a stranded resident of New Orleans in When the Levees Broke, the latest joint from Spike Lee. Clocking in at four hours and twenty minutes, this is a massive testimonial of first-hand pain, exhaustion and raw, bloody anger that mostly aims for the heart, instead of the head. Even the editing of this film is angry, occasionally cutting rapid-fire through nearly identical testimonials -- 'I heard a boom - there was a loud boom - there was this boom - then bang, this loud noise' -- as if to head-off anyone who might quibble with the survivors' memories. Survivor is the operative word here -- it's a Holocaust-style remembrance, with interviewees often too choked up to finish a sentence but determined to get it all out. In between the personal stories, Lee also reboots those images burned into our collective media brain. We see Spicoli paddling his dinghy and looters surfing away on flat screens. We relive the record needle-scratching moment when Kanye West opines that "George Bush doesn't care about black people," while Mike Myers stares blankly ahead.

The film is divided into four "acts," each about one hour, and the first three acts are almost entirely devoted to the detailed recollections of the victims, chosen for their proximity to the event, not because they possess any special oratory or analytical skills. Some of these talking heads give memorable testimony, some do not. One survivor gives out her phone number on screen -- 504.919.8699 -- and challenges Barbara Bush to call her and defend those asinine statements she made in the Astrodome. Another cuts through some nonsensical reconstruction estimates: "They're gonna repair in eight months what they couldn't build in forty years?" Lee does some of these people no favor by allowing them to expound on the fatuous belief that the levees were dynamited by the U.S. government to exterminate the black population of New Orleans. This canard is repeated ad nauseum throughout the film's first half, to its great detriment. We're also forced to endure the drooling crackpot Harry Belafonte, pushed in front of the camera to billow hot air about the greatness of Hugo Chavez, for some reason.

I guess fake disaster movies just aren't cool enough anymore. I mean, now that our generation has lived through some whoppers (seriously, though, Americans don't even know what a real disaster looks like), we just aren't settling for volcanoes in Los Angeles. And obviously, combining true stories, which audiences love, with cataclysmic destruction presented with stunning special effects, which audiences love even more, puts dollar signs in the eyes of Hollywood studios. It reminds me of Peter Gallagher in The Player pitching a straight-from-the-headlines movie about a horrible mudslide. "Triumph over tragedy," he explains, simply.

So Billy Ray, the writer-director who co-scripted that volcano in Los Angeles movie (Volcano), is currently focusing on true stories of real disasters. First, he tackled 9/11 by writing a script based on the book 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn (I'm not sure what the status is on that project). And now he's about to take on Hurricane Katrina for a film he'll write and direct, called Hurricane Season. Based on Franklin Martin's documentary Walking on Dead Fish, the film will follow a Louisiana high school football team in the aftermath of the storm. Universal, the studio involved in the project, must have gold bars in their eyes, since adding a sports element to the true story/disaster combo (though Ray could avoid showing any hurricane action) should attract an even bigger audience.

Stevenson J. Palfi, a documentary filmmaker based in New Orleans and celebrated by the likes of Les Blank, has reportedly died via self-inflicted gunshot. Palfi was best known for a 1982 documentary called Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together (right), about several generations of New Orleans based musicians. Relatives say he had been severely depressed after Hurricane Katrina, which had detroyed his home, his neighborhood and most of his belongings. He had been living with his ex-wfie, Polly Waring, whose home was one of few spared n the Mid-City area where Palfi had lived, and was working on the final touches to his latest film. Called Songwriter, Unknown, it was a profile of composer (and friend of Palfi) Allen Toussaint; Palfi had been working on it for 15 years. A tribute to Palfi will take place on January 21, as part of Offbeat Magazine's "Best of the Beat" Awards ceremony at the New Orleans House of Blues. The suicide rate has supposedly skyrocketed in New Orleans since Katrina's early-September onslaught; according to the NY Times, that city's rate is now at least double the national average, a statistic made more staggering by the fact that New Orleans' post-Katrina population is surely smaller than that of any other major city.

I was too busy on Christmas Day actually watching movies to bother reading or (as you hopefully noticed) writing about them, so today I'm playing a lot of catch up. I guess that led me to read too quickly, because at first glance, I thought the first graph of Nancy Ramsay's piece in yesterday's New York Times ended like this: "[New Orleans] has become perhaps the year's favorite setting as filmmakers race to exploit the implications of the storm."

Ramsay actually wrote that filmmakers are rushing to "explore" the implications of Hurricane Katrina, but when Michael Moore and Spike Lee are setting the standard, is there really that much of a difference? Athough Ramsay makes some small differentiation between the carpetbaggers now jetting into the area from New York and LA, and the local filmmakers who are using the catastrophe to fund or sell films that they couldn't get off the ground pre-Katrina, she doesn't seem particularly interested in exploring (ha ha) that dialectic. You get the idea that the two approaches are about equal – either way, tragedy and despair are feeding into some kind of swindle.

Am i just being cranky, or does the idea of filmmakers gold rushing New Orleans – reported by the New York Times as if mid-yawn – rub anyone else in a very wrong way?

Filmmaker Michael Moore has posted an 'open letter' to President Bush on his website, addressing the administration's response (or lack therof) to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. It's vintage Moore: typically inelegant, aggressive and drearily lacking in wit, but effective none the less. He's mostly attacking Bush, personally and individually, for being on vacation, being in San Diego, being everywhere but the affected areas for the past five days. "On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home," writes Moore, "I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that."