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One of the things I did while sick this week was watch, "When the Levees Broke", the Spike Lee documentary about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It was well done and compelling, though a little depressing for the edgy emotional state I get into while sick. I watched it in dribs and drabs, sometimes because it made me cry and sometimes because I found I couldn't concentrate because of my sick brain.

The only part I watched where I was like, "Hmmm, this seems a little picky." Was the scene where a teenager gives a tour of his FEMA trailer, complaining about how cheaply made it is. I didn't dwell on it but Lee had just documented how few people had gotten the trailers at all so it seemed a little, I hesitate to write this, ungrateful. It was a minor moment, but to me it seemed like a false note, a moment of less righteous anger in a film where "righteous anger" was the baseline .

And you know what? I was totally wrong.

Not 15 minutes after watching that I read a Nation article that just came out. Written about a year after the movie was filmed, it detailed that those trailers are making people sick because the materials aren't rated for people to actually live in them. Truly much of New Orleans is toxic still, and it would be hard to separate the toxicity of formaldehyde from the toxicity of sewage, mold, etc without massive study. But, man… It just keeps coming.

In other movie news I finally saw "Pan's Labyrinth" last night. I never get tired of seeing Fascists killed, especially Spanish ones. My favorite scene was right near the end so I probably shouldn't mention it until the movie is out of the theaters, but as someone who grew up watching war movies the "Fuck your honor" moment was incredibly satisfying and against genre. As it should be.

I also somehow got that James Bond movie from Netflix... "The World is not Enough" starring Remington Steele. It was so bad that I actually returned it unfinished. I realized about half way to the mailbox that I actually forgot to watch the last 15 minutes and I totally didn't care. I swear I don't know how that got on my queue. I think the name confused me. Maybe I was thinking it was "The World Can't Wait" and it was about sectarian front groups, I dunno.

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I've been on a big Remington Steele kick and have rented as many shows and movies as I could find.... but not the Bond franchise. Never!

yes..i too enjoyed the fascist plot line in that film...my husband is always going on about Spain under Franco, so i feel particularly intrigued

also..levee is on my list...mebbie i'll move it up

hope you are feelin better

ps: the thought of you watching it and crying is just so
endearingly cute.

I admit to being a Bond fan, but "The World is not Enough" is a true low-point in the franchise, which is saying something. The new Bond movie with Daniel Craig is worth renting though...if you like Bond movies at all.

Yeah, that line in Pan's Labyrinth... bee-you-ti-full

Hot damn. That's insane. I have When the Levees Broke at the top of my queue right now because I'm going to NOLA next month. Did you read the NYT article last week about the move towards tiny homes, and how Lowe's is going to start selling the Fema houses? .....Hmmmmm.

I hadn't even finished reading your post when I scrolled down to comment just what you posted: those trailers are not long-term residential dwellings; they're more like RVs, and cheap, shitty ones, at that. If the FEMA housing had been meant for days, weeks - hell, even months - that would have been one thing, yet 2007 will be two years post-Katrina, and I bet the trailers will still be filled with displaced persons. Disgraceful.

I watched When the Levees... all in one sitting. It was fucking devastating.

an lj friend of an lj friend once commented about how she was lectured by fema staff for not beign grateful to god enough for what she was getting from fema..

It took Akilles and I a whole week to watch "When the Levees Broke" because one hour at a time was enough to digest.

Coincidentally, I saw Pan's Labyrinth last night too. It struck me as a true fairy tale, with all the gore they usually leave out and the real mixture of good and bad results. It's so rare to get that effect mixed with so much beauty.

As far as When the Levees Broke goes, I haven't been able to finish watching it yet, because it keeps pissing me off.

I've only watched the first disk of "When the Levees Broke", but I thought he did a great job of bringing in a wide varity of opinions and statements, without seeming to favor one point of view exclusively. I'm thinking in particular of the way he'd find some very sad stories, trump that story, trump it again, and then present someone so beat down that all they could think to say was the absolute extreme of "the government should have helped us [I agree], should still be helping us [I totally agree], should be giving us a hundred thousand dollars for pain and suffering [wait] and rebuilding my house twice as nice as before! [what.]"

I took a social science class in my long-ago undergrad years, and the professor specialized in disaster psychology. It's fascinating to see how people behave in the exact ways he said they would - there was a particular phase he focused on where people can't help themselves at all because they're too overwhelmed, and they get very angry with their rescuers because it's really the only emotion left that is safe to have. When the people in NOLA hit that phase (and they all seemed to hit it at the same time, and it has lasted a long time), the Right Wing used it as a wedge to prove that all of "those people" were ungrateful wretches who had things work out "quite well, overall" and who just couldn't appreciate the nice things they were being given.

Um, I'm not sure what the point of this is. I guess just that Spike Lee delivers a great movie yet again. I need to watch the rest.

Watching "When the Levees Broke" was like sweating out a fever...almost. I still have a nice reserve of rage and other feelings.

Thanks for posting the link to the toxic-trailers article. I watched "When the Levees Broke" a couple of weekends ago & had to break it up over a few days--but I'm really glad I watched, since it provided me with a framework for thinking-through how one could create a record of the events & a record of so many moments when FEMA's inaction or inept action caused extensive, devastating effects.

Seeing Dinerral Shavers of the Hot 8 Brass Band in the doc was especially sad, given his recent murder.

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cindi thanks us all of the time for taking her in up here and helping her start a new life...she's going to graduate this spring, so i get to be a proud momma...and she's getting married in september, so my mom and i are busy planning a wedding for her along with her sister in NOLA trying to work with us up here...we've really become close with her sis also, and cindi has been calling me mom for the longest time now...

her sister refuses to "desert" NOLA, but has noticed that she has been getting sick a lot and is comtemplating moving up here to be closer to cindi -- cindi decided that she was never going to go back after she did and saw the numbers on the door and what was left of her grandparents' home...she STILL has nightmares once in a while, but is MUCH better than what she was when they first dropped her off on my porch...

i inherited a college-aged kid...but so proud of what she has done to create a great, wonderful life for herself!

"When the Levees Broke" has been on my list forever -- it's a film I've felt like I "should" see, but I've been afraid I would just sob and rage and sob through the whole thing. The FEMA trailer situation is especially hard. Thanks for the Nation link.

I had the opportunity to go to New Orleans this spring with a few photographers/writers to work on a project there and I let it pass. Well, I could still say yes, there's still time. But the magnitude of it all makes me feel so fucking demoralized that I can barely leave this LJ comment, can't even rent the damn film, let alone become what feels like a war correspondent.

P.S. Ha ha on World Can't Wait! Oh my god. Do you know of any good movies on sectarian front groups? I'm fascinated.

Would you agree that one of the best things about Pan's Labyrinth is that the fascist is a real person? Even sympathetic in some ways.

The thing is, fascism has its attractions, and it plays on psychological flaws that many of us have. If it were not so, it wouldn't be dangerous.

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