I spent four hours on Monday and Tuesday watching Spike Lee's HBO documentary on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. I was on a road trip when Katrina hit a little less than a year ago, so I wasn't able to follow the developments of the crisis at the time. I didn't even learn of the levees breaking until I read the front page of a New York Times in Boulder, CO, more than two days after the hurricane hit.

Since I was able to keep up with the ongoing crisis only with occassional spurts of talk radio thereafter, I was most looking forward to the first half of Lee's documentary, which focused on the immediate days surrounding the hurricane's landing. But it turns out that that was the part of the documentary I was most informed about, due to my finally catching up with the 24/7 news coverage and magazine stories a week later. It was in fact the latter half of Lee's documentary that I found to be essential viewing, dealing with the long-term aftermatch of the hurricane. The ongoing struggles of individual families, the politics behind the rebuilding, and the historical/racial/social context of the entire tragedy are artfully intertwined in the last two acts.

Four hours is a long time to spend on a documentary, but I don't think any of you need to be convinced that the Katrina incident is one of the most revealing tragedies in recent American history. And the documentary isn't all elegaics. One more lighthearted segment follows, via home video, the backstory of the guy who infamously double-gutted the Vice President in front of the media with a strangely polite, "Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney." And as always, there's Lee's visual/aural jazz-inspired synthesis, made more the relevant by the New Orleans setting. If you have HBO, try to catch one of the many upcoming rebroadcasts; otherwise, consider putting it on your rental queue.