Back with a Bang

Yes I have returned to civilization, no I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. While I get caught up with the world at large I'd like to bring Trouble the Water to your attention.

Trouble the Water is a documentary from the film makers who worked with Micheal Moore to bring us Fahrenheit 9/11, only they didn't shoot most of the footage. Kimberly Rivers Roberts shot it on her newly street purchased camcorder as Katrina came ashore and the water rose in the lower ninth ward.

Andrew O'Heir has a great write up on the movie and America over at Salon, seriously folks go read it. A few snippets because I don't trust you to follow the link without prompting...

In many ways, I think Kim Roberts' authorship, not just of her amazing storm footage or her music but of her life, is the true subject of "Trouble the Water." We can have a "national conversation about race" until we all turn blue and keel over from boredom -- Did we have it already? If so, what did we say? -- but people like Kim and Scott Roberts don't generally have their own voices, or any other kind of autonomy. A former drug dealer and drug addict, raised in dire poverty by a mother who died young of AIDS, may be understood by way of abstract categories: She's a symptom of criminal pathology or a symptom of racism, a victim or a perpetrator. She is hardly ever going to be seen as a complicated individual utterly free of self-pity, who believes herself fully in charge of her own destiny...

To me it is Katrina that puts the lie to any fantasy of a race-neutral America. And it's Katrina, not 9/11, that displays the nation's potentially fatal 21st century weakness. While countless billions have been spent converting our society into a police state to prevent another unpreventable attack by a handful of neo-medieval wackos, the story of the ongoing destruction of a historic, majority-black American city -- before, during and after that storm -- has been briskly swept under the carpet or, more accurately, abandoned to investigative journalists, documentary filmmakers, NGO social workers, corrupt or incompetent bureaucrats and other irrelevant social debris...

Now like I said go read the rest, oh ok you can watch the trailer below first. Trouble the Water will open tomorrow (August 22) in New York and LA, be shown adjacent to both conventions, and come to Landmark's E Street here in DC on September 26th.

Wait, you didn't think Katrina was over did you?