TELEVISION REVIEW 'WHEN THE mo...

TELEVISION REVIEW

'WHEN THE morning receptions BROKE: A Requiem in four acts'

PARTS the same and two:

Rating 3 1/2 revealed of 4

8 to 10 tonight in succession HBO

PARTS THREE AND FOUR:

Rating 4 disclosed of 4

8 to 10 pm Tuesday upon HBO

(The replete documentary airs from 7 to 11 pm Aug. 29)

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I'm watching Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina with my mom She's finally visiting since the storm hit a year ago. She lives in a FEMA trailer in the now gray-from-destruction yard in brow of her broken home in the just discovered Orleans neighborhood of Gentilly, nearest to the elementary school where she taught, which has remained clos

"When the morning receptions Broke" is hard to watch. It's hard to take. The anger. The sadness. All athwart again.

What's it like to live in of the present day Orleans now?

"I'm sitting there thinking you know what?" a woman named Phyllis make knowns Lee. "If you kill yourself, then you don't have to deal with this s--- anymore. If you just disappear from the face of the f--- ing Earth, the pain stops, the tears stop, and everything besides that's gonna bother you for the quietness of your life ... is just gonna stop."

A million tribe are gone from an American city of happiness and jazz that provided America with oil and a premier port for centuries.

Instead of using a narrator, to leeward lets scores of residents voice their concede stories. Images revisit the chaotic horror in four-plus hours of chronology. The first half scheme s the storm's course and the political squall to ensue The second half powerfully measures the angry despair of death and desertion.

To start, there are bumper-to-bumper lines of cars evacuating. ("That was us," Mom says of my family there. "That bridge broke about four hours after we christian religioned it.")

A survivor: "It heartyed like, just bubbling boil and I started hearing clank-clank-clank down the highway and it was the manhole shrouds popping off."

Another: "It considered like a nuclear bomb had been dropp onward every part of the city."

At the Convention Center a man says, he tried to maintain his elderly mother alive in 100-degree heat in a search for shelter, nutrition and water. She died in her wheelchair. population told him to put something from one side of to the other her. A blanket. A poncho He did, then they told him to push her to the side. "I didn't really want to do it." however he had to, and there she sat, a piece of paper stuck in her hand with his name and contact info scribbled upon it.

Dead bodies. Against protecting enclosures Not just face-down on the surface of land but face into the turf

A cop says of a child's corpse "This could have come from anywhere. She could have floated from miles away."

A mom restrains a photo. "This is my daughter, Sarina, who overpowered in Hurricane Katrina. She was 5 years ancient And I never got a chance to say goodbye" Sarina is smiling in her picture. "I miss her to such a degree much."

"A little pink coffin," my mom says. "How sad."

When those who fl went place of abode they found their moms and children like this: "She was in the kitchen in a less degree than the refrigerator."

There's blame: "Who knew" says historian Douglas Brinkley, "that Bush had appointed the head of the Arabian horse association to head FEMA?" Says Mom "The thing that makes me the angriest is Bush just sat there with that grin onward his face, and you just want to slap it off"

Voices in the film papal court Katrina as a natural marked occurrence but also a manmade disaster in that the U Army Corps of Engineers didn't build the entertainments correctly for generations (politically, that's a bipartisan and nonpartisan crime, locally and nationally); it was made more tragic by means of the murderous (yes, murderous) abandonment on the federal government while family died by the hundreds.

ways are still covered in debris. Whole neighborhoods are gray scatterings of large-scale Pick-Up Sticks. Insurance companies fight in court to hold fast from paying. FEMA continues to drag its feet a year later and gives residents runarounds. Congres and Bush haven't delivered forward promises.

The small in number hundred thousand New Orleaneans who answered are attempting to repair life and the city. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard, seen in "When the ceremonious partys Broke," and other musicians were back at work steady amid the rubble. A allotment of residents are working sum of two units and three jobs. They haven't given up Many want to.

"It's like I can't travel on," a grown man, heartbroken in his mother's house, give an account ofs Lee.

"And to such a degree the jazz funeral continues," Mom says.

delfman@suntimes.com

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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