By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
'His Spikiness': Lee Gets Exhaustive NYM Treatment
Almost 20 years to the day after Spike Lee released his seismic feature breakthrough She’s Gotta Have It, the filmmaker sits for a pair of in-depth profiles anticipating his upcoming Hurricane Katrina documentary, When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. And while Newsweek’s Allison Samuels might echo a bit too much of the Lee profile that owned the front page of the Observer last March, check out Ariel Levy with the 4,800-word Lee family opus in this week’s New York Magazine–its own epic adventure bounding from New York to New Orleans and headlong into Lee’s cinema:
The heavy-handedness that critics have objected to in some of Lee’s movies is absent from his documentaries. In Lee’s fictional films, you can sometimes feel the case of kingitis that [Jungle Fever actress] Veronica Webb diagnosed in action: Lee just can’t seem to get enough of himself. … To be fully affected by Lee’s fictional films, you have be into his vision, his aesthetic, his Spikiness. To be fully affected by his documentaries, you really just need to have eyes. The four hours of When the Levees Broke fly by. It is an astounding piece of work. The full nightmare of Katrina becomes palpable and unavoidable in a way it hasn’t yet in art. I tell Lee this, and he offers me a first and final pleasantry. A text message that says THANKS.
The only thing Levy doesn’t ask is why Lee no longer appears in his films–a character void you can’t say did not nag at you while watching 25th Hour. Or maybe she did ask, and I just have to go back through the story with a flashlight and a canary. Does anybody else know? This question does not rank especially high on HBO publicity’s present-day list of unsolved auteur mysteries.
At any rate, When the Levees Broke premieres Aug. 21 and 22, followed by a full four-hour airing on the Aug. 29 anniversary of Katrina’s landfall.
(NYM photo: Tim Richardson)
How do you get this 4 hour documentary. I don’t have hbo.