By Dave Shiflett (Bloomberg) -- The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina brings has inspired the second coming of Spike Lee, who offers a fresh post-mortem of the disaster in “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise,” a sprawling two-part documentary premiering on HBO August 23 at 9 p.m. New York time. Picking up where his 2006 documentary, “When The Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts,” left off, the new film is exhaustive at four hours (the final segment airs in the same time slot August 24) yet enduringly interesting. Lee mixes archived footage with hundreds of fresh interviews. While very dark at times he also finds many silver linings. To residents such as Curtis Green the storm was a blessing. Green fled to Houston and met his future wife, an especially good catch he tells Lee (always off-camera) because she had not only a house but nice feet. “I have a foot fetish,” he sheepishly admits. Others, such as Pastor R.C. Blakes, says he experienced a change in his “world view” when white, upper middle class Republicans “reached out in tangible ways” to poor blacks. “I’ve seen that,” he says with a degree of wonderment suggesting he’d just beheld a unicorn. Yet for many Katrina left scars that may never heal. Lee includes footage of a young victim’s funeral; the wailing mother’s grief is unnerving. Other enduring problems include a ravaged school system, a high crime rate and a lack of affordable shelter. Public housing, says former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, was “atrocious before Katrina” but has been “worse after.” The same is true of mental health services for the city’s most desperate citizens. Lee spends plenty of time revisiting the official response to the storm, including an interview with former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown. Brown seems worried about the verdict of history, predicting a less than glowing obit in The New York Times. He lashes the Bush administration for wasting “five days” trying to decide how to respond to the emergency and says former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff “didn’t know what he was doing.” One senses the obit writers will not be moved. Not everyone complained about the response, especially Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, seen in footage bellowing that his constitutions “are not into victimhood” -- perhaps, according to the film, because they were in relatively deep clover. Former Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco argues that Mississippi got just as much federal aid as Louisiana even though it suffered only 23 percent of the damage compared to Louisiana’s 75 percent. The film detours to the January 2010 Haitian earthquake and credits the Obama administration with a rapid response. This segment offers the most gruesome footage in the premier: a large dump truck depositing a load of rotting corpses in a mass grave. On a brighter note, Lee interviews Brad Pitt, who is spearheading a non-profit homebuilding project in New Orleans. Pitt, sporting a white hat, beard and sunglasses, says the effort, which has so far erected around 50 houses, has “exceeded my expectations” though only 38 percent of percent of the private homes have been rebuilt, according to the film. The second night includes a detailed look at police misconduct in the wake of the storm and a blistering analysis of the British Petroleum Gulf oil spill. Famed New Orleans musician Dr. John blames the spill on the “love of money” and says “everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.” George Bush and Dick Cheney are roasted by historian Douglas Brinkley for creating an anti-regulatory environment that set the stage for the disaster, while the Obama Administration is lashed for a somewhat lackluster response, even by Democratic strategist James Carville, who says President Franklin Roosevelt would have “jumped out of his wheelchair and run down there.” Brinkley warns the spill could become known as “Obama’s Katrina.” At four hours, Lee’s latest is truly epic. All that’s missing is a plaque of locusts and a killer asteroid.
