Review: Trouble the Water

Friday night I was all ready to settle into some television and a slice of pizza when one of my roommates forced me to get up off my butt and head downtown to the IFC Center to see the opening screening of a film called Trouble The Water.  Reluctantly I went (I can be really lazy- I was tired!) but fortunately was incredibly grateful that I did.

The film, executive produced by Danny Glover (who was there!  He was standing in my way as I tried to sneak in some outside food lol), follows a trio of Hurricane Katrina survivors who lived through the storm and are attempting to rebuild their lives in its environmental, social and economic aftermath.  TTW uses footage taken by the documentary makers, clips from news channels/speeches and home video caught by one of the main subjects of the film, Kimberly Rivers Roberts.

Roberts, her husband, and a friend (encountered during Katrina) return to New Orleans two weeks after the storm to find their homes destroyed.  Unlike what you'd expect, TTW doesn't just talk about how much of a failure the infrastructure our government's disaster relief groups were, but it brings life to the fact that the people whose lives were most devastated by the storm were already dealing with life-threatening situations, drug abuse, death and financial instability.  Kim's mother died of AIDS, both she and her husband were former drug dealers who were failed by the public education system, their friend Brian is a former addict, they have no bank account and- like so many others- couldn't leave New Orleans because they simply did not have the means.

Trouble The Water not only reminds us of what happened during Katrina (as well as the fact that the US Government cares very little about the impoverished minorities crowded in its urban centers) but brings to light the fact that the sicknesses exacerbated by Katrina in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (poverty, poor public education, drug use, STIs and STDs, violence, abuse) not only existed before the storm, but are still here and will be here long into the future unless we take some sort of action.  If there's only one word I could use to describe this film, it would be:

Real.

I strongly urge you to go if it's playing in your city- click here to find information on screenings and openings.

ttfn

i know i don't actually post regularly enough for you to even notice when i'm gone, but for some reason i feel the need anyways to announce that i'm going out of town, so no posts from me for another 8 days at least.

on the plus side, you still have brittany! i could have just commented this on your last post, but as long as im already here, yeah. that video was like, not really funny. and if someone was actually doing that on the subway i was on, i would get REALLY mad. people around here have a nasty habit of turning anything they don't understand into a joke. but some things are actually not that funny. like homelessness.

another pet peeve: those ads on the subway telling you not to give money to homeless people, and to instead donate to an organization that provides homeless services. makes perfect sense, right? people who are begging for money on the subway COULD be getting great services elsewhere but they're just too lazy. and they're on drugs. so don't waste your money on them. because of course it makes PERFECT sense that a homeless person, given the choice between begging you for money and going to get what they need in a less humiliating and degrading way, they'd choose begging you. how about whoever made that ad campaign tries accessing some of those services, finds out there aren't actually enough, and then shuts the fuck up? jesus.

anyways, peace out. see y'all in about a week.

How am I supposed to feel?

So, if you pay any attention at all to what Kaya and I say, you'll have noticed that we both live in New York City and, as people not from the East Coast (Midwest, what-what!) we sometimes have an interesting, or at least different perspective on things that seem to be just the norm around here.

One of those things is the very visible presence of the impoverished and the homeless in the city. Sitting on corners, shaking cups or performing for bits of money, it's easy to see that not only are this city's apartment buildings and projects overflooded, but also the homeless shelters and mental illness facilities. Those of us living and working in the city are all too familiar with the occasional (and on some lines regular) subway begger or performer, coming through the crowded aisles and telling their story, singing a song, doing a dance or in some cases just flat out crying in order to get a bit of change or the grand prize of some actual paper money. And let's be real, I bet on more than one occasion you've stifled a laugh during a particularly crazy/funny/strange performance or tried not to be too obvious while rolling your eyes during a repeat performance of your local train woman's story (I swear this one girl had her speech down pact, word for word weekdays on the downtown 2 train).

So yeah, we all have our thoughts, jokes, annoyances, whatever with these situations, but now someone has actually created a video as a reaction. Take a look below.


So when I first saw this I'll be plainly honest, I thought it was kind of funny. No, more like pretty hilarious. I mean come on, satire is always good fun- and if you get into the layered nature of this joke you could make all sorts of comments on those in power taking money from the middle class workers, the suffocatingly crowded yet simultaneously painfully isolating nature of the subway and the at times ludicrous accounts given by people in order to shame tourists into pulling their quarters and dollars out of their pockets/purses. But, like all good things, this enjoyment of mine while watching this video abruptly came to an end about 10 or 15 seconds into it, turning into a strong annoyance, then a quiet, bubbling rage and finally solidifying into a sinking pit of shame in my stomach when the actual homeless man comes into the cab singing a song and the actor claims that he "can sing better than him."

I'm all for conversations on these sort of awkard and depressing social phenomena, but jokes like this, while generally amusing, don't seem to do much more than providing a cathartic release- not for the people suffering from poverty but for those "suffering" from having to look at them.

And that, my friends, is pretty problematic. :/