Customer Reviews

Hell and High Water

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Of all the DVDs about the damage done by Hurricane Katrina, this one is the most informative and vivid. Like watching TV News as it happened.
Well worth the cost.

We need more independent film makers like Jim wills and Pam Bell who tell the real story instead of sensationalizing it for the media. Shot four months after hurricane Katrina, Hell and High Water gives an true oral history in unscripted interviews with seven people who experienced the loss, frustration, aftermath, and on-going challenge of life in a destroyed city. It's more than a narrative about how the storm affected their lives. It raises larger questions critical to us all about the future safety of our country and our government response to disaster. The seven voices are honest and from the heart, giving us a far deeper understanding of what really happened. Viewing this remarkable work, we learn aspects of the storm and life itself not covered anywhere else.

Wow! These folks did a great job: I'm guessing that it's not easy to find a collection of interesting and soulful people from a variety of walks of life to interview, and the film-makers certainly found them. The deft cross cutting of ongoing interviews with the scenes of the devastation of New Orleans very effectively underscored the breadth and depth of the Katrina disaster, too. More than anything else, the film successfully puts a human face on what it will take to deal with "Katrina's" aftermath. It's just a really outstanding documentary film of a powerful event that people throughout the country should see.

This video is great to show the scenes of particularly the lakeview and lakefornt area which has been neglected in all other videos and reports. The one painter, historian rambles endlessly. Interview questions we generally not answered directly.

I got this DVD to show to a group of people preparing to travel to New Orleans to help with the rebuilding, and I was greatly disappointed. The interviews were shot in bars and shops, apparently with insufficient microphones -- we had to strain our ears to hear the speech over the roar in the background. Much of the footage was taken out of a car window (you can see the driver's side mirror!) and I felt seasick watching it. The editing of the video did not make sense; one interview would interrupt another, with no apparent link between the two, and the background music seemed random and at times too loud. We ended up stopping the DVD before it was over; it became too unbearable to watch, and it had nothing to do with the tragedy of the hurricane -- it simply was a lousy documentary.