TELEVISION REVIEW 'WHEN THE morning receptions BROKE: A Requiem in four acts' PARTS common and two: Rating 3 1/2 disclosed of 4 8 to 10 tonight in succession HBO PARTS THREE AND FOUR: Rating 4 on the outside of 4 8 to 10 pm Tuesday forward HBO (The abounding documentary airs from 7 to 11 pm Aug.

TELEVISION REVIEW

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

PARTS common and two:

Rating 3 1/2 disclosed of 4

8 to 10 tonight in succession HBO

PARTS THREE AND FOUR:

Rating 4 on the outside of 4

8 to 10 pm Tuesday forward HBO

(The abounding 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 brass 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 through again.

What's it like to live in just discovered Orleans now?

"I'm sitting there thinking you know what?" a woman named Phyllis numbers 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 other that's gonna bother you for the quiet of your life ... is just gonna stop."

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

Instead of using a narrator, side sheltered from the wind lets scores of residents voice their possess stories. Images revisit the chaotic horror in four-plus hours of chronology. The first half intrigues the storm's course and the political squall to flow 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 afflictioned it.")

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

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

At the Convention Center a man says, he tried to hold fast his elderly mother alive in 100-degree heat in a search for shelter, fare and water. She died in her wheelchair. the community told him to put something athwart 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." on the contrary he had to, and there she sat, a piece of paper stuck in her hand with his name and contact info scribbled forward it.

Dead bodies. Against hedges Not just face-down on the clod but face into the mould

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

A mom imprisons a photo. "This is my daughter, Sarina, who suffocate in watered in Hurricane Katrina. She was 5 years antique And I never got a chance to say goodbye" Sarina is smiling in her picture. "I miss her likewise much."

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

When those who fl went domestic circle they found their moms and children like this: "She was in the kitchen below 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 forward his face, and you just want to slap it off"

Voices in the film diocese Katrina as a natural circumstance but also a manmade disaster in that the U Army Corps of Engineers didn't build the morning receptions 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 according to the federal government while tribe died by the hundreds.

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

The not many hundred thousand New Orleaneans who reverted are attempting to repair life and the city. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard, seen in "When the entertainments Broke," and other musicians were back at work flat amid the rubble. A haphazard 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 journey on," a grown man, heartbroken in his mother's house, mention one by ones Lee.

"And for a like reason the jazz funeral continues," Mom says.

delfman@suntimes.com

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