Has one of the better lines ever about Dubya: "That man gives C students the world over a bad name." :)

While there's occasional hilarity in Lee's four-hour documentary about the destruction wrought on New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, which screened Friday night at TIFF, there's a much higher proportion of affecting and outright tragic scenes in it.

Lee starts with an Aug. 26, 2005 blog posting from some college kid warning how Katrina could be the cataclysmic big one that the sunken city on the Mississippi River had long feared.

He deals with the official fumbling around on the evacuation order by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the incredibly bad decision by some people that since they had survived other hurricanes, they could ride out Katrina too.

One weakness is that the film doesn't mention how little planning there was to remove the very poor and those with mobility problems. I remember reading an NYT story that quoted a Louisiana State University engineering professor that when he raised the issue at some emergency planning meetings he attended, the response was silence.

From there, we hear first-person stories about the height of the of Aug. 29, 2005 storm (one man described it as "having a freight train in your ears"), see video from inside the Louisiana SuperDome of the roof peeling back, and witness the awesome force of nature.

Then we see a solitary man walk into the frame of a shot, being buffeted by the wind and driving rain.

He had been chased out of his house by rising water. One of the levees had broken.

One radio personality makes the point that Katrina essentially missed New Orleans, instead delivering an extra kick to nearby Mississippi, and that it had been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane by the time it moved on.

The levee system was supposed to protect against a Category 3 storm. It didn't.

Storm surge flowed up canals designed for drainage and blew them apart. There were four major breaches in all. Eventually, 80 per cent of New Orleans would be underwater. In some places, the water would be up to six metres deep or even deeper.

The post-Katrina footage of the rents in the levees provide stark evidence of the decrepit nature of the city's flood protection system.

That's perhaps the worst aspect about Katrina: It didn't have to happen that way. The city could have been protected.*

* Some people swore they heard explosions. In the past, the levees had been deliberately dynamited to save more valuable areas of the city. However, that didn't happen this time.

When the disaster did happen, we get to relive bizarre statements like Dubya telling Michael Brown, the hapless head of FEMA: "You're doin' a heckofa job, Brownie" (Brownie resigned two weeks later after being yanked off the Katrina file).

However, the movie paints Brown as something of a scapegoat and instead indicts Michael Chertoff, his boss and head of the Dept. of Homeland Security.

The diaspora and the sluggish start to rebuilding the Crescent City,  founded by the French in 1718, are covered off, along with the struggles to determine what kind of New Orleans will emerge -- and another reminder of how antiquated New Orleans' flood protection system is when compared to the systems used by the Netherlands, 65 per cent of which is below sea level.

Mainly, this is an oral history. There's no narration, no "voice of God" explaining what happened and only one animation showing where the levees broke. Otherwise, it's just people telling their stories interspersed with news footage from the time and

While the film kept my interest, some complained afterwards that some of the interviews were duds and that you only briefly see flashes of some people at the film's beginning and then don't see them again for a few yours.

While you can't include everyone, he left out out great TV moments, like Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parrish, who said on Sept. 7, 2005: "Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot." However, that may have been a rights issue.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that Lee designed this to be a four-part television series (broadcast on HBO in the U.S.), not as something to be viewed in the theatre in one four-hour sitting (which is what was done -- with no intermission).

Since Lee used repetition to drive some points home, there was definitely room for tightening.

However, is it worth seeing as is? Very much so.

According to a CP story on CTV.ca:

Canadian viewers can see "When The Levees Broke'' Sept. 21 at 9 p.m. ET on The Movie Network and Sept. 24 at 3 p.m. PT on Movie Central (check local listings).