![]() Throughout the episodes, large, bold red type appears on screen to describe people and the NYC boroughs they inhabit. Sometimes a gallows humor permeates the proceedings, as if telling us to laugh so that we may not cry. ![]() He has a wicked sense of humor, joking with his interviewees and even talking smack about folks who aren’t Yankees or Knicks fans. He asks folks to repeat things he finds important or enlightening. ![]() You can hear his excitement, his disbelief and his admiration bellowing from offscreen. There are scientists, doctors, politicians, activists and so on, proving that we come in all different flavors of careers.Īs an interviewer, Lee is a real character. Lee’s use of so many Black and brown talking heads is as welcome and inspiring as it is informative. There are deeply personal discussions and reminiscences from regular people like Lee’s camera man Rick Sarmiento to well-known public entities like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rosie Perez, John Turturro, and Steve Buscemi. From here, we’re introduced to a seemingly endless group of talking heads. Set to Frank Sinatra’s cover of Kander and Ebb’s “ New York, New York,” the short loses none of its power nearly a year later. Chapter One starts with the short tribute film Lee made during the height of NYC being the epicenter of the pandemic. Lee moves from present to past, so we don’t fully get to the World Trade Center until the third episode’s Chapters 5 and 6. I am hoping that the fourth episode, which airs on September 11, 2021, will be a fitting coda to this impressive, sprawling documentary. It’s a typical Spike Lee Joint gumbo that’s compulsively watchable even if you have to turn away (or turn it off as I did) more than once. Lee seamlessly works in musical digressions and movie footage as commentary, and uses still photographs from the likes of Gordon Parks and Stanley Kubrick. There are 200 people interviewed here, some I knew of beforehand and many I did not, and I won’t forget any of them. This series is an extremely well-constructed dissertation. ![]() Lee lets this revelation slowly sink in, allowing you to connect them to their employer’s Flight 93. One person calls the steady stream of bodies with no place to be stored during the height of NYC’s epicenter tenure “9/11 in slow motion.” And a comical section with Black flight attendants talking about how they referred to the rare all-Black and brown crew assignment as “a Soul Plane” takes on a sudden sense of impending doom when you discover they work for United. People we see in the early pandemic-based sections return in the 9/11 episode. Juxtaposing 9/11 and the pandemic seems at first like a random act, but Lee and editor Barry Alexander Brown (who also appears here) constantly build or expose parallels between the events. I feel compelled to warn you of the show’s intensity while at the same time issuing a strong recommendation based on the episodes I’ve seen. Reliving it was at times too much for me to bear. Full disclosure: I suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, which was exacerbated by witnessing the events of 9/11, and I had a severe panic attack watching the graphic footage Lee presents. For those of us who bore firsthand witness to both events dissected in this masterful work, there is major potential for this to be quite triggering, especially in its sixth chapter. I was faced with this dilemma since I obtained the three episodes provided to me a few days before this review’s deadline, and I found the ordeal of watching in such a short period of time to be overwhelming. The release pattern may upset some, but truth be told, this is the last thing you want to binge watch.
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