An average doc that far too often turns into a showcase for Roberts' burgeoning career as a rapper, something that often takes away from its potential as a real human and emotional story.
4 Comments
08/21/08
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Trouble the Water (2008)
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Reviews Counted:69
Fresh:67
Rotten:2
Average Rating:8.1/10
Consensus: This incredible documentary displays the tragedy and mismanagement of Katrina along with the heroism of strangers and survivors.
Theatrical Release:Aug 22, 2008 Limited
Box Office: $146,384
Synopsis: How is it that Hurricane Katrina managed to revolutionize American attitudes about the environment, but somehow the very people most devastated by the storm have become refugees in their own... [More]
Director: Carl Deal, Tia Lessin
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Reviews for Trouble the Water
Later, unfortunately, the film’s energy drains like the waters, leaving a wrack of tired folk wisdoms and ear-injuring rap songs.
12/05/08
The people in Trouble The Water don't want your pity. . .they want outrage for the injustices suffered. They get it, and more power to them for keeping that anger alive.
09/06/08
What Lessin and Deal provide is a considered structure that places Roberts' footage within a larger social and emotional context as part of a self-defined life, in which Hurricane Katrina was both tragedy and opportunity.
08/21/08
Top CriticBy picking up on this personal story and serving it up in a way that plays commentator, not critic, the filmmakers allows Kim and Scott to speak for themselves. The results are astoundingly brutal and beautifully honest.
09/18/08
Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal make jarring cuts from Roberts' personal footage to the mainstream news reports, emphasizing the unreal tone of the professional media.
10/17/08
Trouble the Water's greatest of its many values is its incisive record of how a massive catastrophe is really a story of multiple individuals, families, blocks and neighborhoods.
08/22/08
Trouble the Water is so hopeful and full of life that it would be a shame if it were dismissed as just another Hurricane Katrina documentary.
09/19/08
Gut-wrenching, infuriating, hopeful and unlike any other documentary ever made, "Trouble the Water" is a very specific view of two powerful human beings whose humble heroism and instincts for survival put to shame that of the authorities purported to prov
08/06/08
Trouble the Water proves that a couple of gutsy amateurs with a home video camera can work wonders.
09/18/08
Trouble the Water reveals not only the terrors of the hurricane but also the political and personal valences of its legendary mismanagement.
08/22/08
Trouble the Water, along with Spike Lee’s extraordinary four-hour epic, When the Levees Broke, remains one of the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New O
09/08/08
Top CriticTrouble the Water is ineradicably moving.
08/18/08
Top CriticTrouble the Water’s political-made-personal power to invoke both Anderson Cooper levels of rage and the sense that hope springs eternal rests solely with its main subjects.
08/21/08
Trouble the Water is choppy, overly long and at times almost indecipherable, but it's indelible.
10/02/08
Top CriticThere have been a number of films about the national disaster and scandal of Hurricane Katrina but none have put you as directly into the eye of that storm as Trouble the Water.
08/08/08
A riveting documentary about some impoverished African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
03/22/08
A historical document with a human center.
08/21/08
Trouble the Water is probably the best of the films made on the subject. That's because the film concentrates on a few specific stories rather than trying to provide a comprehensive examination of its subject matter.
10/23/08
It's a view of the disaster that no amount of news coverage would ever manage to capture.
09/08/09
Latest News for Trouble the Water
December 03, 2008:
Gothams Dive Into Frozen River 
"Frozen River" was the big winner at Tuesday's 18th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards, taking home two of the six prizes, including best feature. More...
November 19, 2008:
A Closer Look at Oscar's Documentary Contenders
With awards season just around the corner, it's time to start handicapping the various Oscar races -- and the Los Angeles Times has kicked things off with a look at the 15... More...
August 28, 2008:
Raw, unfiltered and expletive-laced, but a brutally-honest flick guaranteed to give you an unsanitized picture of what life was like for the least fortunate folks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
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August 21, 2008:
Shocking Hurricane Katrina documentary created from real-time home movies shot by storm victim.
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