Watch New Orleans: Music in Exile For Free

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

If this film had high production and great special effects and seamless blends it would suffer. As for what it had to say and how it was done, fantastic. It gave me a glimpse at this great 'CITY OF THE SOUL' and their musical contribution to the WORLD, the artists loss and fortitude and our need to do more than give empty gestures and mouth play. DR. JOHN, God Bless Him, I first heard him on the 'Hippie Underground' Radio Stations and Dave Herman from New York Radio on Friday nights. New Orleans must come back as close to what it was and not as an interviewed person said: " a brand name" . I heard and saw people in this film that i had only caught the ends of their songs on the radio. This was a seat of the pants film, just as New Orleans is getting by today. Great, as far as i am concerned. If you miss this WORK, it is a loss for all concerned.

Director Mugge and his team went searching for New Orleans musicians who had dispersed from that city in the first few months after Katrina. They traveled to places like Austin, Memphis and Baton Rouge, but also looked around New Orleans for players who had returned or never left.The film is an amalgam of footage from the storm and flood, post flood damage in the city, the current (end of 2005) club scene in NO, and scenes at venues in other cities, featuring a number of bands in performance and several talking heads, the best known being Cyril Neville, Mac Rebennack (Dr. John) and Irma Thomas. Neville gets off one of the best quips when he says that he doesn't think of NO as a point in the deep south, but as the northern most point in the Caribbean.I think this documentary was made on the cheap: it suffers from poor production values, the photography is mediocre, the editing unimaginative. The bands skew decidedly towards rock and roll, not my sense of what is unique about the NO musical heritage. At least one group is little better than a garage band. Marcia Ball offers the best singing performance in the film.I did find it interesting to catch a glimpse inside several of the well known NO music venues, places like The Spotted Cat, Maple Leaf, Snug Harbor, Palm Tavern, and Irma Thomas and her husband Emile Jackson's Lion's Den, sadly now ruined, probably beyond repair, by flood damage. The concept for this film was a very good one, but the product's main value is and will be archival. My grades: 5/10 (C) (Seen at the NWFC's Reel Music series, 01/06/07)