Closed for Storm

I am a huge fan of Jake, Bright Sun Films, and the Abandoned series he makes on YouTube.

This takes his concept from that Abandoned series to a long-form feature-length medium on all major platforms for the first time.

The documentary itself focuses on the rise and fall of New Orleans first major theme park. Jake does a fantastic job finding people from the community and interviewing them. He digs to the soul behind the abandoned structures. He also does a great job giving us the history of the park before Katrina so we as viewers care about the park as much as the people in the community did.

My biggest nitpick would be I found the last 15 minutes to be a little flat. The producers on the project gambled choosing to follow a few specific people trying to repurpose the land; no one got the ending they wanted. The gamble could have paid off, but even as is, I think there was a missed opportunity to show more of the heartbreak and disappointment this plot of land has been subjected to for the last 15 years. The last few scenes in the documentary are flat because we didn't get a deep emotional pay-off on one of the narratives they set up. Digging in deeper on the heartbreak and frustration of those people that were trying to repurpose the land may have elevated the final moments of this documentary just a touch.

If you are a fan of Abandoned on YouTube, this is a must-watch. If you are just a general fan of documentaries, this holds its own without any knowledge of Jake's previous work. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in Katrina, New Orleans, theme parks, or urban exploration. For a first feature-length documentary this is an amazing achievement and Jake could easily find himself helming more documentaries in the future!

Well done and keep up the great work!

Strengths

• Jake is a fantastic narrator (A+++)

*** His slow and clear cadence works perfectly with the somber abandoned material, sweeping drone footage, and delivery of heartbreaking backstory; this is a skill he seasoned with hours of YouTube narration and he has a gift for narration***

• Interesting and diverse interviews cut well against other footage and peppered throughout
• Great footage. The drone work on the abandoned park is fantastic. They also mine old footage to juxtapose the current dilapidated state of rides against the vibrant footage from the past. Very well cut and one of the strengths of both this documentary and the Abandoned series!

Weaknesses

• At times the score overpowered the narration early; they did seem to dial this down later but I found a few spots in the beginning that the narration was fighting with the score
• The last 15 minutes was a bit of a letdown.

As a big fan of the various Bright Sun Films, I was expecting a lot. This film either needed a whole lot more content to sustain the feature length or should be heavily edited and make it a short film.

Instead, it feels like one of their 25 minute Youtube videos with added, and duplicative, content. There is only so much meandering through the carnage wrought by Katrina the audience can take. Additionally, my guess is that the interviews they conducted had few gems. So, they chose to include a lot of filler, dull comments to keep striving for a feature film.

It didn't work.

Having enjoyed the Bright Sun documentaries on Youtube I was pleasantly surprised to find this full-length feature on Kanopy.

A park is not a person, yet this story personalized the Katrina disaster more than anything else about I've previously seen. "Closed for Storm" focuses the tragedy on a place whose sole purpose was to bring joy. Heartbreaking to see what happened.. Great use is made of vintage footage showing the park in happier times and the interviewees are clearly sad about its demise. Understandably economics precluded the park's development, but New Orleans deserved better...and this film couldn't have made that point more clearly.

I am a retired "senior", I have seen and/or experienced many acts of nature over my lifetime. My fond expression, because it is true, "Mother Nature always wins in the long haul."

In the case of the new amusement park in New Orleans, opened as Jazzland in 2000, it didn't take very long. Hurricane Katrina in August of 2005 pretty much did the deed as it did to much of the rest of New Orleans. The park has remained closed and abandoned since that time.

This documentary deals with all that, plus some recent years efforts to either rebuild it or re-purpose it but so far it still stands dilapidated, just a ghost of its short glory years. The title comes from a sign at the park's entrance which still says "Closed for Storm."

I found this documentary very interesting with interviews with many people, some video of the park when it was new and thriving, some current video of the ruins, and a view of New Orleans neighborhoods in the Katrina aftermath. What the documentary could have used was periodic subtitles that specified when, e.g. "June 2010" or "May 2020" to inform exactly when certain things were represented by the documentary. But overall pretty interesting. I have never visited the park but do remember driving by on I-10 headed east.

I found it on Amazon streaming videos.

UPDATE: March 8, 2023 - It was just announced that a deal has been made for a 4-year, $500 Million project to clean up the site and convert it into a brand new theme park. Most details are not yet available.

You know how sometimes you're with some casual friend, acquaintance or coworker, and they relate a story as if you know everything about their life and social group, when you mostly have no idea what they are talking about? That's one of the main weaknesses in this film. It feels like viewing random home movies. I say that having lived in Louisiana for longer than I ever thought I would, with multi-generational ties to New Orleans and it's surroundings. Nonetheless this is a pleasant enjoyable passion project that will be appealing to urban explorers and fans of childhood chimeras.

I couldnt begin to tell you who, how and why Jazz-land was ever built, and I lived there during the years when its inception was becoming a reality. It always sounded like a boondoggle to me. Coming out of the era of very high murder rates and economic malaise in the early- mid 90's, it must have taken people with extraordinary vision and tenacity to bring it to fruition, long before Katrina came along. That is certainly one story worth telling, not told here.

For to me the vast terrain of New Orleans East as observed from the roads and highways is a wasteland of broken dreams, consistent neglect and strange decade-specific civil planning experiments, one after the other abandoned in boom bust cycles, that are not visible in such stark relief in the more densely populated areas the city. It is geographically and metaphorically out of sight, out of mind for the rest of the city and suburbs. This documentary could be improved by rooting it in such geographical context, and support its positions with some input from area architectural historians, for a little grounding in objectivity, solving the film's problem without delving into the byzantine and arcane chicanery that got it open, and promptly forgot about it when an opportunity presented itself.

For the few years it was open, it was loved by the people that went, and profitable even as it was left to its own devices. That is the story that is attempted here, in its personal nostalgic tone of mourning for what was lost and might have been. I have seen these same post Katrina. Videos and snapshots, the mold and watermarks and the drone of insects buzzing in someone's abandoned office or home. A story that is told over and over in New Orleans, which never was and never will be The Big Easy for the people that call it home.

Very recently I have heard rumblings that it might revert to a natural park of some sort. There is much enthusiasm in New Orleans these days for streamlined light-handed reclamation of abandoned or not so abandoned properties to ecologically stable public use, along the lines of NYC's The Highline. I hope such enthusiasm is sustained beyond the current real estate bubble.