3 posts tagged “marketing”

Black Snake Moan is about half as interesting as it thinks that it is and twice as interesting as marketing would have you believe. The previous sentence may be completely devoid of meaning. We'll see.

As I struggled to come up with enough of an opinion on this movie to at least clear the height of the image immediately to the left, it occurred to me that the film was marketed as if it were the third part of Grindhouse. Scenes of a scantily clad Christina Ricci chained to a radiator by Samuel L. Jackson's prostelatizing madman provided the centerpiece of the trailers. In my mind, at least, Black Snake Moan became that "girl-chained-to-radiator" movie, a moniker that may have been effective in turning out the exclamation point junkies at Ain't It Cool News but that had little appeal to the rest of us.

As it turns out, there's a bit more to Black Snake Moan than just "girl-chained-to-radiator". I don't say that as a positive qualitative judgment, especially since the film probably should have focused more on those scenes upon which it was obviously conceived and less time with all of the unnecessary business that surrounds the relationship between its two leads. It's not until about thirty minutes in that Ricci, a nymphomaniac in Tennessee, wakes up to find herself a prisoner of local bluesman Lazarus (Jackson), who sees it as his duty to "save" her.

Ricci plays Rae, a trashy piece of trash (oh my stars is she trashy, I mean just look at that bleached hair and the Confederate flag on her shirt!) who waves goodbye to her G.I. fiancé (Justin Timberlake) and is immediately overtaken by her desire for sex, something she has in spades. The film insists she has a sickness, though it's a little too concerned with the perfect cut of her torn T-shirt and the way her booty shakes to be convincing as a portrait of illness. Beaten up by an attempted rapist, she's found by the forlorn Lazarus, recently cuckolded by his wife. Lazarus is a God-fearing man, though that part of his madness is downplayed in favor of the much safer "woman problems", and he takes it upon himself to fix Rae. And then there is the learning of lessons, all of it progressing (pretty slowly) towards one of the better final scenes I've seen in a movie in a while.

The two leads are both really effective here. Consider the disaster that could've resulted if Brewer had gone with a more bankable, less serious actress than Christina Ricci. I mean, if it had been Lindsay Lohan up there masturbating with chains, the audience would have been more concerned with what the hell Lindsay Lohan is working through than what it means to the character. In fact, the film has that exact problem with Justin Timberlake as Rae's anxiety-ridden boyfriend. Ricci is a great actress, though, and she inhabits Rae so effectively that you forget that you're watching Wednesday Adams screw her problems away. Jackson is also great at Lazarus' wild swings between charm and anger, something that comes in most handy when he's playing a really sinister blues number entitled "Alice Mae" that provides a kind of catharsis late in the film.

Unfortunately, the actors are better than the film as a whole.

Craig Brewer (who made Hustle & Flow) is obviously enamored of his own romantic ideas of "The South", in which there's an idle-noir poetry to the language and everything has the perfect sheen of perspiration. He's a fine showman and an OK writer, but he's not a sophisticated enough director to realize how ridiculous and unbelievable his Tennessee appears to someone who doesn't share in his delusions. It's might as well be Oz. David Gordon Green's George Washington (2000), about a group of North Carolina pre-teens, has the same anthropological interest in "The South", but finds a much less sensationalistic voice in its strong cinematography, as opposed to the big name actors and overly manicured production design of Black Snake Moan.

In the end, maybe the marketing team knew exactly what they were doing. Brewer's film has the feel of, say, the recent crop of big budget remakes of cheap seventies horror films. Like the people behind The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Brewer seems to have missed the point of the exploitation films that inspired Moan. He clearly loves movies like I Spit On Your Grave (1978) or Last House On The Left (1972), but what he doesn't realize is that the originals were not made as allegories or symbolic texts; people like George Romero or Tobe Hooper weren't making rich minefields of hidden meaning (at least, not originally). They were making great, low-budget movies that critics later felt were symptomatic of attitudes or tropes of their time. Now, though, people like Eli Roth and the Grindhouse crowd are intentionally making terrible films that are "interesting texts" because they comment on gender roles or the role of the audience or what-the-fuck-ever. What was once subtext is now text, and everyone just thinks that they're so clever.

Wow, this review got away from me really quickly.

Anyway... Black Snake Moan.

Though it's meticulously crafted, the film lacks that immediate feeling of authenticity. One feels that Brewer wanted to make a movie about a girl chained to a radiator by an evangelical bluesman, but then felt the need to jam it full of meaning and subtext, ultimately creating a hollow, laborious big-budget piece of trash instead of a rich, fun, low-budget piece of trash. To invoke a cliché, "the medium is the message" with the films that inspired Brewer, but in Black Snake Moan, the message thinks that it's the message while the medium is telling you just how full of shit the message really is.