If you’re looking for that off-beat movie that will be so refreshing after all the mainstream Hollywood crap, look no further, Black Snake Moan is here! Directed and written by Craig Brewer, whose last movie Hustle & Flow was quite good, this is a drama with a lot of sexual tension and great music. Actually, there’s a lot of tension in this movie period. Racial, sexual, and just general, life tension makes Black Snake Moan quite an experience. And these are just the strongest motives, we have here poverty, sexual abuse, broken dreams, and many other fucked up themes popping out constantly.
It’s amazing how Brewer managed to keep this movie from spinning out because it is quite explosive. Of course, Samuel L. Jackson was phenomenal along with beautiful Christina Ricci, who started her career as Wednesday Adams and in the following years proved that she’s an incredibly talented actress. To counter all that fuckedupness, the movie is full of phenomenal music and I spent a good two weeks after I saw it listening exclusively to the soundtrack and blues in general.
Lazarus is a simple man living in rural Tennessee. He was a blues musician, but in a different life, now he’s just a farmer, barely getting by. As always, trouble just keeps compounding on itself, as his wife leaves him and he starts sinking deeper and deeper into depression with religion as his only light in life. One day he finds a badly beaten girl near his house and immediately takes her in. She seems to be badly beaten and abused and he decides to nurse her back to health. However, his methods seem a bit unusual.
There’s something in this movie. I can’t quite describe it, it’s this feeling that the author stumbled upon some deeper truth that penetrates the veneer of race, gender, money, and everything else. A human touch, something that helped us evolve from berry eating apes into whatever the fuck we are now. The empathy that we all feel but sometimes find hard to enact in the real world. Here we have an example of a man who’s losing everything and still decides to help someone in the best way he knows. And I know she’s this hot girl, but I have a feeling that Lazarus would have helped any man or a woman. This might be it, sort of a vague belief in humankind.
And you can’t help but feel the Mississippi heat and that sexually charged energy. After all, Christina Ricci spends most of this movie in small white panties and even smaller top. Not to mention the other facts that I will leave for you to discover. In the end, if you’re looking for similar movies I recommend you check out Sleeping Beauty. It’s a much more serious but equally sexually charged and fucked up movie.
Director: Craig Brewer
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, Justin Timberlake, John Cothran Jr.
Fun Stuff: Christina Ricci wore an actual forty pound chain during filming. Craig Brewer brought various different chains on the set and told Ricci to choose the one that suited her best. Samuel L. Jackson learned to play the guitar for this film, while completing production of Snakes on a Plane (2006)
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IMDb Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0462200/
