| Issue #50, March 23, 2007 |
Guy de Fraumeni’s Hollywod 1n The Hamptons
Black Snake Moan
&
The Most
Watch out! Movies are Hazardous Materials. Reviewers especially find many too hot to handle. Volatile or not, every movie gets to at least one audience member in some way or another. Even then, it is easy to misinterpret the moviemaker’s intent, just as a dear reader might not know where the reviewer is coming from. Two recent films that are both critics’ HazMats are Black Snake Moan and The Host. These are the kind of movies I review wearing a lead-lined, yellow rubber suit and hood with insulated goggles to allow me to review bravely. Sensible folks will initially be appalled at my recommending a trashy exploitation film that oozes sleazoid, black-white race stereotypes like Black Snake Moan. Most would consider a movie having an oversexed white girl chained in the home of a blues playing black man a horror movie. I ask you to think again. Then there’s an actual horror movie, of the “Creature that Will Devour Anything in Sight” variety, whose heroine is a thirteen-year-old moppet, known as The Host. Let me explain.
Audacious is the word for Black Snake Moan. We could not expect less from Craig Brewer, who also wrote and directed Hustle & Flow, a film glowing with a flow of passionate pimps, pink prostitutes and day and night nymphomaniacs out of the 1950s – titillating, pulp paperback, white trash S&M fantasies. With Black Snake Moan, he just about achieves his goal of busting the old Southern cornpone-porn genre by adding musical hymns to the American Way and comedy that bumps the Amos ’n Andy humor up to the wrath of lusty and lurid, bare-chested glory. Mr. Brewer burst forth from Sundance where his Hustle & Flow won the Audience award. Paramount then bought if for $ 9.5 million. At that time, a panel of Southern filmmakers was asked how they avoided Southern stereotypes. Brewer and others didn’t necessarily want to give up the raw material. Rather, they wanted to turn them upside down and inside out and goose them to new meaning. Brewer does that with the givens of the ol’ South, just as he utilizes the blues of his hometown Memphis. The film’s title, Black Snake Moan, is taken from a song by Blind Lemon Jefferson – the kind of music that snaked up from the hellish steam heat of the Delta like a paddleboat brought north by the Devil.
The opening scenes announce a down and dirty view of the South rarely seen and felt vividly. Rae, played by big-time star Christina Ricci, and her boyfriend, Ronnie, are shaking up a trailer with earth-moving sex. He’s leaving for boot camp and neither can handle the parting. He becomes violently sick and she goes off on a wild, drinking, druggy sex rampage, which leaves her a rumpled mess by the side of the road. The incomparable Samuel L. Jackson, as Lazarus the biblically inspired farmer, finds her and carries her home to heal her. His internal, fire and brimstone rage is tamped down to atone for the lascivious Christian beliefs boiling within. Having found out about Rae’s insatiable cravings, he shackles her to a radiator with a forty-pound chain. It’s true that Mr. Brewer forces theatrical metaphors but, being extracted from Southern history, he also creates a new myth. Black Snake Moan is a very serious balance of pulp rascality and high-pitched, wicked Southern murk.
Black Snake Moan uncoils like a rattlesnake, with frightening heights of toxic venom against a lovingly pictured American South of yellow-green bean fields and unforgettable images backed by some of the best music you’ll hear in any film this year. Redemption will not come easily to Rae or Lazarus, but the filmmaker does relent in its final act as he heals open wounds and applies a soothing balm of tenderness. Proactive fans will find this a letdown. However, they cannot contain this forcefully creative director as he is revealing new vistas of cinema.
The Host, a re-spun monster thriller from Korean director Bong Joon-ho, resurfaces a toxic waste-fed reptilian fright with an uncanny, fresh flair. Like Fred Astaire reinventing an old dance routine, Joon-ho taps out a dazzling array of directorial acuity. From its opening attack scene, comparisons will be made to Spielberg’s direction but (and it’s a big but) Mr. Bong’s terror does not guarantee a happy ending, even though the defenders are a family akin to Little Miss Sunshine’s. It’s one of the ugliest films of its kind and the most wonderful. It’s acclaim at the New York and Cannes festivals underline the strong messages it conveys of U.S. world-bullying and environmental negligence. See it before the film gets cleaned up.
Guy Jean de Fraumeni is the producer/writer/director of award winning European and American feature films. He has been a judge at Major Film and TV award competitions, including the Oscars, the Emmy’s and various film festivals. Sarah Halsey assists him.
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