The Rant: Black Snake Moan

As our loyal Tortilla Chips and Milk readers would tell you, Last summer's Snakes On a Plane had everything I could want in a movie. Well, I was wrong. After seeing the first Black Snake Moan, I realized that what Snakes On a Plane was missing was a hot little white girl on a chain. As usual the following is not a review just some impressions.

Black Snake Moan is Craig Brewer's follow up to Hustle and Flow, a movie that I absolutely loved. Like Hustle and Flow, Black Snake Moan is based in the Dirty South, offers music as salvation, and displays a predominantly fucked up morality.

As Hustle and Flow's plot could be summarized in a Hip Hop Single, Black Snake Moan's plot of Man loses wife to brother, Man finds a nymphomaniac, Man chains nymphomaniac to a radiator for a few days, Man rediscovers love and the blues as a result, could also be a blues jam...The best blues jam ever!

I know there must be difficulties marketing movies like Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan, but the commercials which feature a crazed Samuel L. Jackson and a chained up Christina Ricci are terribly misleading. Rather than a Pulp Fiction-esque
thriller, Black Snake Moan, like Hustle and Flow is a slow paced, gritty, character based film, examining a culture that seems so alien it's hard to believe it's probably only 15 miles from a Wal-Mart.

Christina Ricci, spends a great deal of this movie either topless, in heat, or both. I can never watch The Addams Family again. Or Mermaids for that matter...I mean Mermaids for the first time cause I've never seen it...look over there!

Samuel L. Jackson can switch gears like no other. His ability to switch from comedic, to terrifying, to crazed, and back again is rivaled by only Christopher Walken.

Justin Timberlake is also in this movie...let's just say that a whiny, hillbilly chump with no balls is a role he was born to play.

The musical scenes were incredible and I'm not even a fan of the blues.

I love the way the local drug dealer shows the in his own special way that he cares for Ricci's character. I think it's a sad comment on my part that I understood where he was coming from.

Every Samuel L. Jackson movie should have a scene where he stares down someone who has him looking down the barrel of a gun.

Out of the handful of intense moments in the movie, my favorite is the anticipation that builds as we see SLJ's truck drive up after the teenager farmhand has been jumped by Ricci.

The only problem I had with the movie is the dragged out ending. Still I was absorbed throughout and left the theater content.