If I had already seen Black Snake Moan, the new Craig Brewer film starring Samuel L Jackson and Christina Ricci, I would tell you that it was extraordinarily unique, uneven and fascinating. If I had already seen the movie I might say that while it doesn’t exactly work, Brewer is a talented enough writer and director to make even a stumble better than most other filmmaker’s best work. And I would definitely tell you that this film continues to establish that what Martin Scorsese is to gangster movies, Brewer is to music movies.
Black Snake Moan, while it’s about an old black guy chaining a young white nympho to a radiator, is essentially a music movie. Specifically it’s a blues movie, and its soundtrack is soaked with real down South blues music – which you can now hear on the film’s new website. The whole soundtrack is there to be streamed, including the songs that have Samuel L Jackson singing, so you know you’re going to check it out just for that novelty. But check out the title track, which has Sam actually doing a pretty mean monologue/talking blues that comes during the best and most electric scene in the film (which is what I would think if I had seen the movie).
Also check out Black Snake Moan’s MySpace* page and watch the exclusive trailer. The movie is playing at the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, and if I had seen the movie already, I would be trying to convince the studio to let me run a review of it when it plays there. Black Snake Moan is out February 23rd.
*What’s up with the people who hate MySpace? To me this is like hating paper, or email. It’s a tool. You don’t have to interact with the 14 year olds, which is part of the beauty of the whole thing – you create your own network and play inside of it. I just don’t get the knee-jerk reaction against stuff like MySpace – I think more often than not it comes from not having a fucking clue.