DVD Review Rewind #1: Black Snake Moan

(ChrisandKenny-Gras Rating: 3-Tubs of Hot Buttered Popcorn)

From the movie poster alone, it is apparent that Black Snake Moan is a different kind of film. It's not every day one sees an young white girl chained up by an old black man with a tagline like "Everything is hotter down south" emblazed across the image. Sexual implications abound with such exploitive imagery and it's a wonder that more moviegoers weren't sold on the film by such a provocative poster. Leaving aside the nasty sociological ramifications of age, race, and sex proposed by such a image, Everyone associated with this movie have conjured a film that draws you in for a something way more touching than you expect. Like the lure of passing a strip joint, only for you to go inside and find out that it's now a church.

Left to her own devices when her boyfriend (Timberlake) enlists, Rae (Ricci) quickly succumbs to the nymphomaniac urges that have made her infamous in the small southern town. Meanwhile, Lazarus (Jackson) comes to grips with the fact that his wife has run off with his own brother (DAMN!) and can't get over this feeling of loss and failure. After a night out lands Rae (all beat up and near death) in front of Lazarus' house, he takes it upon himself to cure the little slutty hottie of her sinful ways, unknowingly finding his own redemption in the process.

I won't go into how great Samuel L. Jackson is in this film or how hot Christina Ricci looks all dirty in white cotton panties with a chain around her waist for 70% of the film, what I will say is that united, they put together a nice story with a "down home" kind of feeling. This is a movie of how people might preconceive the wrong thing just by what people look like on the outside. Jackson's, Ricci's, and Justin Timberlake's characters are very flawed, but they rise like a phoenix and it makes you feel good for them and for humanity. This movie takes its characters (and the audience) to hell and back in the hopes that everybody understands each other a little better on the other side of the journey. "What's your opinion?...we'd like to know."