black snake moaning

At the Times, A.O. Scott (who is also in rare form today with his review of Wild Hogs) writes that Black Snake Moan...

...joins a dubious stereotype of black manhood to an uplifting, sentimental fable....the character, played with his usual fearsome wit by Samuel L. Jackson, is a tried-and-true Hollywood stock figure: the selfless, spiritually minded African-American who seems to have been put on the earth to help white people work out their self-esteem issues. No doubt “Black Snake Moan” is a provocative title, but a more accurate one might be “Chaining Miss Daisy to the Radiator in Her Underwear.”

At the Voice, Rob Nelson writes:

[A]fter his camera has had its fill of ogling Rae [Christina Ricci], [director Craig] Brewer turns out to have…only a little on his mind and none of it, amazingly, to do with race. Whatever provocation helps sell the movie…doesn't give Black Snake Moan the slightest hint of substance, which is maybe the real reason it got the green light. Both times I saw the film…male buddies in the theater turned to one another with knowing smirks—like, Holy moly, now ain't this one a l'il vixen? Maybe these guys had lost their . . . uh, full attention by the time Brewer contrives to get Rae all gussied up and ready to shake her thing down the aisle. But by then, I might reckon the good ol' boys got what they came for.

David Edelstein at New York Magazine:

At bottom, Black Snake Moan is an old-fashioned feel-good, Sunday-schoolish kind of parable about a broken, bitter ex-alcoholic who's spiritually reborn by, uh, chaining a little white nympho in shorty-cutoffs to his radiator. But it's not how you think! Wouldn't you have chained Anna Nicole to your radiator if you could have saved her? Wouldn't you chain Britney to your radiator?

Lisa Schwartzbaum at Entertainment Weekly recommends that you...

…jump for the chance to see the slip-slim, saucer-eyed star…arch and moan and writhe with abandon, acting out sexual addiction as a fever of lust and emotional emptiness that entitles the camera to focus on her little white underpants. The picture would have been a whole other kettle of blackened catfish had Rae been played by an unknown, or a clothed chick. But that's not what's for sale here; showbiz is.

Over at Salon, Stephanie Zacharek calls it “a wild and sweet little picture about sex, redemption and music, though perhaps not necessarily in that order.” She writes approvingly that “Brewer is a provocateur, a troublemaker…I think, with Black Snake Moan, Brewer's secret is finally out of the bag: For all that he wants to rattle and disarm us, he's really a humanist in wolf's clothing.”

Here's Brewer himself, from an an earlier interview with Zacharek:

So can we actually have movies where a woman chained up can be a character in a narrative, like you would in a Flannery O'Connor short story, and not represent my take on women?

I'm exploring something that has nothing to do with race or gender. I'm the crazy girl on the end of that chain. I'm the one who felt I was losing control of my mind and my body because I was not tethered to anyone. And I needed to be snapped back…. So I think it's foolish to immediately jump to sexism because of the imagery. But I will give them this: I'm asking for it.

…man alive, you look at this imagery on this poster, and I'm so obviously banging this drum. It's like, you really believe that I believe this? That women need to be chained up? Can we not think metaphorically once race and gender are introduced? ... Can we never go back to that time when people can be people and we can explore whatever the hell we want to? Of course we can, but there are going to be people who take exception to that.