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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Moan-y Moan-y

You can argue that Black Snake Moan falls apart when hit by the wake of its own good intentions. You can argue that a performance as raw and real as Jackson’s is lost on a central conceit – an unquenchable fever for “dick,” to use the film’s terminology, tamed only by a moron boyfriend – that is simply too goofy to hold up. You can definitely argue that Brewer’s ability to convey ideas of time – as in, this whole movie seems to take place in a week, when it clearly has to be at least a month – is so messed up that the whole thing seems like a giant wink at the audience.
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13 Responses to “Moan-y Moan-y”

  1. LexG says:

    Good stuff, though I was hoping for more details on your earlier reference to the bad or inappropriate laughs it got from a Friday-night Valley audience.
    As a connoisseur of multiplex horror stories (and the Valley/Burbank is usually comedy gold for clueless weekend audiences), I’d be curious to hear the particulars.

  2. The Carpetmuncher says:

    Sam Jackson is indeed “lights out” good in BSM, but it’s hardly “as usual” – the reality is, Sam has been walking through his films for a decade now, and this is his best work since Pulp Fiction.
    For such a beloved actor (and I’m a fan), take a look at the films in his career, and you don’t see much stellar work. Hardly much great “acting” at all. Instead, you’ve got a handful of great performances that hold up a boatload of very lazy work in mediocre to bad films.
    I loved BSM, though the last half hour wasn’t nearly as exciting as the first hour. Jackson and Ricci both do their best work in years, and Craig Brewer is the real deal, great filmmaker, doing the kind of stuff Tarantino probably would have been doing if he hadn’t struck it rich and got lazy/stoned….

  3. Jimmy the Gent says:

    His best performance since Pulp Fiction? I don’t think so. I admit Jackson has been coasting on his coolness for awhile, but he delivers when he feels like it. Doesn’t anyone remember his amazing work in Changing Lanes? CL is one of the most underrated movies of the last five years.
    People who dismiss BSM reveal more about their sexual/racial hang-ups than anything about the movie itself. It takes the conventions of Southern Gothic exploitation, but is really a sweet, old-fashioned movie about outsiders creating their own family unit. If you don’t “get” the thunderstorm music performance then you don’t get the movie. The juke joint performance is one for the time capsule.
    And Timberlake does just fine in the role. It’s small, but important. If we don’t believe the connection he has with Rae then the ending doesn’t work.
    Poland, you need to examine your feelings about Timberlake. I’ll give you Edison Froce. Heck, even Timberlake would probably give you Edison Force. But his work in Alpha Dog is the work of someone who has “it.” There’s no denying the guy is multi-talented. Deal with it.

  4. Chicago48 says:

    Hmm…I saw it differently…it was good old B- trash…like one of those Tennessee Williams plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Streetcar named Desire…lots of dialog… about broken people going nowhere (just like Laz’s wife tells him). I felt uncomfortable watching Rae undressed and chained for 2 DAMN DAYS – why didn’t he throw a sheet over her to cover her up? And that ending with Ronnie getting those anxiety spells – that was overdone and unrealistic. A really really weak ending…compared to Djay in Hustle and Flow, at least he had a dream come true, there was hope at the end and you felt like Djay was going to be somebody. Rae and Ronnie you felt – where the f*** are they going except into another argument and then divorce? No hope for them. BSM needed more tweaking …it missed the mark just slightly and ended up sexploitation trash.

  5. Chicago48 says:

    DP – agree with you about JT. He didn’t do it for me in this movie. I don’t see his appeal in the looks department and he’s really a skinny white boy. Ribisi made mud of JT. As for Sam, it was the best I’ve seen him in since Eve’s Bayou and Changing Lanes. I normally don’t go to a Sam Jackson movie, because like someone said, he phones it in and that’s why he’s never up for an Oscar. It’s the same-o same-o, but he did come across as Lazarus in this movie…but whether it’s Oscar worthy? Let’s wait see what the year gives up.

  6. Cadavra says:

    I respectfully disagree. Whatever the merits (or lack) of SNAKES ON A PLANE and FREEDOMLAND, he single-handedly kept those pictures afloat. He was terrific as SHAFT, and was hilarious in THE INCREDIBLES and an unfairly-trashed little gem called THE 51st STATE. And even when he does coast, he’s still more compulsively watchable than many actors who draw far larger salaries in much bigger pictures.

  7. How was The 51st State “unfairly-trashed”? It was terrible. Although, to be honest, I only remember Sam standing around in a kilt, so maybe I’m not the best judge.
    And, seriously, Snakes on a Plane was hilarious. So ridiculously bad. The only good things about Freedomland were Edie Falco and when Sam’s character got called “Big Daddy” – that was a hoot!
    Anyway.
    I really want to see this movie, but since it’s flopped in the states and the look of the movie itself, I doubt we’ll get it any time soon. Maybe direct-to-video?

  8. jeffmcm says:

    Can anyone tell me what the title of this post means? (I think I know but I want independent verification.)

  9. Chicago48 says:

    Kamikaze – BSM is a good argument for release to online download with the first-week release. I wanted to see this Friday at the nearby muvee house, but it started at 4:15, I get off work at 5, would get there about 5:30.
    I had to wait until Saturday to see the first show at 1:15. Now had it been available for download via movielink (example) I could have downloaded and seen it the first day opening. Plus, in the midwest we’ve had very bad winter storms and weather…wouldn’t that be a good argument for releasing it online for download?

  10. mysteryperfecta says:

    “People who dismiss BSM reveal more about their sexual/racial hang-ups than anything about the movie itself.”
    That’s a helluva thing to say. What are you inferring, exactly? You might want to rephrase.

  11. Cadavra says:

    It’s a pun on “Mony Mony,” a hit rock song by Tommy James and the Shondells (and covered two decades later by Billy Idol).

  12. jeffmcm says:

    That’s what I thought, nothing important except that it says to me that DP has music on the brain.

  13. LYT says:

    Though I haven’t seen BSM yet, I think it’s unfair to say Justin Timberlake can’t act. I was as predisposed to hate him as I was Mark Wahlberg, based on previous pop music careers — but JT has been great on Saturday Night Live twice, and was absolutely fine in Alpha Dog.
    He may suck in BSM, but he doesn’t suck in toto.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon