skank on a chain
I watched Hustle and Flow last night, and the quality of that film somehow doubled the disappointment I felt when watching Black Snake Moan. I didn’t exactly expect Black Snake Moan to be, you know, good, but I thought I could be some sort of interesting post-exploitation thing. It was not. Watching Hustle really drove home Tom Breihan’s comments on Moan in the Village Voice:
I can, however, say that there’s something truly misguided about the film’s treatment of music, which plays into a deep authenticity fetish. Whenever we see Jackson making music, it’s an instinctive thing, done from the gut with no hint of technique or craft, like primal-scream therapy or some shit. When he tries to teach Ricci how to play guitar, he doesn’t tell her about scales or tuning; he says, “Close your eyes and think on what you love.” Hustle & Flow played into the same sort of dark-and-smoky juke-joint cliches, but it also treated the craft of its musicians with a certain respect and fascination. If we’re to believe Black Snake Moan, people never write music; it just flows out of them. Maybe I’m being needlessly cynical here, but I don’t think music ever happens that way. I didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about Music and Lyrics, but at least that movie showed Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore struggling to write a song; they weren’t forces of nature or anything.
Hustle may still have its problems. For one, Craig Brewer seems to be imagining a South not particularly unlike the one depicted in the novels of J.T. LeRoy, and we all know how authentic his experience of that region was. But, the movie works. Brewer’s follow-up, though, exists in some no-man’s land. It seems to want to parody exploitation, but not more than it actually deeply wants to be exploitative. Here’s to hoping it’s just a sophomore slump.