| Critic |
Review |
Quote |
Analysis |
This Week's Verdict |
Dana Stevens,
Slate |
Black Snake Moan |
"I guarantee that the words provocative, bold, and courageous will be bandied about in discussions of this movie, and they won't be entirely misplaced. Writer and director Craig Brewer, who made 2005's Hustle and Flow, has a fine sense of locale (here, the Tennessee countryside), a way of coaxing thrilling performances from actors, and terrific taste in music. But can we just start with something very basic here? Chaining someone to your radiator is wrong. Depriving a near-naked and recently assaulted stranger of the most basic physical liberty for days on end is a sick, perverse, and cruel thing to do. Black Snake Moan appears to be — or, worse, pretends to be — oblivious to that simple fact. And that obliviousness makes all of the movie's supposed risk-taking seem more like exploitation." |
Well, damn right. Between Hustle and Flow and now Black Snake Moan, it's difficult to approach any of Craig Brewer's with any sort of fair critical eye knowing that the man is going to romanticize truly horrific human behavior. An artistic sense of place and great soundtracks alone don't make a great picture. At least someone's calling him on it.
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Armond White,
New York Press |
Black Snake Moan |
"No doubt writer/director Craig Brewer, whose debut feature was Hustle and Flow, means well. His taste for low-down ribaldry gives him access to a sympathetic observation of thwarted lives that are a genuine but usually ignored part of American experience. He's a Tarantino with his feet on Southern ground instead of his head up the ass of Hollywood/Hong Kong junk." |
Armond, buddy. Do some research. Craig Brewer's debut feature was The Poor and Hungry in 2000. IMDB is just click away, tough guy. The Tarantino corollary is actually a good spot, but not for the reasons White cites. The truth is that Brewer and Tarantino excel at extreme exploitation of these "thwarted lives". The difference is that Tarantino admits his intent of blank entertainment. |
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Scott Tobias,
The Onion AV Club |
Wild Hogs |
"Between the tortured introductions — which include the second gag in a month (the first was in Because I Said So) about a middle-aged person accidentally downloading porn — and a prolonged pit stop in small-town New Mexico, Wild Hogs really doesn't spend much time on the road. Good thing, too, because after the guys are found sleeping side-by-side and skinny-dipping together, the writers must have run out of homosexual panic jokes. That leaves the heroes to confront the Del Fuegos, a group of biker thugs led by an amusingly deranged Ray Liotta, and thereby rediscover the balls they'd tucked away in a jar so many years ago. It's the equivalent of Billy Crystal 'finding his smile' in City Slickers, and every bit as odious." |
Okay, so Wild Hogs is an easy target for anyone with MS Word and even a modicum of taste but Tobias here knocks it out of the park with such a choice bit of word usage that I feel like walking up the street and buying him a beer. Odious. That is exactly what the McMidlife Crisis male bonding movie is. Odious. |
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Nathan Lee,
Village Voice |
Zodiac |
"A remarkable feat of concentration, Zodiac is a fully mature triumph for reasons that bring us back to that trio of signature shots. Their explicit virtuosity stands out in a surface that forgoes the visual sweep of Seven, Fight Club, or Panic Room. Mechanical as he can be, Fincher tends to the operatic: big emotions, massive denouements, portentousness, flamboyance. Zodiac, by contrast, plays out with the cool calibrations of a 12-tone piano suite, advancing with a detached, mathematical precision capable of great variety and nuance, yet controlled by a strict discipline. It's a film that never raises its voice because it needs to speak clearly and carefully. It's got a hell of a lot to say." |
So do you, Nathan. It takes the man eight hundred words or so of hyperbole laden wankery just to make this fairly insightful point about just why David Fincher's latest happens to be swell. Getting paid by the word has to be awesome. |
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