The 2007 Sundance Film Festival
Jan 18 – 28, 2007, The Final Year of Cinema Week 3
As a person who has always been deeply interested in film and the business surrounding it, film festivals have always been an object of deep fascination. On paper, a film festival is simply a place and time where a lot of different movies are shown outside of their normal theatrical exhibition schedules. In reality, well, I’m not 100% sure what the reality is. I’ve never been to one. I know what I’ve inferred from books and magazines and podcasts and other media about media: that film festivals are places where deals are done, filmmakers are lifted from obscurity, and careers are made and broken.
Sundance is likely the most commercially important film festival held in the United States and has been since it was officially renamed “Sundance” from “The US Film Festival” in 1991. Originally a small gathering of film enthusiasts in ski town Park City, Utah, the US Film Festival started gaining in importance when Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute became involved in the mid-80s. The Sundance Institute was (and is) an incubator for creative talent, holding workshops and programs to support novice independent filmmakers, also located in Park City. It only became natural that the Sundance Institute should start exhibiting films by their alumni at the film festival that was already happening in the same town. In 1984 the institute took over management of the festival, and in 1991 renamed it The Sundance Film Festival. Almost immediately afterwards Sundance became the place where new indie auteurs were discovered. At the 91 festival the debut features Slacker (dir. Richard Linklater), Poison (dir. Todd Haynes), and Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash) were premiered. The next year launched the careers of Quentin Tarantino and Allison Anders with Reservoir Dogs and Gas Food Lodging. Through the 90s, Sundance’s status as the place of breaking new indie American Cinema had well been established.
By 2007, the great indie boom of the 90s and early 2000s was beginning to recede. Distributors were no longer looking for the next The Piano (1993 Sundance debut. Distribution rights purchased by Miramax at the festival. $40 million box office on a $7 million budget). Still it was (and still is) the definitive place to celebrate American independent cinema. Even if your movie doesn’t make a dime “it played at Sundance” is still a feather in your cap.
Black Snake Moan
I am firmly of the opinion that every region of the world should have its own indie filmmaker that really gets that region’s vibe. Just as Austin, TX has Richard Linklater and Oregon has Kelly Reichhardt and Brooklyn has Spike Lee, every place deserves to have someone who really can capture that place. As a 22 year old in Nashville having freshly seen Hustle & Flow (2005) I was very ready for Craig Brewer to be Tennessee’s assigned director. Hustle celebrated all things Memphis so beautifully that it managed to get the stodgy, ancient, and incredibly caucasian Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to vote a song penned by the Three 6 Mafia called “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” for a Best Original Song Oscar. Many people — myself included — anxiously awaited his next film hoping it would cement him as a strong voice for the dirty south. Unfortunately that next film was Black Snake Moan.
Black Snake Moan is the story of Laz (Samuel L Jackson) a deeply religious semi-retired blues musician and small plot farmer whose wife has just left him for a younger man, and Rae (Christina Ricci) a sex addict and former victim of child sexual abuse. When Rae’s boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) leaves town to join the army, she goes on a sex and drugs bender, culminating in Ronnie’s BFF Gill (Michael Raymond-James) beating her and leaving her for dead on the side of the road near Laz’s house. When Laz discovers Rae, he nurses her back to health. As she recovers, Rae is prone to hysterical nighttime sleepwalking fits, and to prevent these, Laz chains her to the radiator. Eventually through the power of Jesus, The Blues, and Laz’s loving guidance Rae learns to confront her demons and be a better loving partner to Ronnie (freshly returned from basic training after being discharged for extreme anxiety).
Several of my favorite filmmaking tropes are all over this movie. I love movies with a really distinct sense of place and setting, and Black Snake Moan gets rural West Tennessee in the same kind of way that Young Adult (2011) gets exurban Minnesota or Tangerine (2015) gets the parts of LA that aren’t typically depicted on film. I love movies about small towns and the strange dynamics that arise when everyone knows everyone else like Passion Fish (1992) or Bagdad Cafe (1987). Most of all I love movies where broken people find each other and help each other to find some modicum of happiness like The Station Agent (2003) or Rushmore (1998). Black Snake Moan is all of these things, and I honestly kinda like it, but I don’t love it.
Brewer clearly has something to say about the culture of West Tennessee and isn’t afraid of being provocative to say it. It’s just really unclear what it is he’s trying to say. It’s clear he’s portraying Rae’s addiction as an affliction — something she needs treatment and care for rather than a failing of character — but the majority of shots of Rae are in a pair of underwear and a crop top as she writhes and moans. It’s like Brewer is saying “Sex addiction is real… real sexy that is!” In addition the presence of an old Black man and a young white woman in the American south where one of them is literally being kept in bondage via chains raises a lot of questions about the power dynamics of age, gender, and especially race, but there’s nothing in the direct text that addresses it. The closest we come to an acknowledgement that there’s racial elements at play is when Laz is explaining to his friend RL (John Cothran) why he didn’t call the police when he discovered Rae by the side of the road. Everything else being said is subtext, and if there’s a message there it was not clear enough to be received by me.
The film has moments where it truly shines. An early scene where Rae is out partying in a field with a bunch of fellow degenerates reminded me what it was to be young and feckless and about to make some bad decisions on purpose. Laz has a rather understated love story with the local pharmacist Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson — better known among my fellow Millennials who grew up on Law & Order classic as Lt. Van Buren) where he woos her with fresh grown produce. Craig Brewer also clearly loves music and the act of making music, just as Hustle & Flow celebrated the magical joy of creating recorded music Black Snake Moan celebrates the communal joy of live music in a scene where Laz comes out of his semi-retirement to play a show at his local watering hole and burns the place down. Unfortunately these moments come in between uncomfortable moments of Christina Ricci half-dressed and locked up in a chain.
Brewer ultimately never ended up being the Dirty South’s poet laureate and has had since moved on to mining the past for film content, including a remake of Footloose in 2011, a legasequel to Coming To America in 2021, and a genuinely hilarious and worthwhile biopic of Rudy Ray Moore called Dolemite Is My Name (2019). Allegedly though he’s working on a film about Charley Pride, and for all of Black Snake Moan’s missteps, I still look forward to the day when a new Craig Brewer film about a Black man making beautiful music in Tennessee comes out.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ a maddeningly uneven movie. Sometimes marvelous, sometimes downright gross.
Economics: By the time of its screening at Sundance Black Snake Moan had already premiered at Harry Knowles’s 2006 Butt-Numb-A-Thon in Austin1 where it was picked up by Paramount Vantage for distribution. It was released wide on March 2, 2007 where it placed at #8 on the Box Office chart, below Music and Lyrics in its 6th week of release and ahead of Reno 911!: Miami in its 4th week of release. It ultimately did $10.2 million in sales and $13.1 million in DVD sales against its $15 million budget.
Notable Tavern Work: I love taking note of hangout spots depicted in movies, be they opulent Victorian dining rooms or 7-11 parking lots, when shot well and lovingly I think “boy howdy that looks like a good hang” and boy howdy does Laz’s regular bar “Party Time” look like a good hang. A 30’x18’ windowless box with brick interior, a pool table, a real jukebox, and a small stage, it’s both a place to have a quiet beer with a bud and a raucous party space where two dozen people dancing together feels like Bonnaroo. That’s my kind of spot.
Son of Rambow
There are a few kinds of films that I broadly dislike as a category. One is movies about how magical childhood is. Another is movies about the magic of cinema. As someone who spent his childhood more or less patiently waiting for adulthood to happen, I simply do not relate to “childhood is magic” stories. Movies about the magic of cinema ironically don’t speak to me because I’m already so bought in on the message. Spending two hours telling me about how art can open up worlds and change people’s souls feels to me like spending two hours watching someone demonstrate how to operate a screwdriver. Son of Rambow is both of these kinds of movies in one, but I loved it.
Son of Rambow is the story of a pair of English preteen schoolboys in 1982 who have difficult and strained family lives who find each other and become friends. Lee Carter (Will Poulter) is a troublemaker whose parents are absentee owners of a retirement community and is largely raised by his indifferent older brother. Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a sensitive artsy child whose family are members of a devout Plymouth Brethren2 community. They meet when they scuffle in a school hallway and shatter a goldfish bowl. Demure Will is terrified of getting into trouble and so allows Lee to rope him into performing dangerous stunts in his homemade film project inspired by First Blood (1982). Will has never seen a movie before and immediately begins overflowing with ideas for Lee’s movie after a lifetime of idly doodling fantastical scenes in bathroom stalls and Bible margins. Soon the project spirals out of control after a fashionable French exchange student named Didier (Jules Sitruk) gets involved, but ultimately the film gets made and both boys deepen and strengthen both their relationship with each other and their relationships with their families.
Son of Rambow was made by the duo of director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, also known by the pseudonym of Hammer and Tongs. They were primarily prolific directors of UK Pop music videos through the 90s and early 2000s, including Supergrass’s “Pumping On Your Stereo”, Pulp’s “Help The Aged”, and possibly the greatest music video of the Britpop era: Blur’s “Coffee & TV.” While Rambow isn’t their feature debut (that honor belongs to their 2005 adaptation of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), it was a passion project that the two had been working on well before the Hitchhiker project came together and has all the hallmarks of a low-budget promising feature debut. These are clearly ideas that were rattling around in these guys’ heads for years. The main characters are around the same ages as Jennings and Goldsmith were at that time (Jennings was 10 when First Blood came out, Goldsmith was 12) and features a handful of autobiographical details: Jennings was friends with a kid whose parents were largely gone, giving him the same kind of destructive free reign as Lee; he has family who are members of the Plymouth Brethren, and had a similar awakening to the power of cinema when he watched First Blood at a young age.
The pitfalls of movies about a magical childhood are often that the kid protagonists are too angelic and perfect and the adults in their lives are at best aloof and indifferent and at worst cruel monsters3. Every character in Son Of Rambow feels fully realized and human. Lee is creative and ambitious but also occasionally callously cruel and indifferent to those around him. Will is a skilled artist who’s incredibly kind but also flighty and aloof. Didier is impossibly cool but also kind of a dick about it. The adults (or adult figures) are also real and complex-feeling. Will’s mother struggles with her son’s rebellion against the precepts of her faith but also sees how happy his artistic expression makes him. Lee’s brother clearly resents needing to take care of him but also deeply loves him. The characters feel grounded and real even as ridiculous things happen all around them.
The pitfalls of movies about the magic of cinema are how cliché the aspects of cinema are, typically because of how we in the future understand how important the things being depicted are or will be. Take Hugo (2011): a celebration of the work of pioneer of special effects Georges Méliès, a man who deserves celebration, but any audience member with a passing familiarity with Méliès’s work is simply waiting for him to become a titan of cinema rather than being surprised by it. We know that Sammy Fableman in The Fablemans (2022) is going to grow up to direct Jaws (1975). Even watching The Disaster Artist (2017) or Ed Wood (1994) we know that their subjects are going to end up as celebrated cult figures, just maybe not the kind of celebrated cult figures they might want to be. Son of Rambow undercuts this cliche by having its heroes fall in love with First Blood of all things, and when we see the fruits of their labor at the film’s climax, it’s not like they’re secret geniuses who created a masterpiece. It very much looks like what happens when two kids with a video camera try to make an action movie. Charming yes, but good? No. But who cares. Kurt Vonnegut famously once said “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow.” Son of Rambow is a film about one’s soul growing.
Rating: ★★★★★ While it loses a little steam in its final act this is a delight. Come for the friendship, stay for the flying dog.
Economics: Son of Rambow debuted at Sundance where it was picked up by Paramount Vantage for US distribution. It was released in US theaters on May 2, 2008 where it placed at number 46 at the box office, between In Bruges in its 13th week of release and Space Station in its 264th week of release4 It ultimately earned $11 million worldwide at the box office against a £4.5 million ($8.8 million) budget. Its home video sales are not reported by any agency that I can find.
Best Outfit: cool guy Didier’s “how much cool 1982 guy can we fit into one frame” is a killer fit.
Next week: Volver
at some point in this project there will be a Harry Knowles sidebar but this post is too long already
too much cultural context to go into here but think British Mennonites and you’re in the ballpark
ie Radio Flyer (1992) or the entirety of the Harry Potter franchise
if you too are thinking “what on earth is that and why did it run for so long”, it’s a 3D short that was played in IMAX planetariums about building the ISS. If you just now learned “wow they track the box office of IMAX films in planetariums?” so did I.
The Black Snake Moan trailer definitely gave me the jibblies so I'm glad they weren't completely unwarranted. Did Ricci's portrayal feel like a continuation of her uncomfortable character in Monster?