30 Jul Sinners (2025)

Visual Music

Something like Jodorowsky but instead of Chilean mysticism, African voodoo, or what we think so through prior films. Something culturally like ‘Snatch’, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, and ‘Kill Bill 2’ rolled together.

Grand cinematic skill but in the small. Like another recent film (‘The Brutalist’) a high level of mastery in the moment — terrific craft, effective, emotional, direct.

I am almost ready to forgive the reliance of multiple but different magical traditions, because they in combination motivate the different world(s) we effectively immerse in. But it is vexing, because the way I enter films at this level is to enter the world the filmmaker builds.

He has sharecroppers show up for an evening of deep music, dance, sex, abandon, transcending past societal and relationship chains. Simple enough, I am happy to immerse, but the soup is in different cups.

The core is supposed to be the blues, music supposedly born of pain and repression. There’s a popular connection with the devil, but that’s not from the music, instead some Uncle Remus-like story. It is not from the blues which is designed to use very limited patterns to allow unschooled musicians a simple chalkboard for emotional connection. It would have been far better to use Jazz, which is more genuinely Black, steeped in drugs and magic, and all about shared new worlds. Jazz is inherently hallucinatory, but then you can’t really build a story about one man’s power to evoke the underworld.

So you have magical music. You have, quite separately the wife’s voodoo through connection with elemental spirits. This is like Shinto and there is no evil in voodoo. The chants and dances aren’t just different than the blues, it is a different space. Blues connects a room, Voodoo connects a single soul with elementals.

And then you also have the vampires, which here are both from the vampire and zombie genres, mixed in a way we are supposed to understand simply because of their Irish/Appalachian musical foundations. These whites want the power of the blacks.

Add to that the magical thinking of white supremicists; the Klan here is an unintegrated mix of brutal ignorance and a set of ideas about class, destiny and Jesus that makes it dangerous.

Cooger mixes all these as if they are the same, can interact at a dramatic level. I wish it worked for me. I was swept with the sheer cinematic competence, the music, the sex — incidentally three strong references to cunnilingus with three woman is a bit heavyweight. I recommend this for immediate power, but no more life-altering value than, say, Spike Lee or Quentin.

Posted in 2025

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB