Christina Ricci used to be one of the prime examples of a type that an old college buddy of mine famously dubbed "chunky slutty hot." The chunky slutty hot girl was, as the name suggests, both chunky and slutty and hot (technically, I don’t think the rules of American English syntax allow for anything to be "both" three things, but fuck those rules — we’re keepin’ it street today). Drew Barrymore was, and remains, another great CSH. Alicia Silverstone was once, and is now no more, a CSH (though she’s still pretty). You get the idea. It’s women whose extra bounty of flesh and curves is set off with just the right hint of promiscuity.
Anyway, I’ve been noticing that Ricci lost her CSH status somewhere between 2003’s Anything Else, which was the last thing of hers that I saw, and 2006’s Black Snake Moan, which is heartwarming tale of a "a God-fearing bluesman," played by Samuel L. Jackson, who chains up and plies with chaste, chained-up love "a wild young woman (Ricci) who, as a victim of childhood sexual abuse, looks everywhere for love, never quite finding it"until she quits her wild woman ways.
This would be just another story of a Hollwood actress with an interesting, and provocative, body shape capitulating to the pressure to slim down (and Ricci has definitely slimmed down), except for the fact that she looks spectacular in the new movie. And there’s still something unique about her — still that alienness that made her so perfect as Wednesday Addams in the Addam’s Family — but it’s as if all the girlishness has been purified away and left in its wake a pure animal sexuality. Or as one perceptive reviewer of the film writes:
But it is Ricci who will be remembered when all else about the film has been forgotten. Her large oval face dominating her tiny body, which is exceptionally thin around the waist, Ricci is clad in scanty cutoffs, panties, midriff-baring shirts at most and often less. Here she is a feral animal, a force of nature, a wild thing with a ferocious physicality and a sexuality like Vesuvius in its prime. Her Rae is Eros unplugged, unquenchable, inexhaustible. Fascinating, scary and entirely debauched, Rae is the sort of female creature who has been seen onscreen many times before, but rarely, or perhaps never, so bluntly portrayed in a Hollywood studio film.
It’s better for our young women if Christina Ricci offers herself up to them as a model of how to be beautiful without being ridiculously thin, I suppose, but in this case she’s so stunningly hot that I have to make an exception.
