Women On Verge
We’ve all been expecting Sex and the City 2 to be vulgarly profligate and surface-y and generally reprehensible. To go by David Edelstein‘s New York review, it apparently is that. The challenge in reviewing such a film isn’t to state the obvious (i.e., confirm the expected) but to come up with fresh and exhilarating ways to trash and befoul the franchise, and particularly the four stars.
About all Edelstein attempts in this regard, part from rote lamentations about the fading or diminished appearances of Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis, is to say that Liza Minnelli, who has a cameo, “looks more human.”
“The most depressing thing about Sex and the City 2 is that it seems to justify every nasty thing said and written about the series and first feature film,” Edelstein begins. The SATC dynamic has always been fragile, but at its most affecting you could see beyond the costumes and artifice and feel the characters fighting for validation — and connecting with one another in their struggle. Now there’s nothing but surface. And what a surface.
“The film is an epic eyesore. It’s as if they set out to make a movie that said, ‘You’re right! We are hideous!’
“The thinking behind the movie (written and directed by Michael Patrick King) is undisguised. Let’s start with an over-the-top gay wedding! Then we’ll send the girls to Abu Dhabi so they can rile up the fundamentalists with their sexuality! Then they’ll make fun of women in niqab (‘Certainly cuts down on the Botox bill!’) but later show (campy) feminist solidarity! Won’t they look great swishing around the desert being waited on by smooth young Arab men?
“Amy Odell, of nymag.com’s The Cut, accompanied me to the screening and was kind enough to whisper that a particular dress of Carrie’s cost 50 grand. But what’s the point of spending that much when the cinematographer, John Thomas, lights Sarah Jessica Parker to bring out the leatheriness of her skin? How did he manage to mummify the lovely Cynthia Nixon? Kim Cattrall, fresh off her witty, subtle work in The Ghost Writer, is costumed to look like a cross between (late) Mae West and (dead) Bea Arthur. Kristin Davis gets by (just) pulling little-girl faces, probably for the last time.
“For all the sniggery double entendres, virtually all of Sex and the City 2 is a pale shade of vanilla. But there is this one moment [in which] Cattrall, in short shorts in the Arab marketplace, has a flurry of hot flashes, drops to the ground, and writhes around screaming, ‘I have sex, yes! I quite enjoy it!’ People coming out of surgery with bad reactions to the anesthesia have been known to behave like that, which gives it some fleeting connection to real life.”
For me, nothing so far has topped the Onion‘s image of this quartet being thrown into a vat of acid and melted alive.
And yet, it will make an insane amount of money. The biggest problem with movies isn’t that the people in Hollywood ‘don’t know anything’ but that the audiences ‘don’t know anything’. If we can re-train audiences to read movies again then they might stop going to sub-standard drivel.
I dunno. Everytime I see those crappy banners for it, I can’t help but think, “Bizarro Ishtar”.
Candid, hyperbolic, possible alcohol-inspired comment at 3am PST, but I defy you to prove it incorrect:
Most women have terrible taste in everything.
I am right in the target audience for this film, but there’s no way in hell I’ll go see it. Reprehensible is right. Probably offensive too.
I was somewhat surprised that Stephen Farber’s May 23 Hollywood Reporter review is fairly kind, even claiming the sequel has more cutting edge humor than the first effort. Quote: “Critics will carp about the platitudes in the scriipt and about the longuers in the nearly two and a half hour opus, but for the core audience, there will be no complaints about too much of a good thing. This picture is going to be a smash.”I was also surprised when writer-director Michael Patrick King turned up on The Daily Show that he and Jon Stewart are old pals. I believe Stewart noted King gave him his first job in tv while King noted he is gay and Stewart was still straight.
Having root canal instead. More pleasant.
Come on, let’s just say it. It’s a particular kind of gay man’s fantasy. The actresses are, no doubt, whores for the payday, but they’re put in the position by the people who hired them. Lay the blame where it belongs.
I don’t begrudge them a payday when any A list male actor can whore himself out for typically 5 times as much as any of the SITC gals. The TV show was more balanced. The characters were flawed, and the flaws remained (and often intensified) each season. Bigger isn’t better with this property.
>I defy you to prove it incorrect:
>Most women have terrible taste in everything.
I defy you to prove it correct.
Isn’t it fun to make random unsubstantiated comments calculated for shock value?
I predict that in big cities gay men will out-number women on opening weekend.
Hard to believe, but at one time I was recommending the show to friends. Season One on HBO. Check the tapes. It WAS a funny show back when it was a comedy. (also a good chunk of Season Two).
The ladies seemed to like it better and better the less funny it got and the more it focused on Relationships. Ugh. “Will she get back with Big?”
fugue: “I defy you to prove it correct.”
Justin Bieber.
Although, to be fair to women, none of them are still defending the quality of MacGruber, so…
I predict that in big cities gay men will out-number women on opening weekend.
This is correct. In the metro Chicago area where I live/work, just about every gay male acquaintance of mine is positively fucking BUZZING about this flick — it’s their Iron Man 2. (Or my Inception, take your pick.)
There’s gonna be a “gay-flu” in big-city workplaces the day this thing drops. Employers, plan accordingly.
Bluedouche, you need EXAMPLES that women have bad test? Have you ever met a woman, ever?
Got a girlfriend, some female friends? Ask them to read a newspaper. Or a question about immigration, Wall Street, cap and trade, the BP spill… I’d all but GUARANTEE that 85% of all women, and 99% of HOT women, wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. Even find a chick who was a big Obama supporter and ask her about some of his specific policies. You’ll get nothing. Then ask them about Dancing with the Stars or Carrie Bradshaw’s shoes, and you won’t be able to get them to shut the fuck up.
So, what we learn from that is, the overwhelming MAJORITY of women are kind of arbitrary, illogical, shallow, status-and-money-obsessed, superficial, and if they can coast on looks and trivialities, they need not trouble themselves with the particulars of the world. They live in a cocoon, one provided for them by RICH MEN. So of course this dumb Sex and the City shit is right up their alley.
I’d sit here and list every single bad romance novel, romcom, soap opera, McSteamy/McDreamy dancing reality shows, argument in the history of the world, but it would be easier to try and figure out something of QUALITY that women, en masse, actually LIKE. Even when they’ve made GOOD “chick flicks,” women DON’T GO TO THEM, because they’re not stupid enough in that non-challenging way that women like. As much crowing as Manohla Dargis wants to do about THE DEARTH OF STRONG VEHICLES FOR WOMEN, in actuality women DON’T GIVE A SHIT about any of that, they just want bland comfort and the stupidest stuff imaginable.
Or if you want a better example, I’d just direct you to every single dating/marriage choice women make, by which 90% of women would rather be with an abusive, violent, unemployed, cheating “bad boy” than some white-collar douche, or how they’ll put out for money and power.
Again, SATC hits all their bases.
when I saw this the other night the print broke and burnt (for over a minute in the humanless projection booth) at the exact moment Penelope Cruz made her cameo … by the time the film was fixed and re-threaded she had one more line and was gone, talk about bad karma …. still this film isn’t any more mindless than shrek, macgruber or its ilk, and you do have one sequence that features both cameltoe and “Lawrence of My Labia”
Remember all those complaints from moviegoers on the first movie’s opening weekend about boom mikes dropping down onto the screen and being visible to the audience? It was a phenominom that happened at theatres all over the country. Did they ever figure out what was causing it?
That was the only memorable thing about the first movie, which i admit I only watched the first 75 minutes of on Cinemax and then bailed out.
never heard it, but it sounds likely that the prints were mis-aligned or something. That stuff is often there on prints, but as long as they’re aligned correctly, they don’t get projected.
I still find it interesting that as a person who makes his living off of online advertising, Jeff regularly posts the entire content of someone else’s web page as rather than sending people to that page with a link.
The cost for P90X is about three months of a paid gym membership but you get to keep the program forever
Jane