Sex and the City 2 (0.5 out of 5)

When the cinema is at it’s best it has the power to create great female characters like the ones of Mike Leigh, Jean-Pierre Junet, Peter Bogdanovich, Ingmar Bergman and so on. Has a man’s camera ever loved a woman more than Fellini’s loved Giulietta Masina? That’s what films about women should strive to do: create strong, interesting, intelligent characters, no different from men. That’s not what Sex and the City 2 does. Instead it spends its time instead creating unlikable, superficial, vapid, stupid, vein women who do nothing more than talk about clothing, sex, what a burden children are and so on for an ungodly two and a half hours. These women, contrary to why some might like them, are not liberated but trapped in a petty, meaningless life in which the only way they can fill the black holes that are their souls is to constantly and shamelessly indulge in only the most superficial of splendours. This isn’t a fairy tale, it’s a cry for help. Socrates would have had a field day with these broads.

Carrie Bradshaw (now Carrie Preston) (Sarah Jessica Parker) is still married to Mr. Big (Chris Noth), except now she’s feeling a little skittish. They’ve moved into a different apartment, one not as fancy, although not without the perk of a full walk-in closest, and he would rather watch TV on the couch then go out to fancy premieres and would rather eat in than fuss about reservations. Carrie doesn’t like this. Oh course she doesn’t, it’s too much like real life; maybe her first ever taste of it. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t know what to do with it.

The film begins with the wedding of two of Carrie’s gay best friends. There’s no reason for this except that 1) it wouldn’t be Sex and the City without some referencing to gay man and 2) Liza Minnelli, playing herself, marries the two. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) helpfully explains that “Whenever there’s this much gay energy in one place Liza just has a way of materializing.” This leads to an extended musical number of Liza doing a full out song-and-dance number to Beyonce’s Single Ladies, which only brings to light the sad realization of how truly far from Scorsese’s New York, New York we are. That writer/director Michael Patrick King let’s Liza do the whole song and rarely cuts from it is an early indication that he is both incompetent and knows that it’s all downhill from there so why not make it last?

So Carrie has a mid-life crisis of sorts, Miranda quits her job because she can’t take the new male boss who also hates her, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) can’t stomach her new baby’s constant crying and is haunted by her braless new nanny as thoughts of Jude Law jump through her head and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) throws back the vitamins (in one mouthful of course) in order to keep her sex drive raring during menopause. Cattrall is constantly victim of the film’s worst lines, which are mostly entandras that pack the subtly of a sledge hammer: when she spots a gorgeous man in Abu Dhabi, she refers to him as Lawrence of my labia. Get it? Ho ho.

So, with everything falling apart around them, the women, through Samantha and her publicist powers, scores a free trip to Abu Dhabi, where they fall off camels, have a gay servant named Abdul (like Paula, get it?), offend the locals with their clevage and so on and so forth. There, Carrie meets a former lover and has a worthless moment with him, leading to a stupid climactic scene that is more petty than cathartic, and Samantha gets arrested while lip wrestling on the beach. Samantha’s antics also lead to a chase through market streets, ending in them being rescued by a group of local women, leading to a scene of such jaw dropping stupidity, ignorance and condescending that it boarders on racism. It's not unlike movies to wave the American flag, but to degrade an entire culture in one foul swoop? Impressive.

I didn’t much like the first Sex and the City film either, but I gave that one an easy ride because it was so clearly not made to appeal to me and was an adaptation of a show that I had not seen. I’ve still never witnessed a moment of the show and this film was not made for me either but now I’ve met these women, have a sense of them and know that I am truely irritated by most of them. That they have been dropped into a film that is long, boring, pointless and lacking in anything that could ever come close to resembling wit or charm doesn’t help. If the first film felt like a bunch of episodes strung together with no overarching narrative drive, this sequel feels like a ship that has desperately run out of steam. I’ve been told, on more than one account that the series was clever and sassy and gave the characters actual dimensions. Maybe it’s true, but Sex and the City 2 is no more than a feature length peepee joke.

And then, as if to fuel the flames, the film makes several throwaway references to the struggling state of the American economy. When the trip to Abu Dhabi comes up, Samantha’s selling point is that they’ve been making bad business deals and suffering so much from the economy that they deserve the trip. Really now? That’s ultimately the philosophy of the entire film: life may suck for you, but it’s still pretty darn good for us. Maybe for the third film the girls can be sent on a trip to China so the Asians can see what their money is being wasted on to keep America afloat.

Sex and the City (3 out of 5)

Sex and the City 2 opens today. I'll be seeing it next week because that's part of what having a girlfriend is all about. So I figured, what better way to prep than revist my review of the first one.



A film like Sex and the City the Movie really unearths the true arbitrary nature of the star rating system. What does appointing a film with a star value really mean after all, when the true point of criticism seems, not to be so much in evaluation, but of sharing ideas and experiences from one film fan to the next? It certainly doesn’t tell us a film’s worth amongst other films (Sweeney Todd and the Godfather share the same five stars, but equals they are not). And if the stars convey a sense of the writer’s experience with an individual film, then why not just let the review speak for itself? A good review after all, will uproot those differences in greatness between films like Sweeney Todd and the Godfather.

So I bounced the concept around in my head of eliminating the stars altogether for Sex in the City, because really, what kind of critical angel can I approach it from? Prior to writing this I skimmed Rotten Tomatoes to see what the general critical approach seemed to be. I of course, like many, could resort to general film criticism. I could say that the film is too long (which it is), isn’t very genuinely witty (which it isn’t), and doesn’t use the film form in order to expand the original television concept to appeal to a wider audience (which it doesn’t). But I won’t do that, because a good critic will just be honest with themselves and admit up front whether or not they embody the film’s ideal audience and proceed from there. What good would film criticism do anyway for a work that’s iconic status stretches far beyond the simple realms of the film world? “Oh man.” I said to the person I was attending the theater with, “This thing is two and a half hours long.” “Good.” She replied, “The more the better.” Struck out before even getting up to the plate.

So, here it is: I never watched one solitary second of Sex and the City when it was on the air, and probably won’t now that I’ve witnessed it on film. So what do I do? I can’t even begin to validate the film’s success in its faithfulness to the original show and playing movie critic for a film whose audience I was clearly not meant to be a part of seems silly for me and dishonest for you. So you see my predicament with rating the darn thing. In my position, appointing a star value to this work seems about as redundant as, well, writing about how redundant it seems.

There are two things every 20-something moving to New York City is looking for, tells the writer Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker): labels and love (which could have easily doubled for the film’s own title). Needless to say, Carrie isn’t a very good writer, but a lack of talent seems like small criticism in a world where The Devil Wears Prada flies off the shelves.
Carrie, having spent her years in New York, is now 40 and writing about being in love with the man of her dreams Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and their future plans. Supporting her along the way are her four best friends: Charlotte (Kirstin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and of course, crowd favorite Samantha (Kim Cattrall).

For those not initiated with the show, they will find that these four women each inhabit broad social types and their emotional reach does not seem to delve much deeper than that. Carrie is the emotional one who thinks (as her opening voice over suggests) with her heart and her cheque book. The first thing Carrie checks when looking for the new apartment: the closest space. Miranda (the most level-headed and interesting of the four) is the headstrong one, a driven career woman, so caught up in her work that she risks sexually alienating her husband. Charlotte is the bright and bubbly one; the girl who everyone loved but no one took seriously in high school, who wound up with the best husband and family anyway. She’s mostly comic relief and has an unfortunate scene put upon her in which she accidently drinks water in Mexico and has an attack that wouldn’t be below a Wayans Brothers comedy. Finally there is Samantha, who women love, I assume, because, even at fifty, she is sexually liberated and vulgar, kissing and telling whoever will listen. No wonder Sex and the City was such a hit on TV; these girls occupy the perfect high class/high fashion female fairytale.

The plot however, at two and a half hours (that’s five episodes worth of material), feels painfully episodic as each sequence seems to announce itself as a requisite Sex and the City moment instead of emerging from a greater overarching narrative: okay, here’s the fashion show; Okay, here’s the unveiling of the new closet; Okay, here’s the homosexual male banter; Okay, here’s the fabulous wedding dress, and so on. Of course, none of this seems to add up to any more than it is: another moment, another new idea for next week’s episode. At half an hour increments, I assume that Sex and the City could sustain itself. At two and half, it lacks the continuity and coherence to pack any emotional punch, despite one great sequence that, in spite of it all, seeps under the skin. It’s a montage of New Years Eve, set to the subtle splendor of Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis’ Auld Lang Syne

So now I’ve come to the end, and done my best to fulfill my job as the critic. I’ve described to the best of my abilities, the movie that I saw and the experience I had of it. I’ve tried to explain it in such a way that, if it sounds like it will appeal to you, you’ll see it even though it didn’t much appeal to me. I’ve thus given some thought to the matter and finally decided that the film deserves a three star rating: neither here nor there. As a whole the film doesn’t work: to those uninitiated, it will feel like visiting a stranger’s family reunion, with not much incentive to care about anyone there or the actions they take, and I firmly believe that a film of any nature should strive to be self-sufficient; to not require that the audience bring any prior knowledge into the experience. However, for better or worse, as both a love and a label for many, I’m sure that Sex and the City the Movie is just about perfect.