Movie Review – Sex and the City 2!

When I was e-mailing a friend about my consternation that Sex and the City is currently a viable film franchise, she remarked: ‘I don’t feel the need to watch 50 year-olds try to be like 25 year-olds.’ Having now seen the second installment in said franchise, I can congratulate her on her trenchant insight, and her prescience, as demonstrated in the following scene:

After dressing down a boutique employee who suggested a dress was a bit too immodest for a woman her age to wear, Samantha wears said dress to a red-carpet film premiere. And there, wearing the exact same dress is…wait for it…Miley fucking Cyrus. After an all-too-brief moment of mortification, Miley smiles, says something complimentary about Samantha, and the two pose for photos from the paparazzi.

I can infer two things here, neither of them particularly pleasant. The first is that the Sex and the City creators view their characters as generational role models for girls and women to aspire to, and at this point, they’re so established that they’re canonical. Inside every girl is a Carrie, a Samantha, a Miranda, a Charlotte. Um…no. Please God no.

The second thing is that Miley identifies with Samantha specifically, and by the time she’s an independent adult she’ll be a sex addict of staggering, Caligulan proportions. Not sure if that’s just funny or a little sad, but it wouldn’t surprise me that the yoke of Disneyfication will cause her to act crazy once she shakes it off. But I digress.

Miley wants to play Samantha in the prequel…she’s gearing up for a very method performance.

Part of the reason I wanted to write about this movie, and the Sex and the City franchise in general, is that for certain women, this is the property that inspires their own special geek fervor. This is their Star Trek. There are no conventions, no costumes, no games, be they board, video or role-playing, but the loyalty and devotion that fans lavish on it has that same flavor. They watch the wardrobe choices and accessorize accordingly. They own all the DVDs and the original books, they can quote the characters, they remember all the plotlines from over 90 episodes to the point of who was doing whom when, which is probably their equivalent of USS Enterprise engine room schematics.

This isn’t that mysterious a reaction, since the original show does have a few virtues. Chief among them, it’s a story for women, geared towards them and their interests. Let’s face it guys, in terms of our share of the cultural marketplace, we are a spoiled bunch, and the majority of product, good or bad, is a big fat softball pitched underhand in our general direction, so an exception has inherent value. And while far from perfect, the writing could and did often click. The characters were distinct and well-defined. The dialogue was sharp, pun-filled and quippy. The city of New York was practically a character itself, and the series was a showcase for all things hip and trendy around town. Thematically, it played to its strengths, celebrating female camaraderie, liberation and empowerment, with a veneer of style.

Before you label me a fan, let me say the show wasn’t without serious shortcomings. It would be kind to refer to the characters as cynical, superficial and judgmental. There was a nasty undercurrent of vicarious living in the role of Carrie as narrator; for ¾ of every episode, Carrie narrates the goings-on of her friends (including them fucking), ostensibly in the writings of her column/book, which of course, begs the question, what friends in their right minds would allow her to do this? After reading her material, anyone that has a passing familiarity with them will be able to identify them and know the explicit intimate details of their lives. That’s not only outing personal secrets to the entire world, it’s exhibitionism by proxy, and it’s a wide distribution of sensitive info into a world full of unstable stalker types. Thanks, girlfriend!

There was also a lot of rub-your-nose-in-it materialism, turning beauty, wealth and style into virtues, and marginalizing anyone who lacked same. The conflicts often felt manufactured, the humor crass, and the resolutions pat and trite. All of which led to a big feeling of ‘who gives a fuck?’ when it came to the stakes. Will these unlikable narcissistic status obsessed women find love and happiness? It’s not life or death, it’s not even whether or not good things happen to the truly deserving, it’s generally well-off people whinging that they aren’t happy ENOUGH. Fuck them. Nothing truly terrible EVER happens to these people. Okay, one of them DID get breast cancer that last season, BUT, it was stage 1, she got ridiculously good health care and was back fucking her brains out by the end of the series’ run. Sometimes there’s nothing more patronizing than hearing how hard it is to live a charmed life. So again: FUCK. THEM.

The first movie affirmed and accentuated a LOT of the negative things about the show, and it was an excessively bloated piece of film making to boot. Extended costume parades to show off Sarah Jessica Parker in out of date fashions and bridal gowns? Multiple cross-cutting montages showing where every single character is at a given moment? Lame pubic hair and pants-shitting gags? Apartment interiors, gratuitous clothing and merchandising product placement, and a myriad of other lifestyle porn too lengthy to bear describing here? Check, check, check and check. The movie squandered whatever good capital the show had with me. Lazy writing, contrived situations, and the dialogue…! The writer never met a pun he didn’t like. Or a cliche. And they all swirled together and grew like mold in a bread drawer.

And as for the plot/characterization, here is my quick synopsis, which will spare you the two-and-a-half hours you’d wish you had back:

Carrie: Mr. Big is buying us a huge apartment to move into!
Miranda: If he doesn’t marry you and he kicks you out you’re shit out of luck.
Carrie: Mr. Big finally proposed to me!
Miranda: My husband cheated on me because I only fucked him once in six months so I’m not going to live with him any more.
Samantha: I’m still fucking my hot young guy.
Carrie: Mr. Big left me at the altar! Waah!
Samantha: Let’s all go to Mexico and use Carrie’s honeymoon cabana!
The girls all go to Mexico.
Carrie: Mr. Big hurt my feelings!
Miranda: I forgot to wax.
Charlotte: Oops I crapped my pants!
The girls return from Mexico.
Carrie: Mr. Big hurt my feelings!
Charlotte: I didn’t think I could get pregnant but somehow I am without trying. Yay!
Miranda: I’m sorry I said that thing to Mr. Big before the wedding that made him run off.
Carrie: Mr. Big hurt my feelings!
Samantha: My hot young guy is great, but I crave strange dick.
Miranda: Maybe my husband isn’t such an asshole, I’ll take him back!
Carrie: Mr. Big still loves me and I married him. Yay!

It shames me to my core that I remember enough detail of the plot to even write that synopsis. I still can’t even begin to explain why Jennifer Hudson was in the movie, except to prove that Carrie had at least one black friend.

Despite this, I am still such a cinematic masochist, I not only saw the sequel, I went to see it at a midnight premiere showing near Times Square. This was the hardcore fangirl crowd, and if you don’t believe me – I counted four guys in the whole screening besides myself. Pretty sure I was the only hetero male there voluntarily. During the pre-show entertainment, the crowd squealed and cheered for the trailer of the movie we were about to see. They did that for a lot of things. They squealed and cheered when the trailers started. When the opening titles started. The first time we saw each of the four girls. The reveal of Carrie’s closet which is the size of a studio apartment. The reveal of the gay best friends’ wedding invitation. Seeing any of Samantha’s boy toys without a shirt (there were numerous audience members fanning themselves at those, even with the Arctic-level air conditioning). When we got a poolside close up crotch shot of some dude’s sausage in a speedo. The first close-up of Carrie’s shoes. OF. HER. FUCKING. SHOES.

I was dimly hopeful that the crowd’s enthusiasm might rub off enough for me to not want to claw my own eyes out. In that regard, it was successful. I only wanted to jab a pen through my ear to see if I could somehow scratch the images directly off my cortex.

Ok, now for the plot synopsis – brace yourselves, it ain’t pretty.

The horror! The horror!

The girls attend the single gayest wedding ever for their friends Anthony and Stamford, the only two gay chacraters on the show, who originally hated each other so why wouldn’t they pair off and get married? I use the word gayest in the literal sense here – there’s swans and a gay men’s chorus in white tuxes and tails singing showtunes. And just when you think it cannot get one iota gayer, Liza Minelli shows up to perform the ceremony. And then she sings ‘All the Single Ladies’ in only a sequin blouse and sheer black pantyhose. Will someone please greenlight the Arrested Development movie so she can get a paycheck and we don’t ever have to see her do anything like this again? Please? Think of the children.

After enduring that camp overload, the threadbare plot begins to take shape. Carrie and Big argue about staying at home or going out. Miranda has a douchey boss at work who gives her a hard time because she has a vagina. Charlotte is overwhelmed raising kids who have the temerity to cry and need supervision, and the hot Irish nanny she hired likes to go around braless, and her husband and the cinematographer ogle her nipples through her tank top. Samantha rubs ointment into her vag and swallows more pills than Sylvia Plath to combat her menopause and stay horny, also relying on a book by Suzanne Somers that she at one point holds up like someone paid her to, or something, but nah, they’d never do that, too much ethics. A wealthy sheik offers Samantha an all expenses paid week at his hotel in Abu Dhabi to discuss some publicity job he wants to offer her. Or more likely to discuss a certain job he wants FROM her. But hey, it’s a free trip to a conservative Arabic country for a perpetual horndog who fucks anything that moves, what could possibly go wrong?

Because all their situations are so dire, Samantha decides they all need a vacation and sweet-talks the sheik into comping all four of them. Prepare for a truly disgusting and gratuitous display of material excess. Their plane flight has separate sleeping compartments. They get chauffered around Abu Dhabi in four white Maybachs. They each get a personal butler. Their suite was based on a design originally commissioned by Charles Foster Kane, but he rejected it for being too opulent. The puns start flying non-stop, and they’re all horrible. Bedouin, Bath and Beyond is, sadly, one of the better ones. The costume changes start flying as well, and damn, it gets bad – in at least two places in my notes I have written OH DEAR GOD WHAT IS THAT THING ON SJP’S HEAD?!?

‘I am woman, hear me whinge! On shoes and purses I shall binge!’

Carrie somehow runs into her ex, the guy from Northern Exposure who was less of a dick than Big. Samantha is despondent that the authorities at the airport took her hormone drugs, but when she sees this Danish dude in the desert who has a porn-star name she gets horny again. The girls go back to the hotel and sing ‘I Am Woman’ in a karaoke bar with a bunch of belly dancers gyrating on a catwalk, which is supposed to be empowering, or something. Carrie’s book gets a bad review in New York magazine and the girls decide it’s because the reviewer is a sexist guy whom they’ve never met nor read any other reviews by, but Carrie’s still bummed.

So the next night, while Charlotte and Miranda drink and talk about how much it sucks to be moms with full-time nannies, Carrie goes on a date with Northern Exposure and locks lips with him and is horribly guilty over it. Samantha goes on a date with Dick Spirt (seriously, that’s his name), fellates a hookah pipe in public and otherwise behaves enough like herself to get arrested. The hotel stops comping them for their $22,000 a night room the next morning, so the girls decide to leave the country rather than actually pay for anything themselves. Carrie realizes she lost her passport in the market, they have to go back, and Samantha has an altercation that results in a crowd of men wanting to stone her or hand her over to the cops, but she’s dumb enough to egg them on, waving her condoms in their faces and yelling that she likes sex. Some local women give them shelter, and wow, surprise, under their robes and veils they wear the same expensive fashions the girls do! I guess that means that underneath it all, every woman, no matter where she’s from, just wants designer clothing and to find true love. Um, you’d think in Abu Dhabi they’d want equal rights under the law and legal protection from getting beaten and raped, but hey, I’m a guy, what do I know?

So the girls make it home and everything resolves itself in the ten minutes left. Miranda finds a new job. Charlotte’s nanny turns out to be a lesbian. Dick Spirt’s dick spurts with Samantha while they watch 4th of July fireworks in the Hamptons. And Carrie and Big realize they’re such assholes that no one else in the world will have them and work things out; he buys her a diamond, she stays in with him to watch TV and eat take-out. That is how lazy this film is; NO ONE ACTUALLY SOLVES A PROBLEM ON THEIR FUCKING OWN. Two and a half hours of bogus conflict and lifestyle porn. I’m going to be truly despondent if it enjoys the same level of financial success as the last one. Moreso, actually, since this time I bought a fucking ticket.

While waiting for the show to start, I spoke to the woman next to me, an ardent superfan who’d been watching the series since the first season when she was ten years old. She gushed about how much she loved it and how closely she followed it, and I realized something a little frightening. When discussing the right topic, I sound EXACTLY like this woman. If I bring up Joss Whedon, or Pixar, or Alan Moore, or Lost, I sound the same, I know I do. She seemed like a nice girl, a bit tanked (pre-show cosmos), and her occasional shriek of joy may have given me mild tinnitus. But still, I won’t judge a fan based on the merits (or lack thereof) of their object. Like someone in a bad relationship, I just wish they’d move on and find someone better.