You might be wondering what is going on. I understand. The reason I am reviewing these movies, as a white male cultural critic who is only at home discussing the pacing of an 80's slasher kill, is that alot of nerdy stuff is just getting tiring to me as a solo venture.
I should put a big old pulsating emphasis on the world "solo venture" because I am still enjoying games and nerd movie shit as a social venture. I've slowly rediscovered enjoyment of
Left 4 Dead 2 even if I'm a Normal Difficulty scumbag. I even resubbed to
World of Warcraft after having not played the game in 2009, when mono basically killed my attempts to kiss the Lich King and make me the Homecoming Raid King. But it's only enjoyable with others. A few days ago, I loaded the game and played with a Special Person without having a method to communicate besides in-game chat. Do you know what that's like? Utter agony, like being trapped in a glass jar and having to lick the same 3 by 3 inch space over and over again. With communication, you can at least say "man this space really sucks to lick" to the other person.
What I'm trying to say is that at the moment, my finger has been hovering over the Steam play button for
Dragon Age: Origins, a game I have tried to play three times, each on the same origin story and class (Human Noble, two handed warrior), each time basically failing when I reach the first hub town and realize everyone around me is awful and going to incrementally wear me down until I'm nothing but stats and bones. Bones that you cannot sell to a vendor for three silvers. Which is also to say I'm slowly moving from nerdy things into applying my horrible critical habits from reviewing nerdy things towards not nerdy things.
Hence,
Sex and the City.
I had no particular bias for
Sex and the City before watching the movie. My primary knowledge of the show came from reading short synopsis of episodes in my paper's tv guide, and jokes about Sarah Jessica Parker's horseface. To be fair, Sarah doesn't have a horseface. It's more like she has a sinister otherworldly creature inhabiting her skin, so that if you pay close enough attention, you can see it pushing against her face. I knew it was about four friends in New York, in an episodic and seasonal structure, and that nothing important ever actually happens with them. Alot of times the snippets in the tv guide mentioned a "Mr. Big," who was a fascinating mystery to my teenage brain. Why was he called Mr. Big? Did he have a monster dong, or was he some sort of shadowy power broker bang lord?
One of the nice things about the start of
Sex and the City is that, likely to help those helpless boyfriends in the theater being dragged through the cinematic vagina dentata, is that there's a actually pretty well done breakdown of the television series events that sort of mattered: all four of the women are sort of terrible in their own complementary ways, now they're all sort of domestic, and Mr. Big was just some rich British guy that Sarah Jessica Parker decided to make her final bang target.
The only thing not really covered, though mentioned by the Special Person and made abundantly clear by the film, is that the three girls that are not Parker's Carrie are basically in thrall to her. Those three, the hard-edged and let's try not to use any sexist meanwords Miranda, the basically inconsequential Charlotte, and the likeable because all she wants to do is fuck Samantha, all have their own plotlines, but ultimately their existence is secondary to Carrie. It's never clearly explained why this is the case;
Entourage had the same issue, but it was more believable since the main character was actually successful, while his rat-faced companions were human polyps. Here, it's true that Carrie is a Big Important Writer, but Miranda and Samantha both have high impact jobs too, so who even knows. Perhaps a subconscious genetic control where the three other girls recognize that Carrie has the least destructive sexual instinct from a conventional societal viewpoint?
The first movie indeed doesn't really stray from its television format: at two and a half hours, it's basically three fifty-minute episodes, each with its own arc, cliffhanger, and advancement. The first deals with Carrie's imminent marriage with Mr. Big, which after fifty minutes of characters going "this wedding is going to be amazing and the talk of New York City!" concludes with the not at all contrived sort of kind of jilting at the altar by Mr. Big. This leads to the second part, which is fifty minutes of Carrie acting sad at a super expensive resort that no normal person could hope to enjoy, but that's okay because Carrie isn't enjoying it either until a
dysentery joke occurs.
The conclusion is the inevitable "struggle then rise" bullshit, with Carrie becoming Her Own Woman before realizing "nah lol I want 2 get married." This is helped along by Carrie hiring a spunky black woman, whose defining character traits are that 1) she is poor and 2) she is dedicated to subsuming her own desires for Carrie's, at least until asked. I guess it's nice of the show to acknowledge there are black people in New York City, and as sad as it is to say, the fact that even has independent goals and wants puts her in the upper quartile of black people in these sorts of movies (ie, the sorts of movies where the only time someone cares about minorities is trying to determine if they can get any sort of market share from the Tyler Perry demographic). Naturally, by the end of the film she's loaded onto the space capsule and blasted off into St. Louis, because
jesus christ.
Naturally the three other girls have their own problems that Carrie occasionally deigns to interlope upon. Charlotte is pregnant! Samantha has been in a dedicated monogamous relationship for too long! Miranda's husband had an affair, and her reaction to this for the entire film is to rip his skin from his scalp like a b-list Cenobite! The Miranda plotline is given by far the most screentime of the secondaries, and holy shit it is tiresome. Not because of how Miranda acts (obviously if you cheat then you are basically throwing yourself at the mercy of the other person), but because it felt like there was a dozen scenes of her husband appearing and going "hey i'm sorry let's go back" and Miranda replies with "no h8 u 4ver," and a dozen other scenes where one of the other girls goes "hey Miranda stop being mean he only cheated once" and Miranda removes her face and reveals her otherworldly demon form because she will not forgive him.
(spoiler at the end of the movie she forgives him)
Honestly, I sort of liked
Sex and the City. It's not a good film by any standard, but it's honestly entertaining if you're willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. The plotline moves forward with a greater speed than most movies designed for nerds, and some of the gags, if clearly not remotely meant for me, were still sort of funny. Also noticeable was the relative kindness given to the male characters. If they're sort of dopey and not truly understanding of the DIVINE SISTERHOOD, the boyfriends/husbands of the main characters seem to at least be trying their best and acting like real people would, which is better than could be said for
Entourage, where every female I saw was either an enormous whore or an enormous bitch (which I guess is how the target audience of that show views women). There's a certain kind diplomacy I felt while watching the movie, as though it was saying "hey, I know this isn't your normal thing, but give me a chance, I promise you won't completely hate yourself by the end of things." And it was the truth.
So here I am at the door, spruced up and ready to give the sequel a fair shake, still skeptical but more open hearted to what this film can achieve. The door flies open, and I feel a sharp pain in my chest. I look down, and I see a sword hilt sticking out of chest. As I slowly collapse, I can only ask "why?" In a slurred, surly tone, I hear "WHY DON'T YOU RESPECT WOMEN LIFE IS HARD POOR PEOPLE SHUT UP."
It's as though all the preconceptions that my most cynical aspect believed the first film would contain somehow escaped from my body and infected a film strip.
Sex and the City 2 is obnoxious, loud without saying anything, completely unfunny, and utterly contemptuous of anyone that is not a rich old white lady. This awfulness is understandable: while it's likely that some people not completely indoctrinated in the Gospel of Sassy would have seen the original
Sex and the City, the sequel assumes anyone watching at this point would probably also watch Carrie apply hemorrhoid cream for three hours, so why try anymore?
The best thing I can say about
Sex and the City 2 is that it does not waste its time making this attitude abundantly clear. The first thirty minutes of the film take place at the ~~~GAY WEDDING~~~ of the two gay guys of the series. People who would call themselves "sensibly liberal" and view minority struggles with the same degree of concern as they would with their cat's health problems might view the ensuing proceedings as "really progressive, wow they're showing a gay marriage!" Anyone else is going to view this as "something you would see in a Lucio Fulci film, except fruitier." Needless to say we are smack dab in the middle of positive stereotyping of gay people: they're loud and obnoxious and incapable of restraining themselves from fucking everything that moves, but they're also super witty and totally willing to convert themselves into being a support system for the breeders. The ceremony feels as though it was transmitted from the collective nightmare of every board member for the National Organization for Marriage, culminating in a sequence with Liza Minnelli strutting across a stage like a 16-year-old cat in heat while younger clones of her dance around.
After the nightmare ends, it's revealed that all these sassy gals have troubles again! But instead of troubles from the first film, which while strictly first world, were still problems a person in the audience might empathize with, the second movie dispenses of this little problem. Instead, we get issues that only the most capitalist cock sucking hoe bags could experience, done in a way that still assumes we're bad people for not caring about it:
For instance, Charlotte's issue is that she now has to worry about the fact that her nanny has big boobs, a fact that is demonstrated several times as some sort of misguided concession to the males in the audience. Miranda decides to leave her firm because of a cartoonishly sexist senior partner, which never appears to be an issue since the only effect seems to be a shot of her complaining about her increasingly difficult life
while their maid is putting stuff away. Samantha's problem is just "getting old," which would be understandable if not for the fact that her method of dealing with it is buying dresses priced at thousands of dollars (leading to her running into Miley Cyrus wearing the same dress ah ha ha fucking kill me) and spending thousands of more dollars on organic anti-aging treatments.
The real lion's share of screentime, of course, belongs to Carrie. Her problem is, without under or overstatement, that her husband is occasionally wanting to spend time eating take-out food and watching tv rather than going to parties. Carrie's reaction is to go to her own apartment for a week (in a really stunning moment that explains everything wrong with her movie, she offhandedly mentions the 2008 housing crisis as the rather inconvenient reason she never sold it), and when she returns, Mr. Big says that maybe that could be a regular "take time off from each other" concept. Somehow, this is a crisis akin to being jilted at the altar, because Carrie's self-created dilemma means it's time for another trip...to Abu Dhabi!
Yeah so everything about this aspect of the movie is an utter fucking mess. There's a palpable terror by the screenwriters at actually tackling anything vaguely controversial, so the entire affair comes off like watching some middle aged woman type out the details of her exotic trip on facebook. The film has basically two modes of portrayal, 1) "wow this place is so beautiful and there's so many good deals and friendly people," and 2) "hmm these women are kind of oppressed and maybe these hotel servants are basically well-dressed slaves that's kind of sad :(" It's a constant and nausating flip-flop between these attitudes for most of the film, shifting between Carrie being super excited about how cheap shoes are at the bazaar, then an awkward as fuck discussion between her and her hotel servant about how he hasn't seen his wife in six months. And then we're back to camel rides and Samantha meeting a dashing man (who is European, because ha ha did you really think they were going to have romance between a white woman and a brown man in a wide release film)!
Unfortunately this meeting leads to another nadir, where Samantha deep throats a hookah in front of the mystery man and we're supposed to be like "whoo grrl power" but instead you just end up cheering for the angry conservative Arab couple who want this ridiculous shit to end. This display eventually forces the girls to escape from Planet Islam, though as they're trying to get through the city streets, Samantha's suitcase opens and out spills condoms. This leads Samantha to, I guess in another misguided attempt to make us root for her, shout "YEAH THEY'RE CONDOMS, CONDOMS BECAUSE I HAVE SEEEEEXXXXXX" Thankfully, just as the swarthy hordes are about to find them, the girls are rescued by a group of Arab women.
But these just aren't any normal Arab women...
Yes, in a scene that I knew about beforehand but still couldn't believe when I actually saw it happen, our protagonists are saved by a group of Arab women that are hiding designer dresses under their restrictive outfits. This, along with the reveal shortly after that Carrie left a few Ben Franklins for her hotel boy, seem to signal the film merging its two viewpoints about the Middle East into one: "shit is pretty bad I guess, but capitalism will eventually solve everything!" There's also a subplot where Carrie reconnects with an old flame also in Abu Dhabi, but it's such an absolute afterthought at trying to inject something resembling real drama that I refuse to talk about it.
At any rate, the girls return home and all their issues are magically solved (oh silly me the nanny was actually a
lesbian oh ha ha mega funny), culminating with Carrie and Mr. Big coalescing themselves into one vibrating ball of flesh, hissing and gagging as their shed skin slowly drips off the side of the bed.
I mean they watch TV in bed. TV. Say it. TV.
Christmas wins the "biggest waste of potential reward," featuring Seth Green as a beleaguered husband stealing the holiday's primo toy, a VR machine that shows you what's inside your head or something, from the hands of a dying man. Unsurprisingly, he begins to see things from the perspective of the dead guy, and I settled in, expecting a serviceable, maybe even clever, techno-rehash of the "guy gets X transplant from mystery donor, things go to shit." But for some reason, perhaps due to the running length, the story goes in a totally different, absolutely absurd direction before just deciding to abruptly end.
