Daily Archives: May 28, 2010

First things first, and for the benefit of fans who will see this film whatever this review goes on to say: yes, Liza Minnelli is in it and yes, she sings; yes, there’s a gay wedding with swans; yes, Charlotte falls off a camel; yes, there are more insane outfits than Mardi Gras; yes, there is a camp Arab butler named Abdul whom the girls nickname Paula; yes, the gang sing ‘I Am Woman’ at karaoke; yes, Carrie kisses whatsisface-the-carpenter; yes, Samantha gets arrested for shenanigans on the beach in Abu Dhabi; and yes, they make puns that would make a tabloid headline writer blush, ‘Lawrence Of My-Labia’ being the most awful/memorable. Not that Sex And The City has ever been lauded for its subtlety and grace, but this really is the closest to a Carry On film that the franchise has come so far. Suggested alternative title: Carrie On In Obscene Luxury.

The appeal of the original Sex And The City TV show, I am reliably informed, is that it gave us fully-rounded female characters who are the leads in their own lives rather than doomed to exist as sidekicks, pin-ups or romantic interests. This promising basic premise is wrapped up in a glossy package of cocktails, high fashion and adventurous sex, and underpinned by a solid foundation of female friendships. Sounds brilliant in theory, but it’s certainly not what you get from Sex And The City 2, which resembles what happens when comedy characters you know from a TV series or film appear in an advert – it’s recognisably them, and they behave in a way those characters might behave, but it’s all incredibly over the top and broad, an ad-man’s idea of funny. Plus of course, they’re trying to sell you something, and in Sex And The City 2′s case, that something appears to be Abu Dhabi, where the four girls jet off on holiday. If only they’d chosen Las Vegas instead, there might have been fewer crass attempts at cross-cultural analysis.

The girls coo orgasmically over their individual butlers, sigh over their cars and squeal over their $22,000 a night ‘jewel suite’ in a vulgar hotel that resembles what you’d get if you asked a six year old girl to design her ultimate princess dream sparkle palace. This is a movie that worships at the altar of mega wealth and consumerism, and if any extremist fringe groups happened to be thinking of making a piece of propaganda to inflame the righteous against the decadence of modern living, they should save themselves a job of work and simply screen this film.

There are a number of things the filmmakers could have done to vastly improve the film at very little cost. Number one on the list is to create a heroine who is not such a freakishly unsympathetic neurotic. Carrie, married for two years to Big, is upset that he wants to stay home and watch old black and white movies (of the calibre of It Happened One Night, no less – boy got taste) with her. I’m sorry, what? That sounds nice. She issues a terrifying edict: “We’re going to have to work on the sparkle… for the rest of our lives.” I cannot personally imagine many depths of hell worse that spending the rest of my life with Carrie Bradshaw, working on “the sparkle”.

Number two on the list would be to give lawyer Miranda Hobbes, always the most recognisably human character of the four, a proper story – all she gets is a little set-to with her sexist boss, before being relegated to chirping inane trivia from the Abu Dhabi guide book for the rest of the film. It’s an easy paycheque for actress Cynthia Nixon, who emerges from the film as the least annoying of the four women, but mainly because the competition is so hot. Charlotte loses our sympathy from the moment she wears an expensive vintage frock to do finger painting and cupcakes with her child, then bursts into tears when her poor kid gets paint on her dress. Eventually, she and Miranda share an execrable scene where they confess to each other that motherhood is hard and they can’t imagine how women without help do it. Suck it up ladies – at least you’re not spending the rest of your lives “working on the sparkle”.

Then there’s Samantha. Ah, Samantha… At some point in the dim and distant past life of the series she was a normal woman of a certain age who was proud of the fact that she enjoyed sex and didn’t want to settle down. A round of applause for that woman. That woman’s not in this film though: she’s been replaced by the mind of a horny teenage boy on heat, in the body of – well, you know what, I’m not going to say appalling things about how she or any of the women here look, because there are enough reviews doing that already, a focus I find slightly mystifying given the infinite number of more legitimate criticisms one might find to make of this film. Anyway, it’s a shame that Samantha emerges from her Abu Dhabi adventures recalling nothing quite so much as Mae West’s final film, the, um, comedy Sextette, in which Mae totters around gamely making innuendoes at any bit of trouser that happens to cross her path.

The screening I attended of this film was crammed with fans who whooped and roared with laughter; we can only conclude that they enjoyed this frothy concoction and chose to check deeper concerns at the door. This is the equivalent of movies like Transformers, but for people who like fashion and jet set locations rather than explosions and special effects. It will secure huge box office returns, and anyone bemoaning that fact might like to reflect that there are so few films targeting this audience, it’s small wonder they end up taking what they can get. It’s also a shame that, while Transformers was toss, there was also The Dark Knight, a movie with explosions and special effects, but also brains and deeper subtext. Are there any films crammed with fashion and jet set locations that also have brains and deeper subtexts? Whither the Christopher Nolan of “working on the sparkle”?

Not that I can really defend Sex And The City 2. My GCSE History textbook had a chapter on women getting the vote which included a cartoon from Punch Magazine claiming to illustrate the difference between the male and female brain. The picture of the male brain was full of sections like ‘politics’, ‘finance’, ‘international affairs’ and ‘foxhunting’. The female brain was full of labels including ‘shoes’, ‘hats’ and ‘marriage’. Sex And The City 2 appears to largely agree with Punch’s assessment, though it would of course add ‘sex’ to this giddy cocktail. As Carrie might put it, I couldn’t help but wonder: could it really be that the main difference between an ancient cartoon arguing that the female of the species should not be allowed to vote and a 21st century film supposedly portraying empowered modern women was whether they were getting some or not?