FIVE THINGS: "SEX AND THE CITY 2"

Something sad has happened to "Sex and the City". As a television series, it offered a not unintelligent escapist fantasy of the urban single female condition. Wearing Manolos and drinking cosmos, Carrie and friends spent week after week giggling and kvetching about love and life in a way that felt both resonant and idealised. These bosom buddies inhabited a vision of modern womanhood that mixed empowerment with vulnerability, materialism with frustration. They adored what they could control (their wardrobe) and lamented what they couldn't (their suitors). The result was meringue-like entertainment with just enough insight to keep feelings of disgust (self and otherwise) at bay.

So what's the deal with these movies? Oy. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon has written a beautifully zealous take-down of the latest. These are five of his finest moments:

On sadism:

"It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the "Saw" franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks."

On homosexuality:

"King seems to be posing the rhetorical question: Can a gay-wedding scene staged by a gay director still be homophobic and offensive? I think I'm voting for yes..."

On storytelling:

"King's storytelling operates on the premise that the viewer zones out every few minutes, and when she swims back up to the surface again, something new should be happening. Preferably involving camels."

On shambling, half-dead ghouls:

"It relies on stupid stereotypes because it's a stupid movie that's offensive to virtually everyone... The only reason it isn't offensive to straight men is that there aren't any; Big is something else, a shambling, half-dead ghoul enslaved to a demonic harridan."

On nostalgia:

"I kept telling myself, over and over, that Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte—the real, flawed, funny, recognizably human ones, not these lobotomized zombie replacements—would never do anything so dumb."

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: Warner Bros