Matthew Baldwin is back with one of his bad review revues. Which reminded me that I still had my own collection of excerpts from reviews of Sex and the City 2 sitting in my list of posts; for some reason I never published it. So:
I once watched Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, the legendary, gloomy black-and-white Hungarian film that lasts for seven and a half hours. Compared to the Abu Dhabi section of Sex And The City 2, Sátántangó zips past like an episode of Spongebob Squarepants.
In Abu Dhabi husbands can legally beat their wives — and Carrie thinks this place is Oz, a cure for her boredom with a zillionaire husband who, she complains, eats too much takeout. (She won’t cook because she’s more “Coco Chanel than Coq au vin.” Waiter: one divorce, please).
A decent story, witty dialogue, scenes that give good actresses something to do: Sex and the City 2 holds all of those things far out of reach, maybe because someone at the top thinks that the womenfolk out there in the audience, if they’re distracted by enough sequins and silly hats, won’t notice what’s missing.
I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles.
"Sex and the City 2" is more than harmless escapism. It's an accidental candid snapshot of the sick, dying heart of America, a film so pleased with its vacuous, trashy, art-free extravagance that its poster should be taped to the dingy walls of terrorist sleeper agents worldwide. More depressing and alarming than the movies themselves is the notion that a certain culture, a certain mindset, birthed it, without a pang of remorse or even apparent self-awareness, much less self-criticism. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why they hate us.
If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes.
Nothing as Useful as a Bad Theory
4 years ago
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