Ferociously bad reviews have greeted Sex and the City 2. 15% on Rotten Tomatoes! It's becoming something of a blood sport, writing up the movie's vileness. These reviews are also creative and fun to read, sometimes.
For instance, the great Roger Ebert finds the film to be horrific in several senses, about devouring humanoids:
Some of these people make my skin crawl... Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies. They must plan their wardrobes on the phone, so often do they appear in different basic colors, like the plugs you pound into a Playskool workbench...Like doppelgangers, or marionettes, or perhaps fembots.
Lindy West also finds horror of all kinds.
SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car...
If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night.
The City is Carrie Bradshaw's deathless necropolis. I liked Mannequin better.
By designating the rest of the world as an amorphous fantasyland*, the filmmakers also juxtapose New York as the only "concrete" destination in SATC2. By removing the characters from The City for the entire movie, they see that everything outside of New York is simply a fevered opium hallucination. Once you cross the Hudson River, you transcend reality, much like H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands.
[I]n this absolute vacuum of plot, a shadow narrative fills the void — the story of four damned immortals, condemned to live in a couture-drunk fugue state by a extradimensional puppet master (who may or may not be New York City itself). It's not much different from Dark City.These images, scraped from the IMDB's gallery, should suit the theme. On the left, doppelCarrie, waiting to summon up Bloody Mary from her glass. On the right, vat-grown Carrie, newly rebuilt to transhuman specs.
The reviews also note the film's weird situation in the Great Depression. Is it like screwball comedies of the 1930s, or simply tone-deaf and out of time?
Screenplay by Ira Levin? hmmmmmmmmmm
"sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"
Posted by: peter naegele | May 31, 2010 at 18:49
It would be tempting to roll up SATC2 into a column and set it on fire...
...but hey, it's good to see people cutting loose creatively in response to very base materials. Like fine flowers stemming up from compost.
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | May 31, 2010 at 21:59