Sex and the City 2: The Sexening

[JPA]

This is getting an absolute critical mauling at the moment, has anyone been unfortunate enough to see it?

I don't doubt that it will do good business, but I've seen a few reviewers who are actually SATC fans hacking it to pieces.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Ms. Gonzo is a massive fan of SATC, and even she's decided to skip this at the multiplex.

Everything I've heard about it makes it sound beyond awful.

I mean:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas-and-birkins/Content?oid=4132715

[JPA]

Everything I've heard about it makes it sound beyond awful.

I mean:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas-and-birkins/Content?oid=4132715

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.

The SATC stars respond to the glut of bad reviews:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment_and_arts/10185297.stm

But Kim Cattrall, who plays sex-mad PR guru Samantha, says the reviews will make no difference to box office performance.

"I think that people will be interested in seeing it no matter what. There's many delights. If the storylines don't grab you, the fashion might."

Yay Cinema.

[Phil_A]

Nice to see they included a picture of Michael Patrick King, who appears to be an actual leprechaun.

[Lee]

"It's called mental wealth."

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

I saw it on Saturday.  The bad reviews piqued my curiousity too much.

I loved the series, until about the fourth season.  The first film was passable.  This was an abomination.  The bad reviews are not being hyperbolic.

It is soul-destroyingly awful and depressing, insensitive (not "irreverent", just fucking stupid), vapid, poorly scripted, terribly paced and unconvincing. The characters have become shrill one-dimensional chicken legs dragged in the offcuts of a Seven Sisters haberdashery.

It isn't funny.  It hasn't got one piece of wit in it.  The first twenty minutes are My Big Tokenistic Gay Wedding in which the two gay characters who hated each other and whose relationship is a far fetched plot device spend a fucking million quid on gaudy, garish bullshit and actually have Liza Minelli dance and sing, "Single Ladies", backed by the clank of her hips and flanked by the puppet-stringed Richey Edwards and his ghost kicking their legs.  Then they're never heard of again- it's just there to go, "WOO LOOK AT THIS IT'S CAMP!"

The characters are terrible- they bear no resemblance to the originals at all, except for Samantha who is still a loud mouthed fanny wagon who'd fuck anyone that looked at her and claim it was about self respect while doing that FUCKING IRRITATING eyebrow raise thing.  Miranda is the biggest whatthefuck of them all. She was a genuinely great, believable character in the series, and in this film, she's been reduced to grinning like a cadaver and spouting off tidbits about Arabic.  Carrie is so fucking annoying I want her dead.  Charlotte smiles so much that her face cracks open and the Face of Boe pops out gasping. Their "problems" are this:

Carrie's empty husk of a rich cunt likes to watch old movies on his huge fucking TV sometimes rather than accompany his skeletal pillar of dust to fucking film premieres every fucking hour of the day.  He buys her a giant TV for their anniversary and she complains she wants jewellry.  They have a massive flat and another massive flat.  She has a crisis about this non-issue.

Miranda is being bullied by her sexist boss and doesn't get to spend enough time with her ginger sprog and her line-less, grinning husband.  She actually says, "I thought my boss hated my voice.  But he just hates the fact that I have a voice".

Charlotte's perfect fucking life is upset by her braless, giant breasted Irish nanny who is wonderful at her job but braless and giant breasted and of course you should always treat all other women with contempt and suspicion.  Anyway, one of her perfect rosy children won't stop crying and another smears jam on her vintage frock which causes her to burst into tears.  She later says she doesn't know how women without help manage.  FUCKING DIE IN THE A FIRE.

Samantha is still a woman whose vagina remains intact despite being battered in more times than the door of the fucking Kray Twins' house.  She is going through the menopause and don't we fucking know it because it's all she talks about.

Anyway, the "gals" fuck off on a tenuous all expenses paid trip to fucking Abu Dhabi and plunder new depths of cultural insensitivity.  They're waited on hand and foot by pretty manservants whose humanity is all but fucking ignored.  They marvel at a woman in a nijab eating fries.  They insult Islam and meditate on their completely imaginary problems in their stupid fucking dresses stitched together by the fucking money they have.  At one point, after Samantha has given a blowjob to a hookah she, in a Muslim country, while the call to prayer blasts out, in front of men, "I LIKE SEX! THESE ARE CONDOMS! I HAVE SEX!"  She's liberated, not just insensitive and selfish!  The muslim women wear couture under their burquas!  Fuck me!  Being liberated like Carrie and friends!  Shallow! Self obsessed! YEAH!

I don't even have the energy to go on- it's a monument to commercialism, shallowness, the death of feminism and a good reason why another 9/11 should happen soon.  As well as that, it's completely unfunny, incoherent and boring to boot.  The "gals", who were once convincing as friends, are just stiff strangers.  You can practically see the stage directions, it's that stilted and badly acted.  I HATE IT. I had my boyfriend with me to watch it and he was ingesting himself with horror and annoyance.  It's the worst film I've ever seen.  And I can't watch my box set anymore.  My beloved box set.  I want to burn it.  Herald the end of feminism, like bras heralded the beginning.

[Artemis]

Thanks for that, Ronnie - I've booked my ticket! That burka sequence sounds HILARIOUS!!1

[Ronnie the Raincoat]

Oh fuck, I forgot the scene where they maul, "I Am Woman" in a karaoke bar and lots of different race women sing along and some clasp their hands to their chest in joy and identification.

When Samantha starting rolling around half naked and screaming about sex and flipping the bird at Muslim men, I was dearly, dearly hoping she'd be stoned to death then and there.  That would be political commentary.

Oh, by the way, the mad dash at the end is because they don't want to fly fucking coach on the way home.  Someone should have followed them with explosives strapped to their chest, they'd have been doing the world a favour.

[HappyTree]

I have never watched a single episode of SATC because I presumed from the title and cast that it would be exactly like Ronnie's excellent review all the time anyway. I now feel smug that I was so accurately prescient.

Desperate Housewives falls into the the same category. Why on Earth would anyone want to watch housewives being desperate? Egads.

[SavageHedgehog]

Does Kristen Davis have a Dorian Gray-like cast portrait in her attic, and if so did she recently snap off the bit with the other three on and burn it? It certainly looks that way.

The clip from this I've seen multiple times is where Parker says to some young girl "yes, it was just like [the Disney] Aladdin but with cocktails". That is not a joke, try harder please.

[Cerys]

The more I hear about Sex and the City, the more glad I become that I avoided it forever after watching almost one episode.

[Bingo Fury]

Ronnie, that was a fucking brilliant review. I've seen a couple of episodes of the TV show here and there (and I do mean, literally, a couple) and found it reasonably enjoyable and inoffensive, but the trailer for the first movie was so smug and self-congratulatory (and soundtracked by the most nauseatingly self-satisfied "ba-ba-boo" scat-singing imaginable) that I knew I could never bring myself to watch it. You're a brave soul.

[eluc55]

Just wanted to add my praise to that review Ronnie. Sehr Magnific.

[jutl]

Miranda is the biggest whatthefuck of them all. She was a genuinely great, believable character in the series

I have a lot of time for Cynthia Nixon before her assimilation. Her performance on Tanner '88 is fantastic.

[thepuffpastryhangman]

A Hollywood comedy mocking Muslims? And about bloody time too.

[rudi]

Just wanted to add my praise to that review Ronnie. Sehr Magnific.

I read it after being recommended to by Mark Kermode's most amusing review of his own last Friday on R5. So I in turn recommend fining that and giving it a listen.

[Lee]

I've just realised what all this reminds me of.

It's The Producers isn't it?

[Artemis]

When Samantha starting rolling around half naked and screaming about sex and flipping the bird at Muslim men

oooh, that's just made me a bit angry! Fucking hell, what on earth were they thinking?!

[non capisco]

This evident abomination has justified its existence because of how hard Ronnie The Raincoat's description of it made me laugh. Roll on Sex And The City 3!

[Artemis]

Kermode's review is very good as well, and is on iPlayer (starts at 1hr 38m in).

[George Oscar Bluth II]

The entertainment that the reviews of this film have given me over the past weekend or so justifies the films existence. Ronnie's was particularly good.

[purlieu]

I have never watched a single episode of SATC because I presumed from the title and cast that it would be exactly like Ronnie's excellent review all the time anyway. I now feel smug that I was so accurately prescient.

Surely not?  She was so angry at the film because the series wasn't like that...

[HappyTree]

I was referring to the sheer Capitalist, vacuous orgy and amoral sexual predation. She said the characters were not like they were in the series, but I got the impression the series overall was just the same kind of thing, if toned down.

[Fry]

I've watched every episode of the series, I can't remember the excuse I usually trot out for why - but I have. And, generally, the second film doesn't seem too far removed from the series, just amped up by 20x. Remember that excrutiating episode where they tackled class? With the nail salon and the silent japanese women doing their toenails? Ugh.

Although I think that was the 4th season, which you mentioned being terrible.

(Although I don't think it was, because wasn't it when Miranda was with Steve, and was fretting about making far more than him? I haven't watched them for a while)

[Barberism]

Not sure if I said this one before.

The skanky horse faced bitch from Sex and the City walks into a bar and the barman says...

Spoiler alert

Why the long face you skanky horse faced bitch.

[close]

[boxofslice]

My sister went to see this at the weekend and the word she kept using on the phone last night to describe it was, hateful.  She was a big fan of the original series, has them all on DVD but according to her this film bore little or no relation to that programme.  She was really quite angry about it all.

[23 Daves]

I've watched every episode of the series, I can't remember the excuse I usually trot out for why - but I have. And, generally, the second film doesn't seem too far removed from the series, just amped up by 20x. Remember that excrutiating episode where they tackled class? With the nail salon and the silent japanese women doing their toenails? Ugh.

Although I think that was the 4th season, which you mentioned being terrible.

(Although I don't think it was, because wasn't it when Miranda was with Steve, and was fretting about making far more than him? I haven't watched them for a while)

These are the issues I've always had with SATC, which makes me wonder - are critics just being more sensitive to it now because we're in the middle of a recession and that kind of decadence doesn't seem like escapism anymore, and more like rubbing other people's faces in it?

I've always found it to be hateful schlock, although my wife's defence of it has always been "Well, it's not made for your entertainment or benefit, you know" (ie "You're a man, you wouldn't 'get it'".  Which is interesting, as she's never been able to accept that answer from me about why she can't seem to find any English music-hall derived or influenced comedy funny*).

*She's not English, btw. 

[Santa's Boyfriend]

Kermode's review is very good as well, and is on iPlayer (starts at 1hr 38m in).

Kermode's review is on Youtube.  It's wonderful!

Sex and the City 2 reviewed by Mark Kermode

EDIT:  This is the review Kermode mentions: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/burkas-and-birkins/Content?oid=4132715

...although I have to say I think Ronnie's review is better than either of them.

[vrailaine]

Jim Ross from the WWE said it was only "so-so" and suggests you give it a miss.

[biscuitsandtea]

Jim Ross from the WWE said it was only "so-so" and suggests you give it a miss.

Aw cripes IF Jim's says it's bad. Then it must be bad. Still going... tonight in fact. Kinda mainly out of horrible fascination, and now I'm worried that because I have no expectations I might actually enjoy it. :/