I just got the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly, and it has 63 whopping pages about the Sex and the City movie. I can already hear the legions of internerds cracking their knuckles, getting ready to post ‘hilarious’ savagings of this issue and this movie.
EW is devoting so many pages to the film out of corporate synergy – Papa Warner Bros is putting this out (through the rapidly dessicating New Line. I had dinner with a former New Line PR person this week and she told me that nobody knows how that transition is working. If it’s working at all). But it’s also devoting so many pages to the film in a belief that this is a seminal cultural moment, and that really annoys nerds. You see, all non-sports related seminal cultural moments are now supposed to revolve around comic books and action films, not shit girls like.
Of course the question of how seminal an event this will be is a good one; while the mainstream media has been all over this film the way that nerd sites are all over comic book movies, I have a vague feeling – based on little beyond useless anecdotal evidence – that Sex and the City‘s cultural moment ended a year or two ago. The show has now been off the air long enough that the viewers have moved on to other things but not long enough to create that sense of nostalgia which can only explain why any rational human being would be excited for an A-Team motion picture. If this exact same movie had hit theaters in 2006, the 63 pages in EW would have been wholly justified beyond an attempt to shill the corporate product. But cultural moments are ephemeral and hard to gauge properly. For instance, I think Star Trek is going to hit at the right cultural moment, but will The X-Files 2?
Still, nothing amuses me more than seeing people get annoyed or up in arms about this film, or films like it. Films that are not aimed at the exact demographic of this website. The latest great bit of news is that Sex and the City is two and a half hours. That’s probably how long The Dark Knight will be – which film deserves this epic length more? The answer: neither! One is based on a half hour sitcom, one is based on a children’s entertainment, both are bloated beyond measure and equally juvenile and at heart, pablum.
But Sex and the City is for girls. Ewww.
I watched a couple of seasons of Sex and the City when I had a female roommate. The show didn’t kill me, didn’t make me gay, and didn’t help me understand women. It was a modestly funny show that was mostly fantasy; it occasionally (especially in the earlier seasons) hit upon some real human truths in interesting ways. It surely was infinitely better than trash like Stargate or Farscape or easily 90% of network sitcoms; everything from the writing to the production value to the acting was better. I think it’s actually better than a couple of sacred cow HBO series, but there’s only so much hate mail I’m willing to get on a weekend, so I’ll keep it to myself. Anyway, the show just wasn’t that bad. Like many shows it stretched out too long and lost a lot of its original charm, eventually becoming way too bogged down in itself and its continuing storylines. I didn’t make it all the way through the series run with my roommate, but I don’t think my eyes would have begun bleeding had I made it appointment TV. I can see having real ethical problems with this show and film if you’re a hardcore Marxist, or a super religious type. I can see not liking this show and film on a pure taste level. I just don’t understand why anyone would get annoyed about it.
This probably makes me a traitor: to me a movie about a guy turning into a green giant and smashing things is just as dumb as a movie about four aging single women shopping and fucking. This is the female equivalent of all the shit that we cover on this site day in and day out, just without fight scenes or special effects. It’s arrested development fantasy, it’s retreading of old ground, it’s most likely pandering bullshit.
But it’s pandering to girls, instead of to me. Ewww.