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STUDIO: New Line Home Video
MSRP: $35.99
RATED: R
RUNNING TIME: 146 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
“So Much Can Happen in Two Years”: A conversation with Sarah Jessica Park and Michael Patrick King
Styling Sex and the City 2
Marry Me Liza!
Revisiting the 80s
The Men of Sex and the City
SATC2 Soundtrack: In the Recording Studio with Alicia Keys
Commentary by Michael Patrick King
The Pitch
The worst HBO show ever made gets a sequel. A week later, it dies in theaters.
The Humans
Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon
The Nutshell
HBO is the shining beacon in the Warner Empire. While it treated Deadwood and Carnivale like shit, it has no problem trotting out Sarah Jessica Parker for a cinematic tour. Watch now, as we began another tour into a mysterious cavern of pop culture delight. A place where bodily functions don’t matter and no one gives a shit about Bruce Campbell. Fellow chewers, we’re about to go pink.
The Lowdown
The first Sex and the City film became one of the highest grossing R rated films of all time. Naturally, a sequel was greenlight and the vapid rejoiced. Cut to two years later and a bloated man-handled film was dropped into theaters and ignored. The super hardcore came out and supported it, but the film died with little fanfare. Where did it go wrong? What could’ve been done to right the Carrie Bradshaw ship? Unfortunately, nothing.
Sex and the City 2 proved that women will watch any vapid fantasy to a point. Over the six seasons of the show’s HBO run, fans had to stomach a lot of back-turns and hand-wringing plot developments in order to push Carrie and Big together. The fact that Miranda, Samantha or Charlotte got any time to develop onscreen seemed to be an afterthought to stretch out the distance between Parker and Noth. The first film managed to play against that well, while giving the supporting players substantial material to develop. The second film suffers from the show’s worst faults as it tried to develop inconsequential plot lines.
Who gives a fuck about Carrie and Big’s problems? They’ll get married, they won’t get married. She got him to leave his first wife for him, which makes her the adultery victor. The only real bit of non-sunshine to enter Carrie’s life in the film is when the Times slams her latest book. The she-fantasy aspects of this series has been discussed to death, but there’s something to the fantastic in this film and throughout Bradshaw’s adventures. Carrie Bradshaw is perceived by this generation as the ideal woman. She’s impervious to criticism, can go wherever she wants and can have any man she wants.
Think about it. In reality, a horse-faced girl like Carrie would be relegated to the Last Call circuit of your local bar. Yet, we’re supposed to believe that a half-witted advice columnist is able to globe-trot while keeping a non-gay man interested in her? Fuck, the only gays in the flick got married near the start of the picture to get away from her. What market is driving this film? Women were supposed to be the ones that embraced the show, but that would be ignoring it’s large gay following. It’s not like the series has really gone out of its way to pander to one audience over the other. There’s just something not right here and I couldn’t put my finger on it until the end of the film.
When you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being nothing to the world. After two and a half hours of melodrama, you get an epilogue capper that feels almost as trite as the ending to Unbreakable. Those last two minutes of the film seem to indicate that no one on the film gave a shit about pacing. What was essentially thirty minutes of plot is stretched to two hours and thirty minutes for what?!? You get some armchair feminism mixed together with a critique on misogyny in the Muslim world. Alice Eve’s nipples get a cameo in Charlotte’s nightmares, as all of the real women cry and complain about they want more out of their lives.
Do any of them actually take any serious endeavors to obtain these wants? Oh no, that would require showing a woman working at bettering herself. In the world according to Carrie, shit just falls into place as you walk down Easy Street in your Manolos. This film fails because there is no forward motion. You don’t care about the women, unless you spent six years of your life trying to invest in a series that slowly pushed its way into Arliss territory.
This is one of the worst films of 2010, but it’s far from the top tier. When you consider its amazing line-up of faults, one has to acknowledge that director Michael Patrick King handles the various location changes well. When you consider that he was strictly a television director before jumping on the Sex and the City wagon, it’s quite impressive. Outside of that, I’ve got nothing. There are those that will gush over the film, but I don’t expect to find many of those fans at CHUD.
For these female Chewers out there, I beseech you to defend this movie. Is this movie supposed to be campy? Is their some secret message that Bushnell, King, Parker and company are telegraphing to the X chromosomes out there? I want to know why you like these characters/franchise. There’s obviously a chance that someone can explain to me why it was worthwhile to support a franchise about vapid chicks worrying about shoes and imaginary sex scenarios.
The Package
The Blu-Ray with a ton of featurettes about the production. Director Michael Patrick King takes part in a commentary where he never apologizes for this piece of shit film. Alicia Keys and Liza Minelli get their own sections where they discuss their inclusion into the film via cameo and soundtrack. The A/V Quality is sharp enough, but the series was never really known for its visual pop. The Middle Eastern section should’ve been a great place to showcase dynamic soundstage design with its HD master audio track, but it never happened. In the end, you get what you should expect. A middlin’ film designed to teach impressionable women how to be shallow.