Sex In the City II

There's a reason why Sex In the City 2 is like Grease 2, but we'll get to that in a minute. The real shocker of Sex in the City 2 isn't that it's overlong and borderline atrocious, it's that it's leagues better than the first film. I'm not sure if this fact should shock or dismay, but mostly it just fills me with dull ambivalence.

The first question has to be: is the movie bad? The answer? I'm not sure. It's not good, that much is obvious. But there are good parts, and that's what's most infuriating.

No. No, wait, I take that back. Most infuriating is that Sex in the City 2 features, as its main character, an unlikable shrew of a woman with whom we are all supposed to relate. This shouldn't be hard, I think. I recall relating to her (mostly) on the TV show. Despite her expensive tastes, she seemed somehow earthy and interesting. A little self-involved, perhaps, but still a formidable main character with whom the audience's sympathies could easily lie.

In Sex In the City 2, Carrie is at turns shrill and unbearable, unreasonable and ridiculous. And she wears this one hat that could almost literally house a small, poor family. Her marriage problems almost border on existential, and in a better movie, that angle could have been played up. Every time she says she enjoys something, even slightly, her husband (Mr. Big) chooses to escalate those enjoyments to an unreasonable point. She likes a couch and he makes it his nest. She likes an old movie on TV, he installs a TV in their bedroom. She takes two days off from him to go write in her old apartment, he institutes it as a weekly occurrence. It's not that these aren't valid concerns a wife might have every right to complain about. Instead, she nags that they don't go out every single night, and eat take-out once in awhile. And she doesn't do it in a way that elicits any sort of sympathy, either: she's like a demanding, cartoon shrew.

The other women fare a little better. Miranda's new boss is a sexist (though the utter lack of any other women in her entire office seems suspect), Samantha's fighting off menopause, and Charlotte is finding out that motherhood is not all about baking cupcakes in vintage clothing. (Roger Ebert makes a note about that in his review; after some thought, I think Charlotte wearing a vintage dress making cupcakes actually fits for the character, trying to literally have it all at once.) These all seem like realistic, albeit heightened, problems - all of which are far, far more interesting than Carrie's. To be fair, though, a time-lapse video of plaster hardening would be far more interesting than Carrie's problems.

When, via some plot mechanations, the girls fly off to Abu Dhabi to "go someplace rich," things really start to skid off the rails. (1) New York City, for these women, IS someplace rich. There's lip service paid to the sagging economy, but it's one of those "show, don't tell" moments authors learn to avoid in, say, 5th grade Comp. (2) This is when the movie decides it has a Theme, and that Theme is Women Are Oppressed the World Over. It's not a bad theme, as themes go, and in a better movie with some smart handling, it can absolutely work. In this movie, womens' consciousness is awakened with the subtlety of a jackhammer on asphalt. During one otherwise okay moment where Our Girls sing "I Am Women" at karaoke, a number of Abu Dhabi women watching in the crowd seem to have a spiritual awakening. Oh wait, they seem to be thinking, those American women are right. I AM woman! It's pandering and insulting, not just to women, but all moviegoers.

(Oh, and speaking of insults to moviegoers: a cardinal rule in filmmaking is that you never, NEVER show clips of better movies in your crappy movie. It's why you don't see anyone watching Citizen Kane in Leprechaun 4. SITC2 has the audacity to not only show bits of It Happened One Night, but also rip off one of its central gags. Does it work? Eh, sort of. But mostly we're reminded that It Happened One Night won the Top 5 Oscars, and that we're still watching Sex In the City 2.)

Okay, so here's how this film is like Grease 2: smack dab in the middle of the movie is a scene that belongs in a better movie. Charlotte and Miranda are talking about motherhood. It's a scene they have to themselves. In it, they're bonding about why motherhood is harder than it seems to be, and why it's okay to admit it. The women in this scene seem real. They also seem like friends with a long, storied history. Better: the scene is well-written, with a silly confession drinking-game gag that fits in. The actors even seem to step up their game, knowing that they finally have something fun and interesting and real to work with. Then Samantha gets arrested for causing a boner and the film shrieks back into suck territory.

The main message I took away from this movie is that you can solve equal rights issues worldwide with (a) shaky puns, (b), a steady supply of haute couture, and (c) being over-privileged. I also learned that the best way to relax is by putting on your most expensive clothes and sitting sideways on an uncomfortable couch and flipping through a magazine so far away from your face that reading it is likely impossible. I am woman!