I'd already made up my mind that I'm going — at some point — to see Sex and the City: The Movie. I've caught and enjoyed a handful of episodes, and while I've never found it must-watch TV, it's served as a bubbly distraction on a draggy night.
But in light of the vitriol leveled at Creative Loafing critic Lance Goldenberg for his pan of the film, Sex Bomb, (scroll down to read the comments), I guess I should get a ticket sooner rather than later, just to see what all the fuss is about.
While a couple of the screeds imply that "getting" the film depends upon whether one has a penis, this is an awfully shortsighted perspective that doesn't hold up to close inspection (i.e., reading any other reviews by other men). On Rottentomatoes.com, which offers a compendium of reviews from critics, you'll find plenty of men who dug the flick and plenty of women who didn't, often for the same reasons. As the saying goes, "one man's trash is another man's treasure." And one girl's Cosmo is another man's girly drink.
Among the female critical assessments, my favorite is this take by MaryAnn Johanson of FlickFilospher.com:
Fans of Sex and the City, the TV show — I am not a fan — rave about how it’s about “real” women and “real” concerns that women have. But I don’t see a real woman in Carrie Bradshaw. I see a very narrow, very stereotypical idea of what women are. Maybe that’s just me — I have no doubt that I am not the average woman. But I guarantee you that I am real. And here, I see a woman who is a caricature of “women,” not someone who is a human being first and a woman second, like we all actually are. Does she read a fucking book once in a while?
Ouch.
But as I said, there's plenty of men who appreciate the movie, including New York Magazine's David Edelstein:
Sex and the City: The Motion Picture (not the actual title) is a joyful wallow. And it’s more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it’s what the series finale should have been. For one last time, the relationship columnist–cum (no pun intended)–anthropologist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) tests the fairy-tale trappings of modern romance—turns them inside out, pulls at the loose threads, and wrings the tears that have saturated them into iridescent cocktails. (God, that’s terrible. I have to work on my Bradshaw-esque relationship musings.) It’s not that the writer-director, Michael Patrick King, breaks new ground; it’s that these women are in their fifth decade, and age is a more insistent subtext. The time for do-overs is almost up.
However, the best, most scathing non-review review may be from the Orlando Weekly:
We’re totally down with the interpretation offered by a choreographer we know, who once pithily observed that SATC projects onto women “everything that’s wrong with men.” For real: Is it any sort of inroad for a summer film to prove that ladies, too, can surrender to pummeling materialism, a blinkered emphasis on self-gratification and hollow objectification of the opposite gender? Plus, Darren Star and his “creative” crew must be laughing their sphincters loose knowing that their amoral fantasia has been welcomed as gospel by genuine urban women, instead of their obvious target demo: Iowan paralegals too tipsy and titillated to notice that the characters are actually semiotic stand-ins for gay men.
Geez, I can't wait to see this movie.
This article appears in May 28 – Jun 3, 2008.