Commentary – SATC2 – Tinsel & Tine

When Busby Berkeley wowed and won over throngs of people in the 30’s & 40’s with his movies of sparkle, charm and eye candy, were there just no movie critics around or did movie critics used to be real people who can take things at face value, enjoy it and for God’s sake, not pick, pick, pick like vultures on prey!

Casting aside the filmmakers’ breathtaking cultural insensitivity, their astonishing tone-deaf ear for dialogue and pacing, their demented, self-serving idea of female empowerment, the biggest sin of “Sex and the City 2” is its lack of beauty. It’s garish when it should be sumptuous, tacky when it should be luxe, wafer-thin when it should be whip-smart and sophisticated. -Washington Post, Ann Hornaday

Apart from an elaborately cloying gay wedding, nothing happens until somewhere near the half-hour mark, when Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and her beloved Mr. Big (Chris Noth) come up against a certifiable conflict—he wants to stay home and she doesn’t. That’s when “Sex and the City 2” also becomes a triumph of product placement, the product being Abu Dhabi. – Wall Street, Journal Joe Morgenstern

Liza Minnelli—as the rabbi, after a fashion—shows up to hoof a little number, wearing someone else’s face and flanked by twin younger versions of herself. I’m sorry, but a 64-year-old woman in a shirt worn over tights is not a happy sight, no matter how good she once was at this. You want to avert your eyes for her sake. –Village Voice, Ella Taylor

Brief updates. Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon) is a high-powered lawyer who is dissed by her male chauvinist pig boss. Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) is still a sexaholic slut. Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) has the two little girls she thought she wanted, but now discovers that they actually expect to be raised. Mothers, if you are reading, run this through your head. One little girl dips her hands in strawberry topping and plants two big handprints on your butt. You are on the cell to a girlfriend. How do you report this? You moan and wail out: “My vintage Valentino!” Any mother who wears her vintage Valentino while making muffin topping with her kids should be hauled up before the Department of Children and Family Services….This sequence is an exercise in obscenely conspicuous consumption, in which the girls appear in so many different outfits they must have been followed to the Middle East by a luggage plane. I don’t know a whole lot about fashion, but I know something about taste, and these women spend much of the movie dressed in tacky, vulgar clothing. – Roger Ebert

Oh my goodness, it so very simple – Sex and the City the TV show, was a platform for women’s issues and relationships in a very savvy, sophisticated way, while working in the fashion and overt sex. Sex and the City the Movies deliberately take a broad stroke!

They focus in on the over the top quality for summer movie, escapism fun! Get it? For Goodness Sakes it’s not supposed to be rocket science. We love these characters and we just want to visit them now and again, their problems don’t need to be huge or deep or original, we just like to see them together!

I, myself, love abundance, sumptuous luxury, changing costumes three or four times a day and I need a personal butler. So if I haven’t quite figured out how to achieve this in my own life, than I thank God for Michael Patrick King for bringing it to me on the big screen.
And by the way, Ella, Liza Minnelli was spot on perfect! I’m glad to know she’s in good enough health to perform like that; in fact, it was so funny and outrageously unexpected, you really need them to pause the film for a moment in order to bring yourself back to the rest of the gay, lively, glow of Sex and the City 2.