Sex And The City 2: 2013

Saturday, 9 February 2013

Sex and the City 2 movie latest trailer

Sunday, 3 February 2013

Sex And The City 2 movie overview

This put me in mind of a stunned and disillusioned childhood of multimedia consumption in the 1970s: watching the adventures of that sexy quartet, Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Bones, as with eternal dynamism they pursued space adventures on TV. And yet, up on the big screen, with each new movie … why did they look increasingly slow and dull and tired, often wearing new outfits which didn't look very good? Perhaps, with Sex and the City 4, we will be treated to a heart-rending Death of Spock-type scene, in which Samantha is fired out of a Manhattan penthouse window in a sparkly coffin, having first transferred her "katra" to a demure assistant.

Anyway, Carrie and her best buds get it together for another big-screen go-around in this misjudged and quite incredibly boring sequel. As ever, the stars are Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon as columnist-turned-bestselling-author Carrie, heroically lascivious PR Samantha, Park Avenue princess Charlotte and smart lawyer Miranda. It is two years on from the last movie. Charlotte and Miranda are happy, if stressed, moms; Samantha is single and staving off the menopause with weird vitamins and Carrie is still married to smug Big (Chris Noth), but the romance is leaking out of their relationship. And iPhones, which so baffled Carrie in the last movie, are now ubiquitous. The gang have lots of fun at a gay wedding, there are a couple of nice jokes and then … well, something absolutely awful happens. Do they all get crushed by an oblong-shaped asteroid while they're doing that empowered four-abreast march down the sidewalk? Do they get wiped out by swine flu? Do they have an epiphany and retreat to a nunnery in Lille? No.

They go to Abu Dhabi! That's right. The big plot twist is that Samantha is offered a very unappetising all-expenses-paid junket in Abu Dhabi and gets to invite her three BFs. Naturally you'd expect the scenes in Abu Dhabi to last, ooh, maybe two, three minutes, tops – enough for some gags about deserts and camels and American outsiders clumsily misunderstanding Middle Eastern culture, and then surely we're back to zingy Manhattan. But oh no.

We are stuck in Abu Dhabi for almost the entire film. Abu Dhabi. In the United Arab Emirates. That Abu Dhabi. As 10 minutes turned into half an hour and then into an hour, and we were still in Abu Dhabi, with the foursome landed with having to gaze in wonderment and squeak with excitement at naff hotel fixtures and fittings, I sensed a claustrophobic panic growing at the screening I attended. Like Martin Sheen waking from his uneasy slumber in Apocalypse Now and thinking: "Shit, I'm still in Saigon," various members of the audience would emerge from their periodic reveries and mumble out loud: "Shit, Carrie and her friends and by that token we the audience are still in Abu Dhabi." I once watched Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, the legendary, gloomy black-and-white Hungarian film that lasts for seven and a half hours. Compared to the Abu Dhabi section of Sex And The City 2, Sátántangó zips past like an episode of Spongebob Squarepants.

What is going on? Is writer-director Michael Patrick King a massive fan of Abu Dhabi? Is he an evangelist for Abu Dhabi as a rockin' holiday destination? Or is he, conversely, consumed with a desire to satirise Abu Dhabi as an unsuitable place to visit? There is a strange scene on board the plane headed out there, when the crew of the (fictional) airline Afdal Air ostentatiously offer the ladies a welcoming glass of champagne — in exactly the way that the winning couple on the 1980s TV show Blind Date would invariably be offered an airborne glass of bubbly as a way of advertising the airline company who were bankrolling the prize. Weirdly, the film is not shot in Abu Dhabi but Morocco. It's a puzzle.

Anyway, our heroines have lots of dull misadventures out in Abu Dhabi, which is presented as a modern Middle Eastern luxury hotel complex with burqas and tradition, but also nightclubs and fun and drinks and karaoke – no cigarettes, though. Samantha meets a foxily grey-haired Danish architect who looks about as attractive as Harold Shipman, but nonetheless she has a romantic liaison with him on the beach, which gets her into hilarious trouble with the law. And then Carrie runs into a very significant person in the souk. Soon, assignations are being arranged and Charlotte warns Carrie that she is "playing with fire". Later, some burqa-clad ladies remove their veils to reveal that they are wearing New York-style fashions. That strikes me as playing with fire rather more dangerously than Carrie's flirtatious dinner-date.

Well, the way ahead could be Sex and the City: the Next Generation, at which each of the foursome's assistants team up for younger-level adventures. Or maybe some sort of prequel. Candace Bushnell, author of the original column and book, has in fact already published a teen-lit tale of Carrie's schooldays. Or perhaps it's time to call it a day. After all, they'll always have Abu Dhabi.

Sex And The City 2 movie review

As I suffered through the nearly two-and-a-half-hour runtime of Sex and the City 2, I kept asking myself: What might I have done wrong, in a past life or in this one, that I deserve to have my eyeballs seared by Sarah Jessica Parker's loony desert-princess getups? To suffer the agony of watching four actresses who have previously given me so much pleasure become undone by crap dialogue and, in one case, an overinflated ego? To gaze upon a couple of amazingly well-groomed camels and realize that they have better hairdos than the human movie stars astride them?

Even in the context of that lumpy, overpriced Birkin bag of stuff we call Hollywood product, Sex and the City 2 hits a new low of idiocy and crassness. There are lots of problems with mainstream Hollywood movies today: A tendency toward fast cutting as a substitute for clear action, storytelling that relies too heavily on dialogue and too little on visual information, an overall samey-sameness as studios desperately repeat any formula that has made them big money in the past. But Sex and the City 2 -- perhaps even more so than its 2008 movie predecessor -- is a sad and ugly example of how terrific television can mutate into something that feels a lot like torture porn. No, scratch that -- torture porn may be unpleasant to watch, but at least it's honest about its motives. And the clothes are less of a horror show.

There's very little plot in Sex and the City 2, which, like its predecessor, was written and directed by Michael Patrick King, based on characters created by Candace Bushnell (which were further fleshed out by Darren Star, creator of the HBO television series). But who needs a plot when you've got -- squeeee! -- cosmos and Louboutins and enough costume changes to outfit at least three separate amateur Gilbert & Sullivan productions? Sex and the City 2 proceeds not from plot point to plot point but from outfit to outfit, beginning with Parker's Carrie Bradshaw reflecting on her old, single life in the city (complete with flashbacks to 1986, represented by the era's ubiquitous big hair and bad sneakers). Flash forward to the present day: Carrie and her pals, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda (Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon) are attending the wedding of two of their dearest friends, Stanford and Anthony (Willie Garson and Mario Cantone). Carrie, the best woman, is wearing a man's tux and strangely crimped hair; later, she adds a black lace crown that looks like something the Wicked Queen in Snow White might have worn, just because she's crazy that way.

Other stuff happens: Carrie thinks her marriage to John/Mr. Big (Chris Noth) is getting a little too routine, never stopping to think that perhaps he's beginning to wonder how he found himself married to a woman who insists on wearing a bra and a nightgown to bed. Meanwhile, other women are not wearing enough bras: The friendly, capable Irish nanny Charlotte has hired to watch over her two moppets (a misused Alice Eve) has huge knockers and joyfully refuses to harness them into submission. Charlotte worries that her sweetheart of a husband (played by the refreshingly straightforward Evan Handler, who appears in far too few scenes) might be tempted to cheat, a thought that understandably distresses her.

In other news, Miranda is stressed out by a job she hates; apparently, King couldn't be bothered to come up with a reasonably sexy conflict for her to resolve. And although Samantha is going through menopause (much hilarity ensues whenever she suffers a hot flash), she looks as sexy as ever. She flirts with a rich sheik, who invites her to come to Abu Dhabi for an all-expenses-paid vacation -- he wants her to see what he calls the "new" Middle East. She wangles additional invites for her besties, and so this happy, chattery jumble of privileged white women arrive at the luxury resort where Mr. Sheik has set them up in lavish style, with private cars to take them anywhere they'd like to go and dutiful personal servants to peel their grapes for them.

But the women are very surprised to learn that even this "new" Middle East is very different from home. They slither from the rocks under which they've been living for the past 40-odd years to learn that many Muslim women wear the hijab, often complete with the niqab, which covers the mouth. Carrie looks at these poor dears with pity and condescension, using her brilliant powers of deduction to ascertain that this is a way for Muslim men to control their women. "It's like they don't want them to have a voice," she says with a small shudder, before we're treated to more scenes of the fab four cavorting in their sequins and silk jersey as they avail themselves of the nice digs and great food provided by the generous Mr. Sheik.