I liked it, though. It was a bit like visiting with old friends you haven't seen in a while. Sure, it was a bit long, with a few extraneous threads, but I've seen many worse movies. Which makes me think about this article I read about the critical hostility directed at it:
"Sex and the City" the TV series was a revolution, yadda yadda, because it was one of the rare forms of entertainment that showed women in the flesh (and flesh), with all their vulnerabilities, anxieties and intelligence. But when you listen to men talk about it (and this is coming from the perspective of a male writer), a strange thing happens. The talk turns hateful. Angry. Vengeful. Annoyed. It's not just that they don't want to accompany their significant others to the movie. How dare Carrie and her girls hijack the box office during a time when the Hulk, Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the good old boys of the summer usually rule?
Is this just poor sportsmanship? I can't help but wonder—cue the Carrie Bradshaw voiceover here—if it's not a case of "Sexism in the City." Men hated the movie before it even opened. They flooded IMDB.com, voting early and often, so that the movie would have a low rating of 3 out of 10 among users before Friday (although now that number is higher, at 4.8). Movie critics, an overwhelmingly male demographic, gave it such a nasty tongue lashing you would have thought they were talking about an ex-girlfriend. "Sex" mustered a 54 percent fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com, compared to the 77 percent fresh for the snoozefest that was "Indiana Jones" (a boy's movie! Such harmless fun!).
2 comments:
The NY Times let Mahnola Dargis review it, and she hated it, perhaps more than the male reviewers. But then Mahnola hates almost every movie ever created, so maybe this doesn't say much.
Well, it's definitely not Citizen Kane, to be sure, so I wouldn't want to spend time arguing its artistic merits.
I think what's curious is the hostility directed at it. It's not just a snoozefest or silly or a formulaic, saccharine love story, it's an affront! A torturer of boyfriends! Harpies grubbing for the ring! Sluts doing their slutty fixation on shoes and designer labels!!
Some of those reviewer snippets were baffling. Roger Ebert feeling like he had to pop on out there with not knowing who Vivienne Westwood was, except for being a girlfriend of one of the Sex Pistols? (So? I didn't know who she was either.) It was like he was rubbing off the girly taint, lest someone think he's gay or something.
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