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Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Sex and the City 2 Trailer

Darlings. The SATC2 trailer. It is here.




Kittens, our fortunes may wax and wane over time, but there has always been one thing of which T Lo has never been in short supply: OPINIONS. And lucky you, we're going to give them to you for free.

Here's the thing: Like so many urban gays of a certain age, we shared the love with our urban straight sisters for Carrie and her backup singers. Because we occasionally lapse into stereotype, our place was THE place to go back in the late '90s/early aughties on Sunday nights. Yes, it's true. You could often find us whipping up a batch of Cosmos with some gal pals and sitting on the couch to discuss Carrie's latest cracktacular ensemble or her latest attempt to fuck up her life. It was fun and we truly loved the show, despite the tendency in later seasons to morph Carrie from quirky, vintage-wearing party girl into a couture princess fantasy. When it ended, we felt they (mostly) ended it well (Did EVERY ONE of them have to wind up with a man in the end after six seasons of driving home the point that women could be happy without the fairy tale?). We were hesitant about the first movie, but dutifully bought our tickets and (mostly) didn't like it.

But something happened in the zeitgeist when the show transitioned from HBO to the silver screen. It became very fashionable to hate on the show and especially to hate on Sarah Jessica Parker. Granted, in the years following the show finale, SJP apparently never met an endorsement she didn't like and from the Gap to Garnier to her own fragrance, she was out shilling like her life depended on it. That's a great way to make some big money for an actor, but it's also a great way to get the public to turn on you. Still, the vehemence with which many criticized her was a bit jarring, not least of which because so much criticism centered on her looks. Suddenly, it had been decided that SJP wasn't an actress with quirky good looks; now it was decided that she was downright ugly, a charge we find to be more than a little ridiculous. Sure, we've criticized some of her fashion choices, but we've always maintained that if SJP wasn't famous and she walked into a party, many if not all of the straight male heads in the room would turn in her direction, if for no other reason than she's still got a killer body, striking blue eyes and a sexy mane of blonde hair.

But it was the criticism of the show and the quality of the criticisms of the first movie that really got our backs up. Look, we criticized it too, but we criticized it on the merits, not on the fact that they're all in their 40s and sexually active, which is what so much of the bitching revolved around. That's a charge that really stuck in our craw because on any given day in any given year, you can check the movie listings and somewhere there's a big budget mainstream release wherein the male romantic lead is in his mid-40s AT LEAST and no one bats an eye, even when he's paired with a female a good ten to twenty years younger than he is. All this managed to prove to us is that the film critic industry is dominated by men. Seriously. Outside of Manohla Dargis in the NYT, we can't think of one leading film critic sans penis. What most of those male critics couldn't understand was that the very concept of Sex and the City was designed to make most straight men deeply uncomfortable. Instead of realizing that and owning their own reactions to it, many (most) of them simply wrote it off as a silly chick flick about sexually voracious middle-aged women who spend too much money. And when you think about it, that's a concept that really hits all the major areas of male entitlement and insecurity.

This is a very long-winded way of saying that even though we think the show's time has passed and the transition into movies wasn't a great idea from an aesthetic point of view, we will still defend those girls from what we think are unfair criticisms from people who never bothered to see the world past their noses. Of course they're shallow. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT. It was never meant to be a show about the experiences of all women. It was a show about a very narrow sliver of the female experience: single, educated, financially secure urban white women over thirty. We don't know about you, but for our crowd, built in to the viewing experience of each show was the post-game wrapup, wherein a bunch of us, lubricated on Cosmos, sat around and talked about what a smacked ass Carrie is for mistreating Aiden, or for spending $40,000 on shoes without realizing it, or for constantly making everything about her. That wasn't a bug of the show; it was a feature. Pardon us for saying so, but (some) women like to judge other women. A simple check of our comments section bears this out on an almost daily basis. As an audience member, you weren't supposed to cheer on every decision or action the characters made; you were supposed to discuss them, as if you were all sitting around talking about the friends that weren't in the room; their fashion choices, their relationship choices, and even their career choices.

Now, having said all that...kittens, this trailer pains us. Obviously it's only a couple of minutes from a much longer movie, but it looks to us like the mistakes of the first film have only been magnified in the second. Gone are the complex, infuriating, quirky (there's that word again) women of the TV series and in their place are a bunch of over-the-top drag queens parading around in increasingly silly outfits. And the Morocco setting only makes us think of the AbFab episode where Patsy sold Saffy into white slavery.

Are we going to see it? Of course we are. But to be honest, we can practically guarantee that this movie isn't going to provide nearly the entertainment that sitting down with the DVDs from the first 4 seasons of the show does.









[Video: YouTube - Screencaps: Projectrungay.blogspot.com]



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