May 29, 2008, - 1:31 am
“Hags and the City”: My Review of Trashy, Anti-Male “Sex & The City” Movie
By Debbie Schlussel
A national IQ test for women takes place starting tonight. It’s called, “Sex and the City,” the movie (SATC).
If you like this TV-show-turned-feature-length-film and you’re female, you failed. If you like it, and you’re a guy, you threw away your man card long ago. You’re not a failure. Just gay (like the people who created this show) . . . not to mention, completely bereft of testosterone.
When, early in his Presidency, George Bush had never heard of the TV show, he was attacked in New York Times reporter Frank Bruni’s book for that. But, au contraire, it was a badge of honor for him and one of the few things that marked his intelligence and good taste.
A close-up shot of a woman’s pubic hair sticking out of her bathing suit, and another woman defecating in her pants–both are, um, “highlights” of the SATC movie. GUH-ROSS. I thought I was watching a bad, juvenile frat boy movie. This is what substitutes for haute culture for women in America, these days. Very sad. But not as sad and miserable as these four haggish women, who like their former TV show, can’t be called “past their prime” because they never were “prime.” Just primitive . . . and reliably sleazy and low-class.
Unfortunately, they’re Delphic oracles to far too many American women, if the long lines of drooling women who packed four large theaters at a promotional screening I attended were any indication.
And the diarrhea accident and unsightly giant vaginal hirsute protrusion shot are just the bathroom “humor” in “SATC,” in which three 40-somethings and one 50-something make up a foursome of bawdy, aging women who wasted their lives sleeping around, cackling about it, and acting like immature, 20-something sex-crazed male dogs in heat. Because they dined in glamorous places, wore trapezoid shaped clothes and $1,000 fancy high heels, this somehow made their low-brow, savage behavior, “classy.”
With their conduct and bitterness in addition to their age, if these women were even a day older, they’d have to change the title to “Sex and the Cat Ladies.”
Disgusting and vulgar, and coupled with so much angst, screaming, shrieking and crying, watching this movie I thought I was caught in the middle of the Spitzer marriage on the day Client-9 was unveiled. Painful to sit through, not to mention for about 2.5 hours. Peppering it with way too many gratuitous shots of sky-high-priced stiletto heels (which, in the case of SATC, are the real “axis of evil”) and bizarre fashion–far more than the TV show ever did–doesn’t make it any more bearable. If I wanted to look at the Nieman Marcus catalog, I’d stay home and read it on the couch (and see the merchandise on real, glamorous models, not women who look like male transvestites). Equine star Sarah Jessica Parker, looking particular male-with-makeup on in one scene, dons an ugly turquoise bird in her hair. Blech!
For the record, I was never a fan of SATC, the HBO TV series, which takes place in New York . . . or at least the New York in Gloria Steinem’s own special torture chamber fantasies. Four women–at least, we think they’re women–who look like female impersonators in drag think and act like they’re supermodels.
The star, Parker, who looks the most drag-ful, plays a loser sex and dating columnist Carrie Bradshaw, who constantly gives herself over to use and abuse by a series of dysfunctional and/or philandering men who are cold and can’t love. Is there any other kind of men in SATC? Uh, no. (The occasional exceptions are men who are so horribly naive and innocent as to be childlike.) The love of her life–“Big,” whom we learn is named John James Preston, as if we care–is the worst of them. And he does it even worse in the movie, something we thought was resolved at the end of the TV series.
There’s Cynthia Nixon as Miranda Hobbes, the lesbian-esque lawyer with shocking red hair who plays man to the chickish male bartender she uses and abuses and whose kid she fathers, er . . . gives birth to. Wasn’t Miranda the name of one of one of the elderly witch aunts on “Bewitched”? Very apropos. She’s more butch than ever in her behavior in this movie. In real life, Nixon left the fiance-father of her two kids for a lesbian relationship. Shockingly, she’s the “female” in the relationship. Think she’s happy?
Kim Cattrall is Samantha Jones, the oldest of the bunch and most vain. She consumes her life with skin treatments, sex toys, and sex acts with near strangers and total strangers. In real life, we call that a “sex addict” or “the most used piece of equipment in the gym.” In SATC’s alternative hate-men-iverse, it’s called “empowerment.” Or is that . . . empowerwomynt?
She’s lucky SATC came along to rescue her from her previous Shakespearian reputation as the mannequin in “Mannequin,” as a slut in the raunchy “Porky’s,” and as a character in a movie called, “Live Nude Girls.” Now, Catrall’s a much hipper, wealthier, more “respectable” brand of slut in SATC, and she has nicer clothes. In real life, Catrall–who wrote an explicit sex book with her much younger husband and then divorced him–is living out her character’s life and not seeming to enjoy it much. Despite her self-proclaimed expertise on sex (she’s written two books on it), she’s had three failed marriages. So much for alter egos in the world of glorified on-screen sluttery.
And finally, there’s Kristin Davis as Charlotte York, who also has been, ahem, “victimized” by rich men who date and marry her. No biggie that she’s a gold-digging idiot who got what she deserved and is more annoying and naive than words.
The movie version rehashes the same old stories that were put to bed four years ago when the show mercifully ended. It’s like exhuming the rotted corpses of unworthy people you could barely stand, and for no apparent reason you must look in vain for a gold tooth among the worms and porous bone. You never find the gold, though.
Is there a point to this movie–other than to make money for the Hollywood figures involved and rehash and reinforce man-hating and miserable, sex-crazed attitudes and lives? Oh, I guess there’s one point, which is the soft-core porn element of this flick. These aging actresses gotta show us they’re still in shape and flash their breasts onscreen–in one case sprinkled with sushi. That, and way too many explicit sex scenes and close-ups of men’s naked butts en flagrante delicto.
Why watch sleazy porn and be labeled a perv, when you can watch this garbage and have the kosher seal of approval from America’s feminists and the phony mainstream media, all gushing over SATC phony “kitsch”?
The only classy thing in this entire movie is the presence of the talented Jennifer Hudson, the Academy Award winning actress and former “American Idol” contestant. And that’s why her character doesn’t belong anywhere near these walking disease incubators.
I suppose Hudson was inserted into the movie–as Parker’s assistant–to answer the complaints over the years by Black America, that there were no Black women in this fashionable pay cable TV gang of hos. See Ebony and Jet, now your prayers about the ultimate in civil rights–close to equal homie billing with the most haggard foursome of whores–have been answered.
Filth and male emasculation–the staples of the TV show–are even more plentiful and pungently rancid in the onscreen version. Shocker.
Is this really what women want? Forget all the raunchy guy movies that have come out in recent years. None have anything on this grotesque celluloid piece of trash. If you’ve ever called men pigs or chauvinists or decried their alleged collective behavior toward women, but yet you like this movie, you’re a hypocrite. The men in our world have nothing on these pigs in skirts.
Men are from Mars. Women are from . . . aging slut hell. But, hey, their jewel-encrusted stiletto Manolo Blahnik satin pumps cost a fortune.
And that’s all that matters.
Hmmm… sounds good. I’m going to see it asap…. NOT… 🙂
It was a good laugh reading your review Debbie. Keep up the good work.
cinerx on May 29, 2008 at 4:00 am