I feel like in order to talk about Sex and the City in any depth more than I already have, I have to tell you a little something about my personal worldview, to explicate how it’s possible that a pushing-30 single gal living in New York could not only not identify with but actually feel hostile towards, as Susie Bright put it in an excellent piece in Salon, the “racket part of what once was recognizable as the sexual self-emancipation of the feminist movement.”

Fortunately for all of us, talking about my personal life on this blog is the last thing in the world I want to do. So, instead, I combed the panoply of reviews of and writings about film that have come online over the last week, in order to cull five different commonly-cited grounds for why this film is a toxic scourge on the entirety of the human race. Or maybe just not the best possible way to spend 2.5 hours.

1. The women aren’t attractive!

Proponents: Anthony Lane, Roger Ebert, Noah Forrest, Armond White, virtually every male blogger with aspirations to be Harry Knowles.

Representative Pullquote: “The most human character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who is still in her 20s and hasn’t learned to be a jaded consumerist caricature…Louise is warm and vulnerable and womanly, which does not describe any of the others.” — Ebert.

Who Says it Best: Lane, who hasn’t produced a review to gain this much traction in the blogosphere since his legendary pan of Revenge of the Sith. Still, it’s not so much what Lane says (he makes fun of not just the ladies’ thirst for expensive outfits but the outfits themselves, complaining that all four are “little better than also-rans” compared to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face) as the illustration the New Yorker saw fit to attach to his review. A masterpiece of grotesque caricature, it’s the only piece of critique of the film that this self-professed third (or is it fourth?) wave feminist considers to be truly, maliciously misogynist.

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• Hellboy producer Mike Richardson is bringing the saga of Emily the Strange––the sad little black haired cat girl who you might remember from t-shirts and stickers with you were a teenager in the 90s––to the big screen. Terrible timing––this is the role Christina Ricci was born to play, but not only is she probably too old by now, but after Speed Racer she probably wouldn’t be able to get the job.
• David Gordon Green will direct Your Highness, a fantasy comedy written y Danny McBride and Ben Best, the stars/co-writers of The Foot Fist Way.
• “Best-case scenario would be for Sex and the City to wind up with same kind of numbers as The Devil Wears Prada, with $200 million internationally,” predicts Variety. The trade doesn’t mention that tracking currently has the film pegged at a $30 million opening weekend, far below the $50 million that Variety claims the Indiana Jones sequel could take in in its second week.
• Would a second place opening weekend dim SatC director Michael Patrick King’s confidence? Upon landing a first-lookdeal with Dreamworks on the eve of his directorial debut’s release, he coyly hinted at the possibility of a sequel. “The actresses are great, and if the gods smile and people are still interested, why not?” he told Variety. Sex, excess, and pantheism––it’s ancient Rome all over again.

If my Twitter stream is to be believed, I was the only female, 20-something writer in New York City who was NOT invited to the Sex and the City premiere last night. (Could it have been because of this? Or this? Or this? Hmmm.) Certainly, each picture Julia Allison staged at the event offers up at least 1,000 word on the matter, but who has time to do all that reading? Jeff Wells‘ take is much more succinct:

The film is another Taliban recruitment film — a grotesque and putrid valentine to the insipid “me, my lifestyle, my accessories and I” chick culture of the early 21st Century. Guys everywhere — if you’re in a brand-new relationship, take her to see this thing. If she even half-likes it, dump her and walk away cold. Save yourself!

Funny side note: I remember the moment when, as a senior in college, I decided that I could no longer in good conscience watch Sex and the City. It was, I think, the premiere of the first season to air after 9/11, and there was a scene where Carrie announced that she was going to help rebuild downtown by going shopping. It was such a direct aping of George W. Bush’s commerce-as-opiate for the troubled masses prescriptive of the time that it seemed like the ultimate sign that the show had cut loose the thread of critique that once seemed to be woven into its pornographic depiction of excessive consumption.

We obviously couldn’t have hoped that the movie would have transcended the worst aspects of the show––at least, not after having heard Fergie’s theme song––but I honestly didn’t think it was going to go as far as this, to become the embodiment of not just what *I* hate, but Why They Hate Us.

• “Over the last 10 weeks, the independent film “industry” has been restructured before our eyes,” writes Bob Alexander at the Indiepix blog. “Is the world of indie film burning up? Or is a new era about to emerge?”
• Defamer points to seven clips from the Sex and the City movie, posted over at BlackFilm.com. I couldn’t get any of them to play all the way through, but the above screencap of Chris Noth (who’s starting to age into some kind of Tim Burton-era Batman villain…Melt Face?) looking like he’s going to eat Sarah Jessica Parker is proof that I tried.
• The Playlist points to an Onion, um, exclusive: “Michel Gondry Entertained For Days By Cardboard Box.” Who’s the Gondry impersonator?
• The Auteurs, a newish film site previously mentioned here, is hosting a short film competition at Cannes. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has a prediction: “These movies are going to be awful.”

“Smell is very nostalgic.”

Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Carter. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.

The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgment says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.

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• “Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs,” Girish writes. “Are there others in the series you particularly like and would recommend?” I read tons of these in grad school; my favorites included Groundhog’s Day, Independence Day, Salmon Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, and Camille Paglia on The Birds.
• Jeff Wells, after trisecting Gus Van Sant’s career, worries which version of the filmmaker showed up to make Milk.  “If Van Sant who made Drugstore Cowboy is making Milk, terrific. If a blend of that Van Sant along with the guy who made Elephant is directing Milk, beautiful. But if the Finding Forrester Van Sant is anywhere near the Milk set, watch out.”
• On a recent press tour for Smart People, Sarah Jessica Parker was reluctant to speak about the Sex and the City movie at all, but she did try to assuage worries that, content wise, the film is going to be more TBS than HBO. “I don’t think we have any interest in doing some homogenized, conventional version, in order to appeal.  We don’t think mass.” Via Michael Musto.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, FOX News and MSNBC), you’ll have already heard that two stars of the upcoming Sex and the City movie have been in the tabloid news this week. First, news broke that Kristin “The Cute, Demure One” Davis had starred in a sex tape; by late Tuesday, the scandal had been downgraded from “sex tape” to “just sex photos” (see them in their very not-safe-for-work glory here). Then, blogs started passing around an excerpt from a British magazine interview with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which the SATC star/executive producer reacted defensively towards a MAXIM article designating her “the unsexiest woman alive.”

Imagine, two actresses from the same heavily-anticipated film with “Sex” in the title, making headlines for their sexiness of lack therof in the same week! What an incredible coincidence, right? No matter how furiously both actresses camps try to paint their clients as women wronged totally independently of each other or the multi-million dollar project both are promoting, there’s evidence that the SJP story, at least, was fully manufactured.

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• Funny how that NY Times story failed to mention this little bit of cross-branding: The Superficial points to this NSFW Sarah Jessica Parker blow-up doll, complete with dirty Sex And The City pun on the packaging.
• AMC’s Sci-Fi Scanner blog notes that, “for better or for worse”, Southland Tales comes out on DVD. I’m firmly of the opinion that, faults and all, it’s worth a look. See my review here.
• Chuck Tryon points to this story, in which he’s quoted, about an upcoming Luke Wilson film called Tenure, set in the wild world of academia. Tryon, a tenure track professor himself, notes the challenges the filmmakers will have in making his lifestyle cinematic: “[S]ince my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
• At io9, Charlie Jane Anders assesses the problem with sci-fi prequels: “I love small, intimate portrayals of people’s lives. But that’s not what I look for from movies with “Star” in the title. (Well, maybe A Star Is Born.)”

Stuart Elliot at the New York Times reports on some of the many branding deals New Line has arranged to cross-promote the upcoming Sex and the City movie. There are basically two types of deals being made. On the high end, the producers of the film have inserted luxury brands into the narrative, based on what the actual characters might consume; Mercedes-Benz, for instance, has created a special limo for Mr. Big and a giant SUV for Samantha (insert penis substitute joke here). But then there’s a passel of more plebian-oriented brands looking to siphon some SATC cred to sell their products to the film’s target audience. Which is, apparently, suburban moms who tend to have a little too much too drink at faux-upscale family restaurants. Behold:

When it comes to products helping to promote the coming film based on the popular TV series Sex and the City, it seems the sky is the limit. Better make that the Skyy is the limit, as in Skyy vodka, which is being named the “official spirits sponsor” for the movie. Among the tie-ins are drinks made with Skyy to be served at Houlihan’s restaurants and named after characters like Carrie, Samantha and Mr. Big.

Well, at least New Line (or whatever corporate faction is handling these deals at this point) seems to understand a good half of their audience. Let’s just assume The Mr. Big cocktail recipe will make it to the gay bar circuit on its own and sweep up the other half.

UPDATE 12:58 PM: We received a phone call from a publicist informing us that the trailer that was posted to iKlipz this morning was “leaked,” and we’ve been asked to take the video down until March 1. But even if you didn’t get to see it, I pretty much summed it up below.

Big––sorry, JOHN JAMES PRESTON––dumps Carrie via cell phone ON THE DAY OF THE WEDDING! So she hires an American Idol castoff with unrealistic expectations about New York relationships as her personal assistant, then goes on vacation somewhere where she’s free to drink pina coladas and laugh hysterically at a 100-year-old drag queen’s jokes about pubic hair. Wouldn’t you?

Also, remember when Sex and the City was pure lifestyle porn (and, sometimes, sort of actual porn) and not a Lifetime movie with swear words? 1999 was awesome. But somewhere along the line, as the actresses got older and I guess and someone decided that it was really weird for a bunch of unmarried 40 year old women to be going out drinking together every night (note to someone: in New York, that’s not that weird at all), all the sex (even the metaphorical sex, the commodity fetishism and the status porn) got washed away. And now it’s movie time, and it seems like a more appropriate title than Sex and the City would be Men Will Always Disappoint Us, So Let’s Just Go Back To Our Fantasy Of Boozy Female Co-dependence While Jennifer Hudson, Who At Age 26 Has Had More Success As An Actress Than Any of Us Will Ever Know, Sings Don Henley. Also: The City.

(Also, I just accidentally let the trailer play in another window while I was typing this, and I noticed that the foley sound of Samantha biting into that cracker is mixed REALLY loud. Like, as if to signal that the sight of a woman eating when she sees something she wants to fuck is not only a joke in and of itself, but that we’ll be alerted to this and other moments of high comedy in this movie by sound effects. Classy.)

Via FilmDrunk.

You might have heard something about this over the Fourth and wondered if maybe all those hot dogs had caused you to, like, slip into a nightmare fugue state, but it’s actually true: HBO and New Line have convinced all four original cast members to return for a Sex and the City feature film. Series exec producer Michael Patrick King will direct his own script. Send your best “Get it? They’re OLD!” jokes to karina AT spout.com.

MGM will debut the feature A Dog’s Breakfast, starring Stargate SG-1’s David Hewlett, on iTunes and Amazon’s Unbox. The film was apparently set for a straight-to-DVD release, before an outpouring of fan support for a YouTube trailer convinced the studio to give the online release a try.

At a press conference in Italy, Spike Lee spits out two not-particularly-incendiary sentences about the lack of representation of black soldiers in Hollywood war films; Variety runs the write-up with the headline, “Spike Lee Attacks Hollywood Films.” A clever attempt to enrage the “Hollywood has been trashing American values since the death of John Wayne” crowd right in time for Independence Day, but it looks like Libertas didn’t bite.