A strong review

It's the movie I am destined to hate and despise (on the dubious assumption that I will ever actually see any of it), so I'm a little disappointed that Sex and the City has actually managed about a 50-something-percent approval rating at Rottentomatoes. I was hoping for it to do worse.

There are some savage reviews in there, though; but few of them I have read have lines particularly worth quoting. Roger Ebert gives a very disdainful review, but not a particularly witty one. He is not alone amongst reviewers in noting that a comedy "highlight" is a the uptight character (how shall we put this politely) soiling herself.

What's more puzzling is that there are a couple of good reviews from religious sites. Here's one at Beliefnet (not sure about that site; I've never spent time there, but it sure sounds like it specialises in soft edged spirituality). The one from Christianity Today seems particularly forgiving. This is very disappointing: who can I trust to incorporate reliable conservativism if it's not from a site called "Christianity Today"? (On the other hand, Anglicans still count themselves as Christians, so I should have known.) Funny how it is secular reviewers who are more offended by the empty materialism than the religious reviewers. Dana Stevens in Slate writes, for example:

The show's values are reprehensible, its view of gender relations cartoonish, its puns execrable. I honestly believe, as I wrote when the series finale aired in 2004*, that Sex and the City is singlehandedly responsible for a measurable uptick in the number of materialistic twits in New York City and perhaps the world.

The strongest short review of the movie is from the Orlando Weekly, and it is kinda funny in its savageness:

....we’ll continue to experience befuddlement verging on disgust whenever we’re reminded of Sex and the City (so named, we suppose, because Seriously Rethinking Third-Wave Feminism reads like ass on a poster). We’re totally down with the interpretation offered by a choreographer we know, who once pithily observed that SATC projects onto women “everything that’s wrong with men.” For real: Is it any sort of inroad for a summer film to prove that ladies, too, can surrender to pummeling materialism, a blinkered emphasis on self-gratification and hollow objectification of the opposite gender? Plus, Darren Star and his “creative” crew must be laughing their sphincters loose knowing that their amoral fantasia has been welcomed as gospel by genuine urban women, instead of their obvious target demo: Iowan paralegals too tipsy and titillated to notice that the characters are actually semiotic stand-ins for gay men.

So, no, we don’t have a strong opinion on the thing one way or the other.

I think it's the same reviewer with this even shorter summary (it's on the same page as the slightly longer review):

We’re realists here. We know that nothing we might write could dim a fan’s enthusiasm for rejoining the continuing adventures of Carrie and Samantha and … uh, Dopey, and … uh, the Pink Power Ranger. And maybe that’s as it should be, because everybody has the right to indulge his or her particular pop-culture obsession in a state of unmolested respect. So knock yourselves out, skanks.

UPDATE: I don't know why Rottentomatoes doesn't count Anthony Lane's reviews in New Yorker. Happily, Lane has reviewed it, and he's very funny. Speaking about the special preview he attended:

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

Interesting, he actually criticises it from a feminist perspective (the women mostly define themselves by their ability to snare and keep a man.) But he ends the review like this:

It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness.