6.01.2008

Hex on the Shitty

I’m going to do a review of Sex and the City without actually seeing it. Hell, countless reviewers write film reviews about movies they’ve never seen, so why can’t I? I’ve seen a few episodes from the series and sort of get its chic-chick-bravado appeal. I love that almost everyone who rents it (98% of whom are professional middle-aged woman) seems to feel the need to qualify her decision by explaining that it’s about the writing. “It’s really well written” is the standard response as if that somehow explains away the shallow, bling-obsessed banality of whole series.

Sex and the City is the urban female’s Nascar. The series was mostly hollow and artificial and yet managed to sell itself as being about “real women”. You would have to surmise that one or both of those thoughts must be a fabrication or the equation equals…ah… well, you do the math. At the risk of waking up with a Manolo Blahnik stiletto stuck in my temple, I’m going to suggest that both statements are probably true. I’ll have to qualify the latter (the show being about “real women”) by saying that it obviously captures something of the fantasy life that some real women want as opposed actually being about their (or for that matter any other women’s) real lives. The desire to spend each waking moment in some gloriously fabulous fantasy life where the biggest question you ever face is the number of orgasms inferred by the term “multiple” is understandable. Somewhere in this obvious conundrum is a plain truism that can’t be avoided. As “well written” as the Sex and the City series may have been, it was not about anything real. It was about fantasy, just like Nascar is for Joe Six-pack.

Rick Groen wrote a stinging review of the film in Friday’s Globe, saying among other things;

"After all, bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.”

Wow… Jeez Rick, why do you climb off that fence and tell us what you really think instead of beating around the bush? As sad and conceivably true as Groen’s review may be, Sex and the City will probably end up one of the higher grossing films of the year. We live in a society where it doesn’t matter whether something has merit in any real sense. What is eminently more important is its marketability. I’d be shocked if studio executives don’t sit around shaking their heads at their great fortune, the direct result of just how gullible and brain dead the average film fan is.

The response to movies like Sex and the City, the endless stream of Marvel comic book adaptations, romantic comedies and direct-to-video Dolph Lundgren action flicks would almost make you think that they really have something good to sell us. That is the great mystery of the modern film industry. If any other industry made endlessly crappy products and unleashed them year after year on their customers, they’d go bankrupt in a heartbeat. Not Hollywood. They just get bigger. Who decided that we have to weather countless shitty movies every summer? Well, we did… because we keep going. Perhaps we do because the average woman really does just want to sit around having multiple orgasms masturbating with a $625 Louis Vuitton Neverfull MM handbag while Chris Noth massages her feet and murmurs “Mr. Big… Mr. Big…Mr. Big…”. Men fantasize about having so much money that they can afford to build invincible iron leisure suits and fly around kicking ass. Jesus Christ, it’s enough to make you want to build a fortress in some dark corner of the city and only venture out occasionally to grab some food and toilet paper avoiding all contact with the humans wherever possible.

I suppose the lifestyles of the rich and famous have been the source of envy and fantasy as far back as we can remember, but at least in the past we had the wherewithal to rebel and kill the wealthy every few decades. Now we just drool like lobotomy patients, scan People Magazine and lurch like zombies at a brain picnic toward movies seemingly scripted by Dr. Seuss by way of that creepy Karl Lagerfeld. How the hell did this happen? How did we end up so bereft of intellect, taste and standards? Maybe we’re so lazy and preoccupied with the vapour nothingness of modern me-life that all we can handle is vapid Sex and the City and Iron Man movies. The Vuitton signature handbag is aptly named the “Neverfull” and maybe that tells us everything we need to know about our society and ourselves. It seems to be enough for the Sex and the City women and after all, they’re like, real women. Who are we to argue with them?


11 comments:

the coelacanth said...

"If any other industry made endlessly crappy products and unleashed them year after year on their customers, they’d go bankrupt in a heartbeat."

mcdonald's, conagra, pretty much the entire fat food industry - and this isn't subjective - these are BAD products, yet people keep flocking to them, because, well, they're cheap and aren't challenging to the palate, kind of like, well, most of what comes out of hollywood. i see great parallels between the fast food industry and the modern "film" industry, and see it as both no coincidence and great irony that multiplex lobbies serve only their cuisine counterpart. it's all about COMMMMFORRRRT baby, get on the bandwagon.

true story: a few weeks ago, just to see what would happen (and because i was realllly hungry and there were no other options), i ate at mcdonald's after not having done so for years. i felt extremely ill, overheated and bloated for the next three hours, then puked my brains out. this stuff is not fit for human consumption - perhaps the same can be said of the modern hollywood product? or perhaps i've just been away for too long......

anyway - great anti-review, a good read and thought-provoking. nice one, sporgy.

La Sporgenza said...

Great analogy to the food industry Coel. I wish I had thought of it. Fast Food/Fast Film/Fast trip to the bathroom

Chandles said...

I was out this weekend for a friend's birthday. Basically it was a table filled with the type of 25-35 year old women who have been waiting for this movie since the series ended four years ago, plus me and my friend's boyfriend, the only other misfit besides myself. Obviously the show/movie came up in conversation and my friend's amazingly ballsy (stupid?) and hilarious boyfriend blurts out that he heard on the radio that morning that the character Samantha dies of breast cancer. While he was being chewed out I was sitting laughing my head off; while cancer itself is not a funny thing, the idea of hundreds of thousands of women being sorely disapointed by this movie made me feel alright that it had actually been made. It turns out that he had been mis-informed and I am back to being bitter about this film being made.

Carrie Bradshaw, in my opinion, is possibly the worst role-model for women to ever be taken seriously. She's viewed as strong and heroic but from the bit of the series that I have seen all I can tell is that she's vapid; void of a decent set of morals; and weak-willed. I've never once seen her pick up a book in any episode, since she works from home in the series mostly what you see is her lunching and shopping but with so much free time (and money based on the things she is buying) you'd hope to see her do something a little less selfish or at least character-building with her time. She cheats on her fiance and constantly let's herself be picked up and thrown away again by the same character, Mr. Big. The list of her undesirable qualities goes on.
Any time that one of the lead characters on this show does something that would appear to be self-confident and possibly role-modelesque, they break down before the episode is through and give in to whatever it was that they had been standing up to. Every single one of the four main characters in the show has given up at least one thing for a man at some point in the series.

I wouldn't even care about this series so much, or that a movie had been made, if the people who watch it could just admit that being able to buy your own shoes and cosmos and have the confidence to sit at lunch by yourself does not a role-model make, if someone could just admit that they watch it because it's fully of snippy comments and snappy dressers.

the coelacanth said...

i wish i got invited to friends' birthdays. actually, i just wish i had friends.

La Sporgenza said...

Brilliant commentary on SATC Chandles. You've nailed the very thing that gets my blood boiling and my attitude cooling about the idiocy of an audience swooning for a bunch of deceitful hosebags masquerading as role models. Don’t get me wrong, I like my films to be down and dirty but this fallacy of Sex and the City characters being representations of real women and their aspirations is a complete joke. Role models?….. Puuu-leeeaaasseee! Nice post.

A few clarifications...

Cancer in the right light, can be hilarious. It's all about the delivery.

Coelio indeed has no friends.

Giving up things for your man is fine, provided you get some major bling for your efforts and can sleep with whomever you want.

Dropkick said...

i stopped watching when they stopped smoking. pfft, pansies.

also Iron Man is a trick to get stupid people in the seats and the watch a film about America's foreign policy while Tony Stark represents Barack. yeah. sneaky.

the coelacanth said...

the "trick" that is iron man got both your and my ass into seats.....so, the question is: are we stupid?

La Sporgenza said...

Coelio... Bating me with a rhetorical question like that is both unethical and unfair. Against all temptation, I refuse to be drawn into your wicked game.

Dropkick said...

iron man was amazing

the coelacanth said...

robert downey jr was amazing - iron man was merely good.

Dropkick said...

touche, but Robert Downey was just so amazing that when i think about the movie all i can think about is him. Kind of like Gangs of New York. When i think about i remember Daniel Day, and that makes me want to watch it again. But in actuality i don't want to watch that film again. I just want to see the character you know man... i mean wow. man. wow.