I’ve never seen an episode of “Sex and the City.”
I watched the first “Sex and the City” movie from a dorm room futon, surrounded by furry pink and yellow pillows while one of the room’s occupants was back in her hometown for the weekend. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, and I have no idea how it ended.
So going into my viewing of recent DVD release “Sex and the City 2,” I did my best to clear all preconceived notions of the show from my head. And at first it seemed fine – just a bunch of wealthy, accomplished women sipping neon cocktails, talking about their relationships, their careers, and their shoes – it was like a middle-aged female version of Entourage. But then the movie took a turn neither it nor I was prepared to handle: It hiked up its Valentino dress, placed a stiletto on a soapbox and began to preach.
The plot is this: Carrie Preston (n?e Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker, “Did You Hear About the Morgans”?) is struggling to find peace in her young marriage to the man of her dreams. She wants to attend film premiers with him, he wants to stay in and watch black and white movies with her, and both feel that the other’s primary motive is self-serving rather than romantic. Meanwhile, the menopausal but still hormone-fueled and sex-crazed Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall, “The Ghost Writer”) gets invited to the Middle East using her connections as a high-powered public relations agent, and invites Carrie plus friends Charlotte and Miranda to travel to Abu Dhabi with her for an extravagant, luxurious, culturally insensitive time.
The film is written like a two-hour twenty minutes television episode, though that’s probably not to its detriment. Because as soon as “Sex and the City 2” tries things that that the cinematic medium allows, things like “developing a character,” or “having a central thematic message,” or even “exploring tricky moral territory with an iota of nuance,” it immediately becomes blinded and confused by the glare from its own designer jewelry.
Several times during the course of the movie, all action stops while some combination of the central four discusses social and ethical issues, usually over drinks. Is having kids worth it in the end? Are the rules for a marriage between two men different than those for a marriage between a man and a woman? Is the concept of marriage flexible enough to allow two days off per week? But invariably, any consideration or profundity is hacked down at the knees by a bit of vapidity like: “Just when you thought everyone was too old to get married, here come the gays.”
Beyond that, “Sex and the City 2” has such a materialistic, flippant, self-absorbed set of characters that its attempts to pose as a story proclaiming the merits of women’s independence are stomach-churningly bad. It’s an important message to be sure, but there’s a choice that must be made between female empowerment and having one of the main four joke that the veil worn by Muslim women “certainly cuts down on the Botox bill.” Simply put, it seems ill-advised for the writers to touch on causes they presumably believe in during a script that can’t quite avoid letting Samantha call an attractive tourist “Lawrence of My Labia.”
“Predators” revolves around an entourage of a different sort, as a small group of some of the world’s most lethal people – military types, criminals and gangsters – awake to find themselves in free-fall over an unfamiliar planet. After their parachutes deploy and they drift to the ground, they begin to realize that they’ve been chosen; brought to this planet as game to be hunted by groups of extra-terrestrial Predators who have evolved killing systems like infrared vision and energy-based weapons. The group dwindles in numbers until only a few are left, and a choice must be made between survival and maintaining some amount of basic human decency.
Unfortunately, “Predators” mixes its messages almost as badly as “Sex and the City 2.” The same lack of internal moral consistency is present in both (though differences do exist: “Predators” has a decidedly more neon-green blood spatter; “Sex and the City 2” has the edge in fawning over vintage watches. It’s debatable which movie has scarier characters.) Here, the problem isn’t so much with tone and dialogue as it is with the scenario itself.
As the body count grows, a few characters are surprised to notice that they recognize aspects of their own personality in the tactics of the Predators. The main character, Royce (Adrien Brody, “Fantastic Mr. Fox”), a lone-wolf-type ex-black-ops agent comes to this realization early on, and it helps him defeat several Predators as his peers drop one by one. He notes that he likes killing, he likes hunting, and hypothesizes that that’s why he was chosen as prey in the first place.
Yet that sets up an impossible conundrum for the characters – with no hope for the true success of going back to earth and no reason to rely on each other, the film seems to be suggesting that a brute individual survivor ethics must be adopted. But it fails to follow through with that set-up, instead delivering only the message “to err is human, and so were the writers of this movie.”
Sex in the City: 2 stars; Predators: 3 stars out of five
Lin Weeks is a junior majoring in finance and marketing. Upset with his omission of the DVD you were most excited about renting this week? Vent at [email protected].
