Sex and the City; The Strangers

Last week was a pretty bad week in the movie theater for men. I avoided it altogether, a good way to save money, right? However, there were some straight guys that got ensnared into watching movies last week - this is in memoriam to their efforts -

Sex and the City (May 30) - 0/4 - Guys Died Watching This One

(Directed by Michael Patrick King, with Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Jennifer Hudson)

“Shock hit me several times while watching the movie, and never in a good way. I was stunned while looking at my cell phone clock, sure that more than 10 minutes must have passed since I’d last checked the time … Relating to the enthralled women around me was no more a possibility than talking sports with a cactus. As the film played, we were disparate organisms not only on different wavelengths but different dimensions. I couldn’t partake in any of the humor they were gobbling up, and felt no suspense in the contrived, easily solved problems each of the fab four heroines endured. I’m not even sure they all faced problems. Charlotte’s greatest trial was wondering whether she should continue jogging after she finds herself in a medical condition. Carrie, for sure, takes on a colossal heartbreak, as does her pal Miranda. As for Samantha, her only challenge was to avoid clawing out Parker’s eyes due to taking screen time and top billing away from her.”
- Phil Villarreal, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

“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?’ … Sarah Jessica Parker … plays Carrie, the writer whose voice-overs keep us up to speed with the doings of her friends … Early in the film, she receives a proposal of marriage from her long-term boyfriend, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), and this triggers a Babylonian orgy of spending. In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, she honors ‘new friends like Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera and Christian Lacroix, Lanvin and Dior,’ and so on; what I object to is not the name-dropping—think of it as a chick response to ‘American Psycho‘—but the montage itself, which is shot in lazy veils of schmaltz …

“Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (‘I got it’), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. ‘I can build you a better closet,’ he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding … 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. All the film lacks is a subtitle: ‘The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.’”
- Anthony Lane, THE NEW YORKER

“… 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 …

“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.”
- Steve Schneider, ORLANDO WEEKLY

“To be completely honest, I’ve never made it past the ten-minute mark of a typical ‘Sex and the City’ episode. Anything more than that and I would break out in a rash and feel my bones turn to dust. It’s safe to assume the ‘Sex’ movie is nothing more than an elongated episode of the cult television show, since the old sensations of instant death came rolling back to me during the opening reel of the feature film. I never enjoyed the show, and the big-screen version is simply a heaping helping of the same New York City baloney that once bewitched a nation of daydreaming female (presumably) audiences and desperate magazine writers …

“To accept ‘Sex’ is to hold tight to the idea that it’s nothing more than a gaudy fantasy. After all, with these strident female stereotypes, insane ideas for cutting-edge fashion, and a parade of proudly emasculated male characters, it’s impossible to take anything ‘Sex’ has to say seriously. The material doesn’t strike me as a comment on female empowerment either, just a lengthy stab at embellishing a media-fed pathway toward self-loathing for overwhelming profit … Now blown up to theatrical standards, and it all comes across tasteless and punishing. Certainly series devotees will find the return of the four ladies to be gift from Blahnik heaven, but the uninitiated would be best advised to bring along a cyanide pill to end this horror show quickly and painlessly …

“I didn’t loathe ‘Sex’ because of my previous interaction with the show. I loathed the film because it’s a lazy, mean-spirited commercial for cultural deterioration. Even the most outlandish of fairy tales have some sense of magic and a feel for limitations. ‘Sex and the City’ exists on another planet, where materialism is a desired component of life and a woman is worth nothing if there’s not a man to love her.”
- Brian Orndorf, BRIANORNDORF.COM

“I missed the screening so had to see this at an early afternoon showing in a theater with a real audience. I was the only single heterosexual male there. The audience was 98% female. The only other males were either gay or had been dragged in by their female companions … The same four ladies who appeared in the TV series are here, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte York (Kristin Davis), and Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon). Carrie has been living with Mr. Big (Chris Noth) and they decide to get married. Miranda, an attorney, is career-occupied has problems with her husband, Steve Brady (David Eigenberg), with whom she has not had sex for six months. Steve is a long-suffering wuss if there’s ever been one. Any man who would allow himself to be treated like this and come crawling to her like he does probably doesn’t need much sex with a woman …

“I could go on about the many things I didn’t like, but why? Suffice it to say, this unfunny film as simply sheer fantasy, about as realistic as ‘The Chronicles of Narnia,’ but without the special effects. Actually, instead of humorous, I found it to be dark and depressing. The entire film is about Carrie trying to get over being dumped at the altar by Mr. Big, and nice guy Steve debasing himself trying to get back together with the cold, unattractive, selfish Miranda. What’s funny about that?”
- Tony Medley, TOLUCAN TIMES

“The money shots start early, and never stop. Carrie and her three girlfriends do not, apparently, own a single pair of jeans, sneakers or fuzzy slippers. What they do have -- all they have, in fact -- are hats the size of cocktail tables, heels the height of condos and wedding dresses whose trains require their own set of tracks … Yet despite Carrie's dippy voiceovers -- now copied endlessly on every other hour-long TV drama -- instead of wit we get wish-fulfillment, instead of self-examination we get self-pity. No one really changes. Everyone gets exactly what they want. And while all of that is pretty and shiny and glamorous, it's not really a movie. It's a clothes catalog that talks.”
- Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

“This is one where four incredibly shallow, uninteresting women ramble on and on - and on and on - about their dull, uninteresting love lives, and there's so much product placement it's like being trapped in a dentist's office with nothing to read but an old issue of Vogue … It's easy enough to pick up the backstories of the characters, but why would you want to? These are silly, superficial women who can get ecstatic over an absolutely hideous handbag because it has the ‘right’ designer label.”
- Daniel M. Kimmel, WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE

Well, what can you say? I don't know if I'd blame girls for watching it. But I certainly can't bring myself to try. Every one of these guys writing reviews of Sex and the City pretty much knew that they were screwed the second they walked inside the movie theater. Why even bother? Except for the fact that it's funny to laugh at their complaining afterwards.


The Strangers (May 30) - 0/4 - What Can Happen To You and Your Girlfriend If You're An Absolute Wuss-Bag

(Directed by Bryan Bertino, with Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman, Gemma Ward, Kip Weeks, and Laura Margolis)

“The initial based-on-a-true-story titles (yeah, right) even come with such stentorian, voice-of-doom narration I laughed out loud … people get dragged down halls, tied to chairs, chased through woods, stabbed in the gut and shotgunned in the face. There's an ax through the door, as in ‘The Shining,’ and a hideaway in a louvered closet, as per ‘Halloween.’ All that's missing is a chainsaw … without subtext, all that's left is misogynist sadism. Watch the pretty lady scream, scream, scream, all alone. Bet she's sorry she fought with her boyfriend now!

“Audiences who want nothing more than the artistic equivalent of someone jumping out and shouting ‘Boo!’ every five minutes or so will consider ‘The Strangers’ solid entertainment. Those looking for pathos or performance, though, will be disappointed. Asked to do little but run and survive (or, alternately, sit and sob) both lead actors labor to meet even those lowered expectations. Liv Tyler -- a passive, big-boned beauty who always seems in danger of curling up for a nap -- cries prettily. Scott Speedman bustles about and tries to look heroic. The three villains wear masks. Their agents' idea, I'd bet.”
- Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

“Two young lovers (Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman) are terrorized in his family’s summer home by three people in creepy masks. ‘Inspired by true events,’ intones a sepulchral voice before the credits—but the ‘true’ events could only have been first-time writer-director Bryan Bertino going to see some Rob Zombie movies or the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and thinking: ‘Hmmm … too subtle, and not predictable enough.’ So Bertino tells us how his movie’s going to end before the credits even roll, then underlines it with the first scene, just in case we didn’t notice. From there, it’s simply a matter of dragging us relentlessly to the blood-spattered finish line, with Tyler and Speedman doing the kicking and screaming. No suspense, no scares, only boredom laced with sadism, useless even as a bad example.”
- Jim Lane, SACRAMENTO NEWS & REVIEW

“The art of suspense is dead, or at the very least, dying. Few in post-modern filmmaking know how to establish dread without drowning it in gore or just boring us to death. Part of the reason lies in how cinematically complex the basic bloodless thriller must be. It has to work on the psychological, as well as the physiological and pragmatic levels. As Hitchcock accurately stated, the viewer must be invariably linked to the fate of characters they just met, and may know more than. It’s all a matter of timing and talent. Tossing grue at the screen is as easy as opening up a can of red paint. Getting audiences to grip the edge of their seats stands as a rare motion picture accomplishment …

“The Strangers is a deadly dull experience in boredom … as for the acting, Tyler and Speedman are given little to do, instantly moving from morose to victim mode in the span of a few seconds. They never provide a sense of individual urgency, capable of anything to make sure they survive. Instead, they huddle into corners and whine, whimper, and wince. We never develop any real sympathy for them, so as a result, we don’t care if they live or die. Our killers are another conundrum all together. Purposefully oblique, they come across as deadly dolls without a single sinister bone in their persistent hunter horror personas.”
- Bill Gibron, POP MATTERS

I hate movies like this because they don't scare me and go against everything logical and rational in the natural universe. Maybe it's because of the worthless script and storyline, or maybe it's just because of Scott Speedman. Imagine for a minute that you are taking your girl to a hotel room (or cabin in the woods, even better) for a night. And all of a sudden a guy and two girls wearing masks (is this the beginning of a porn film?) start beating on your doors and windows, (wtf?). I don't know about you, but I'm opening my door and kicking ass so that I can get back to business inside. Geeze, just twist the stupid doll mask sideways during the scuffle and the motherf----- won't be able to see when you're kicking him in the face. Oh, we're talking about a movie here? Well, what if these mask wearing pricks tried to mess with a guy and girl at hotel room - but the guy turned out to be Samuel L. Jackson? I don't think the bad guys would keep him from his girl for very long. Oh, wait - the fact that the guy is wussy makes the movie fun? Not in my book, it doesn't.