The “Sex and The City” Backlash Begins In Earnest

Sex And The City 2” made $3 million last night, and stands to make somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 million this weekend. It’s a massively successful franchise that will likely spawn more movies and make its creators even richer than they already are. But the reviews have come in for the movie, and they aren’t pretty. Far from it. It appears the “Sex And The City” cultural backlash is officially in full swing.

I always enjoy it when a movie comes out and is not only panned by critics but aggressively panned by critics. As if the critic couldn’t wait to get home from the theater to begin penning a diatribe about how astonishingly bad the film was. That was the sense I got from reading reviews of Roberto Benigni’s “Pinocchio,” or “The Love Guru,” or any other movie that is not only bad, but insulting in its badness. And those are the kind of reviews SATC2 is currently receiving.

The New York Times:

"This one is grueling."

Roger Ebert:

"Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of 'Sex and the City 2' are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row."

Lindy West, who is my new favorite person on Earth:

"It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache."

Ain’t It Cool News:

"This is an awful, awful, awful movie."

And on and on it goes.

I’ve always disliked this show. I’ve been forced to watch it a couple of times and the main characters (the men too!) are utterly shallow and repugnant. But that’s not my beef. I don’t mind shallow and repugnant characters at all. I could watch Eric Cartman and be happy.

No, what has always bothered me about SATC is the writing. It’s abysmal. Take every clichéd joke and narrative device you can think of, throw it in a food processor, and you have yourself a SATC teleplay. Samantha is considered the comic relief in this series and her jokes make a Jay Leno monologue sound cutting edge. And I resent that SATC supposedly represents the apex of female-targeted comedy when there’s so much better written female-centric comedy out there (watch “Parks and Recreation” sometime. No really, please watch it or it will die).

So this backlash is long overdue. I don’t think it’s sexist to hate “Sex And The City.” I just think hating it just means you demand more from your comedy than this.

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