Sex and The City 2

SEX AND THE CITY 2

Directed by
Michael Patrick King
Runtime: 146 min.

SEX AND THE CITY 2 isn’t
meant to be good; it’s meant to be TV, to further change movies into
junk culture where you can’t tell one medium from the other. This
includes diminishing romance, friendship, work and citizenship (so that
they lack the depth of Mother and Child and the candor of Please
Give), thereby turning female stereotypes into gay male
stereotypes. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia
Nixon), Charlotte (Kristen Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) aren’t
characters anymore; they’re brands: Aged, wizened logos that
writerdirector Michael Patrick King doesn’t even bother refurbishing.
When these womenproducts leave New York for an excursion in oil-rich Abu
Dhabi, King discards Iraq War guilt and suspicion about bloodmoney
faster than he dispenses with plot.

Since the storytelling in Sex
and the City 2 is so shallow, it’s best to look at how the movie
corrupts popular ideas about modern life in Al Qaeda’s prime target.
Using Alicia Keys’ solo version of “Empire State of Mind” as a musical
intro gets SATC2 off to a dishonest start from which it never
recovers. Piggybacking that popular record (a singular work of post-
9/11 defiance) is a sign of this sequel’s desperation, yet King ignores
the song’s more complicated duet version where Keys counterpoints
verse-and-chorus with Jay-Z to offer an emotional perspective on Big
Apple ambition. Suggesting some kind of quasi-feminist
Manhattan-boosterism has always made the Sex and the City series
phony, as well as loathsome. Now it clearly lacks the insightful
love-hate ambivalence that emerges so crucially when Jay-Z’s hip-hop
cynicism contrasts Keys’ soaring, unstoppable aspiration.

Starting with Carrie’s
arrival in New York on June 11, 1986, King’s appropriation of “Empire
State of Mind” is consistent with his TV-fable of Clintonera egotism
(the HBO series hit its stride in the late ’90s). He ignores the
realities of urban living that Jay-Z lays out and Keys strives to sing
past. Their moral tension makes “Empire” a sociological lovehate torch
song; it recalls the radicalism of golden-era rap when hip-hop artists
challenged the status quo. SATC2 doesn’t connect with viewers that way;
its parade of luxury and entitlement entices viewers into cultural
delusions—escapism—that hip-hop once discouraged.

Jay-Z’s song-narrative
includes devastated female dreams—a modelturned-hooker story as crushing
as

Mulholland Drive and
diametrically opposed to Sex and the City’s glibness. Its
details are a culmination of Jay-Z’s struggle-records Hard Knock Life
and 99 Problems, only this time trouble is seen from the
upper hand. His “I’m the new Sinatra” boast is meant to convince himself
of triumph and invulnerability but the self-coronation implies a kind
of effort Carrie never exhibits. King pretends the opposite, proposing
easy materialism and that detestable class fantasy of the white Imperium
that Jay-Z and Keys together audaciously contradict.

“Empire State of Mind”
updates the kind of immigrant dreams that used to be implicit in New
York movies celebrating the go-getter American Dream mecca—from the 1953
How to Marry a Millionaire to Woody Allen’s 1979 Manhattan. Carrie’s
opening voice-over vapidly mentions the historic purchase of Manhattan
Island for $24 dollars as the fount of gentrified New York lore, but
Jay-Z and Keys give their particular race-conscious spin—and it’s
culturally evocative. They deliberately call to mind the hometown pride
of Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind,” rewriting that cabaret tune in
modern slang and then Keys’ pounded piano chords up the ante, summoning
the exultant crescendos of Gershwin’s ultimate New York anthem
“Rhapsody in Blue.” Her singing gives the entire gestalt an ironic,
purely human, willpower (“These lights will inspire you!”) that insists
upon the lonely illusion of personal drive.

Keys hits her high notes
like homeruns. What do Carrie and friends do? Shop. Consumerism is SATC2’s
noxious substitute for personal achievement. Carrie’s confession
about moving from a penthouse to a lower floor (“We may be closer to
earth but we’ve kept a little bit of heaven”) merely introduces her
walkin closet. And her materialism is not a bit satirical; it’s smug. So
is her marital hassling: “Am I a bitch-wife who nags you?” she asks
Big. King so completely falsifies modern living he seems unaware the
answer is yes. Propagandizing for greed and avarice, King doesn’t
recognize that his story and heroine are obnoxious.

Sex and the City 2 is
an affront to the recent revelations of Mother and Child and Please
Give. When Charlotte and Miranda complain about parenting, they
never empathize with their own mothers’ experience. The insensitivity
continues with innuendo-loaded dialogue, unflattering lighting and
hideous Halloween costume wardrobe that strangely confuse chick-flick
and drag queen agendas—as when Carrie speaks about “designing our own
lives, making our own rules.”

Although “Empire State of Mind” salutes New York
hegemony, its reality proves Alicia Keys and Jay-Z redesigning and
remaking the aspirational mode. Despite performing a ludicrous karaoke
to “I Am Woman” (as if rousing the Abu Dhabi tourists to revolt), the
SATC girls remain TV-fake. They actually represent an idiotic state
of mind.