Sex and the City 2 (***)

“It’s like 1998 all over again,” says Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) at one point in this sequel, naming the year Sex and the City premiered on HBO. In this case, that’s a good thing. The title may not show much originality, but the story returns to the strengths of the series—female bonding, glamorous settings, strange fashion choices, and tasteful double entendres—while updating us on the lives of the four gal pals.

A fabulous gay wedding kicks off the film, complete with Liza Minelli officiating. Marriage is, in fact, the theme, although the sexually rapacious Samantha (Kim Catrell) is still blessedly single. She’s now combating menopause with an array of pills and hormones. Lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and housemom Charlotte (Kristin Davis) are navigating the effects of career, children, and having a sexy nanny on their marriages. As for Carrie, she and Big (Chris Noth) are still working on theirs after two years, but thankfully that doesn’t take up half the film like in the first movie. It’s a much more episodic film, though like the first one it’s written and directed by Michael Patrick King.

The most unusual thing about the story is not the sex, but the city, which for about half of the runtime is not Manhattan, but Abu Dhabi. The reason the ladies wind up there is unimportant and barely plausible, but provides plenty of opportunities to show off luxury as well as outfits that, much of the time, might best be called get-ups. Placing the women in even this most modern part of the Middle East provides some amusing culture clash moments. As with the earlier film, the setting puts Samantha in a sexual straightjacket, as she can barely abide even the more relaxed standards afforded to foreigners. The difference is that here her inclination is to rebel—humorously—against them, whereas her attempts at monogamy in the first movie robbed her of her one salient personality feature. It also had her stuck in Los Angeles, away from the other women, and that separation is another mistake that doesn’t get repeated here. The strength of the Sex and the City franchise is not in the characters as individuals, but in the way that they play off of one another. Excepting some of the early scenes with Carrie and Big, most of the time the women are all together.

Sex and the City 2, while updating some storylines, doesn’t take the series in any bold new directions. Those who find the series to be a celebration of self-absorption and materialism will continue to find it so. (Carrie does, however, refer to something as a “waste of money,” which surely must be a rare phrase in her vocabulary.) If the last movie erred on the side of seriousness, the second movie does the opposite, while still seeming a bit bloated. But, despite some forced moments, it does a better job than the first of encompassing adult themes while keeping the light, witty tone of the television series.

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viewed at Moorestown and reviewed 5/30/10

Ajami (***1/4)

Tel Aviv natives Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti collaborated on this Oscar-nominated debut feature. Shani is a Jew, but Copti (who acts, too) is a Muslim, and their interwoven stories explore the ways that Jews and Arabs interact in Israeli (and occasionally the Palestinian territories). Almost always, the dramatic thriller avoids we’re-all-the-same-under-the-skin platitudes, or the we’re-all-connected pretensions, of movies like Crash or Babel. The main characters, to the extent there are main characters, are Arab brothers trying to come up with money to avoid the (undeserved) consequences of a family feud, an illegal restaurant worker trying to pay for his mother’s operation, and a police officer trying to solve the stabbing of a fellow Jew.

I doubt that you could make a movie about Israeli Jews and Arabs and not have it reflect the deep tensions between the two peoples, but there are no suicide bombers and no military incursions here, mostly the day-to-day transactions among people who are partly separate and partly intertwined. The politics are those of everyday life in an inherently political setting. The directors play tricks with the chronology, and between that and the large slate of characters, I got confused a few times, and maybe not as emotionally involved as I would have been had they stuck with a couple of major characters. But the inside look at the cultural practices of the Palestinians was intriguing, particularly where a Bedouin elder calculates the monetary payment that can potentially end the cycle of retribution that started with a restaurant shooting.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/18/2010

Waltz with Bashir (**3/4)

This movie that its creator, Ari Folman, calls an animated documentary, is nominated for an Academy Award, but not in the animation or documentary categories, but as foreign-language film. Folman is an Israeli who, spurred by a conversation with a friend, realizes that he’s almost completely forgotten the details of his service in the military during the country’s 1982 war with Lebanon. Interviews with men he knew on the battlefield are the basis for the film.

Animation frees Folman to use “footage” and “camera angles” that would not otherwise be available. (The animation, partly based on live footage, utilizes a realistic, but simplified, style). Flashbacks, dream sequences, and the creative use of music, too, make this seem more like a narrative film, although it’s organized around interview segments (mostly using the actual voices of Folman’s old comrades). Folman provides few details about his life before or after the war, and no geopolitical details about the war. It is possible to see the movie as anti-Israel, I suppose, in that Israelis are shown killing civilians. However, the clear point is that such atrocities are the natural by-product of war and the fear and confusion that it produces. The director is Everyman.

Even while realizing that Folman’s choices were deliberate, for me they made the film a little too abstract. Some sequences are quite striking, like the one in which a solider is separated from his unit and has to swim to avoid running into his enemy. But it if a movie is not going to provide a storyline in terms of why the war was being fought, then it should have given a more significant one in terms of its central character.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/1/09

Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? (***)

Morgan Spurlock’s follow-up to Super Size Me is a fun voyage around the Middle East, but it’s longer on touchy-feely we-are-the-world vibes than factual information. The whiz-bang video game graphics that dominate the beginning of the documentary are probably a better fit for a movie about visiting McDonald’s that one that’s about visiting regular folks in Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Morocco. Like Michael Moore, Spurlock injects his own story (and his wife’s pregnancy) into the movie, and a bit of comedy, but he’s way less prescriptive, if also less informative. And, not to give away the ending, but he never does find Osama bin Laden.

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viewed 4/2/08 (screening at Bridge); reviewed 4/18/08

The Kingdom (**3/4)

Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, and Jason Bateman play a team of FBI agents who travel to Riyadh to investigate a series of bomb blasts that have killed hundreds in an American-controlled zone in the Saudi capital. The opening credits play over a series of chronological film and sound clips that telescope the history of American economic and political interests in the country, which of course are almost solely tied to the presence of oil in the region. But this montage promises more than what the movie delivers, which is an earnest but sometimes-sterile tale that celebrates the derring-do of the FBI, climaxes with a rock-’em sock-’em shootout, and ends with an ironic reminder that shootouts may solve a crime but not resolve the hatred that led to it. Director Peter Berg brings the same earnestness and sense of realism that he did to his previous effort, Friday Night Lights. However, it suffers from the same flaw, a dry approach that makes the characters fairly forgettable, even if the performances are entirely creditable. (Bateman shows the most personality.) Given the tragedy its center, I felt like I should have felt a greater emotional investment in the story.

That action-packed finish will, depending on your taste, strike you as a preposterous gloss on, or a welcome relief from, the quiet detective story of the first 90 minutes. I thought it was both. Berg and screenwriter Matthew Carnahan bring a certain veneer of authenticity to the proceedings. Garner’s character learns about a woman’s place in Saudi culture. The wise Saudi policeman in charge of aiding the FBI men, and even some of the other Saudis, are depicted with more subtlety that you might expect. But still, the basic premise, that four spunky Americans with guns and a copy of The Koran for Dummies will be able to save the day, is never in question.

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reviewed 9/30/07