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

Sex and the City (**3/4)

I must confess I’ve barely seen the HBO hit upon which this is based, but I can see the appeal. On the one hand, the series is a seriocomic fantasy about four wealthy Manhattan women who shop a lot, date a variety of eligible (and occasionally ineligible) gentlemen, and have frank conversations whose main subject is the one in the title. (For a series about women, it was largely a series about men, notwithstanding hedonistic Samantha’s brief same-sex experimentation.) Yet there’s some reality too; the series brought up all manner of relationship issues, many familiar and a few, like “funky spunk,” that may or may not be a problem for many viewers. But mainly, the appeal lies in having well-delineated characters, sometimes-clever writing, and an emphasis on the rarely challenged friendship among the women.

The movie version, written and directed by frequent series contributor Michael Patrick King, apparently without the involvement of series creator Darren Star, contains all of these threads, yet tends to the melancholy side. Suiting the transition from TV show to feature film, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw has completed the transition from columnist to book author, just like her real-life alter-ego Candace Bushnell, but still provides pithy voiceovers. (“A knockoff isn’t easy to spot when it comes to love.”) Her possibly impending marriage to Chris Noth’s “Mr. Big” provides the framework for the film. A parade of wedding dresses Carrie gets to try on should serve as fashion porn for those whose interests lie in that direction. There’s another trying-on montage scene later, which had me looking at my watch.

For those of a different inclination, Samantha’s (Kim Catrall) escapades in the series had provided titillation and male eye candy. It’s unfortunate that for most of this movie her libido is sidelined, and so is she, having moved to LA in an attempt at monogamy that may be as frustrating for the viewer as it is for her. Perky Charlotte (Kristin Davis), wife and mother to an adopted three-year-old, mostly serves as a foil for the other characters, leaving the most compelling subplot to high-strung Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), whose husband confesses to cheating after they’ve not slept together for six months. Hence more melancholy, but Miranda’s trust issues are easier to relate to than Carrie’s.

I won’t give away why exactly it takes over two hours before we find out whether Carrie and Big will marry after all, but to me the thing that keeps them apart is basically trivial and arguably phony. Critics have often called the series and its characters shallow, but others found it shallow and fun. Shallow and dour is not so appealing. I wouldn’t mind watching Carrie mope in Mexico, as she does when things seem to sour, so much if this storyline were better and not built around the conventional dilemma of will-they-or-won’t-they-get-married. Not to say there aren’t some lighter moments. An early scene in which the four women comically use coloring with crayons as a sexual metaphor, due to the presence of Charlotte’s young daughter, has the right feel to it, at once funny and truthful. The scenes with Jennifer Hudson, as Carrie’s newly hired assistant, also have that balance between lightness and seriousness that is sometimes missing elsewhere.

The theme of the movie is forgiveness, and I’m sure most longtime fans will forgive its flaws, but notice them. (Newcomers don’t need to have seen the series to follow along.) After seeing the feature I went and watched a whole episode—the one where Charlotte meets her future husband (Evan Handler)—and enjoyed that at least as much.

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viewed 5/30/08 at Moorestown

The Devil Waters Prada (***1/2)

Fine actors, fine clothes, and a fine script make for an entertainingly comic adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling novel about a dowdy girl (Anne Hathaway) who lands a job working for a dragon lady (Meryl Streep) running a New York fashion mag.

In The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey says that the devil’s greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t exist. So maybe the second greatest is getting someone to sell her soul yet think she still has it. Anne Hathaway plays Satan’s would-be victim in this comic adaptation of Lauren Weisberger's bestselling novel. A frumpy would-be writer who almost accidentally lands a job as an assistant to New York fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestley, she becomes a fashion victim in more ways than one. Priestly, who may or may not be based on Weisberger’s former boss, Anna Wintour of Vogue, is played to a monogrammed T by Meryl Streep. She’s not so much nasty as exacting, exhausting, and without time for niceties. Hathaway showed that she could be surprisingly un-adorable in Brokeback Mountain, but here plays, quite capably, what could be a grown-up version of her Princess Diaries character. (Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci also stand out as her snobbish coworkers.)

The early part of the movie gets some fun digs in at the fashion industry. Yet, given that the film is practically a rag-trade magazine come to life, it also celebrates it. Streep as Priestly delivers up a defense of her trade that may nearly convince you that buying a designer label is performing a public service. The withering looks the fashionistas give Hathaway’s dowdy duds is nearly worth the price of admission. But high-level cattiness is hard to sustain for two hours. The story flags slightly as it becomes about work versus personal life, dueling boyfriends, and becoming the kind of person you once detested. (There’s the devil part.) However, the ending, significantly different from the book, redeems the movie. And another nice thing is that you wind up empathizing with each of the characters, even the one who’s sold her soul knowingly.

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viewed at PFS screening; reviewed 6/29/06; posted online and rating revised slightly upward 8/14/13