The Philippine Online Chronicles

Before anything else, despite all the sicknesses and crutches movies based on TV shows generally have – forced pairings of characters that don’t quite jive well together, the formulaic pace, the non-risky narrative, the central character seemingly too stubborn to change from how we know her from TV: basically all things directed for fan service – I enjoyed the hell out of Sex & the City 2.

A movie most definitely for fans if not ex-regular viewers of the TV show (like me [although I would say that I’m a fan of the first season, it being largely shot as if Chasing Amy-era Kevin Smith directed each and every episode]), the movie did great on what these things ought to do, giving us updates on what’s been going on in these characters’ lives since last we’d seen them and also we get to see them yet again doing the things we know them for, the things we want to see them do, even haphazardly tossing in a prequel sort of sequence – which I think would make a great movie by itself – for good measure just to show us how they were before we initially met them. Everything was basically pat, almost perfectly so. It’s like a high school reunion in that way, seeing how everyone has grown and seeing how they’ve stayed the same and remembering (and talking about) all the wild things everyone used to do, and the movie basically elicits the usual high school reunion reaction: ah, I remember that, and oh, they’re still together, and my, they have more kids, now, and goodness gracious, look at how they’ve aged! And there were bits that had great bouncing braless Irish tits – they were even wet in one scene – and bits that had bulbous Australian rugby cocks in Speedos (also wet), and along those lines, it’s a very good, very enjoyable movie.

But what struck me the most is how this movie is a reminder of how utterly strong of a global cultural force Hollywood is, and how Hollywood utterly wastes this great big influence on crap – albeit beautifully intricately gilded with sequins crap – like Sex & the City 2. To be specific: the greatest dramatic overtures of the main female characters in the movie occur in the faraway exotic and still largely misogynist kingdom of Abu Dhabi – a setup sure to provoke more than a few statements about Feminism and Neocolonialism, which it has in chockfull amounts, only these statements are largely telegraphed (the characters singing “I Am Woman” in an ultra high-end videoke bar hosted by Arab African Milli Vanilli-types fringed on stage by belly-dancers on catwalks) mainly only provisionally provocative (Samantha surrounded by Arab men as she furiously gives them all the Finger while waving the wads and wads of condoms she smuggled with her for the trip) all just excruciatingly fleeting (some two minutes or so on some Arab women reading Suzanne Somers while wearing designer clothing under their burkas as political statement, a true happening which I’m glad they put in there as I was actually waiting for it [I’m such a girl]). Granted, none reached the distastefulness of the first movie’s bit with Charlotte’s four-year old Chinese girl dancing in her diapers while wearing designer things that very much may well have been made in China by other four-year old girls, but all the same, when all is said and done, this is just a movie, this is just Sex & the City 2, and you don’t go into the theater expecting anything other than Female Materialist Fantasies – or a gay caricature of said fantasies, of these Safe For Work Pornographies – rendered in four-coloured celluloid projected by light onto a white sheet, anything other than lots of shoes, dresses, and some sort of sexxing in some sort of city.

Only this movie decided to take it to a different place (literally and figuratively), which only made me begin to want more from it as it made promises to become more than what I initially thought it was going to be, but it could only take it as far as it could without its main conceit collapsing at the weight of the world, so it always ultimately pulled back time and time and time again. This became a source of extreme frustration that could’ve translated into mild physical violence if only Carrie Bradshaw was real and in front of me: at various times in the movie, it felt like Carrie was on the brink of violent social awakening about her superficial head-in-the-clouds obscene way of life – and vicariously, presumably also the viewer – that in fact there are poor people out there in the world, beyond New York City, poor people who could eat a few months’ worth of regular meals on the price of one of her Hermes scarves alone, only to retreat back to her gilded nest of aggressive abusive oppressive overmateriality with a wrinkly-mouthed pout time and time and time again, a wrinkly-mouthed pout I want to slap with a closed fist time and time and time again.

And this happened often enough – too often – that it is actually making me consider that maybe these tentative provisional urong-sulong steps were intentional, aimed to illustrate some general phenomenon about Women? The Upper Middle Class? Americans? The Western World At Large? Only, what is it exactly saying about Women/the Upper Middle Class/Americans/the Western World at Large? That they are materialistic, greedy, depraved, and that these things are their roads to happiness and ultimately also to unhappiness? And that we are all one and the same materialistically happy, even in the Arab World? Granted, this is only Carrie as everyone else more or less seemed normal, or had normal-seeming problems in life – with Miranda’s problems with her boss, Charlotte’s problems with dealing with her kids (which led to a very very very good conversation between her and Miranda that even I – a 28-year old heterosexual Filipino male with no wife and kids – found absolutely sympathetic), even Samantha’s almost absurdist ways to deal with menopause that always unfailingly turns into impetus for both good and bad slapstick – only Sex & the City has always been Carrie’s story, always has been told through Carrie’s voice, so it’s hard not to see her as being laden with whatever symbolic weight that this story seems to be asking for.

All of these concerns are germane as despite it being only merely Sex & the City 2, the extratextual occurrences of its coming out are still also germane to the world at large: there are still US soldiers policing the Middle East as America continues to Tame the Wilderness with Capitalism; the War on Terrorism has been largely a campaign for control of the oil reserves that have made some individuals in the Middle East – Abu Dhabi included – obscenely disproportionately wealthy compared to the rest of the world; even the deliberate juxtaposition of New York and the Middle East brings back maybe indeliberate memories of September 11; and if it didn’t want to unearth all these associations, just why the hell did the makers of the movie decide to set half of it in Abu Dhabi? Why “I Am Woman?” Why the condom-waving? Or in other words: Just what exactly is happening in the second half of this fucking movie?

Well, apparently nothing, or at least nothing of consequence as after Carrie’s – and vicariously, the viewer’s – brushes with aborted social awakening, after all the movie’s flirting with saying anything of substance about the world – even after Miranda’s various colourful infodump monologues about the Arab World – it all comes down to these four ladies going back unscathed to their snug smug larger than life lives of I ♥ NYC and Manolo Blahnik and menopausal blowjobs and yellow cabs driven by smelly charmingly loud Arabs. And as the camera pans and the vision on the cinema screen shifts from someone prepping to sex someone else on the couch by the window into the sparkling New York City lights dissolving to blurs thereof, this is just a movie, this is just Sex & the City 2, existential is always excesstential, just relearn to watch it for that, as despite the intrusions of the real world the movie seemed to welcome with open arms time and time and time again, it’s all still just merely fantasy. Maybe that’s exactly what it wanted to say?