It appears as if, through no actually conscious effort on my part, I’m ending the working week on a quarrelsome note. Over at The Daily Notebook, in today’s Topics, Etc., I sit down with a few defenses not so much of Sex and the City 2, but its actual right to exist, and the way said defenses note, quite correctly, the sexist double standard that’s a reflexive component, in many cases, of that film’s critical excoriation. The snag being that just because you’re right about one thing doesn’t mean you’re right about everything, and it doesn’t provide you with a pass to make a really silly generalization about Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. My musings in this vein have already found me disfavor with the Bidisha fans over at MUBI (yeah, the haircut remark is a cheap shot; so was Nick Tosches’ saying “look at that mug” upon contemplating a Leonard Maltin movie guide…only Tosches gets away with stuff like that), so I guess I can count this week as a great victory; I’ve managed to royally piss-off arch-conservative John Nolte, three (and counting!) feminists whose other politics, I presume, follow a generally “progressive” path, and Craig Keller. Who’s left? Who’s left who counts, I mean. So much for my project of making this blog a haven of love and tolerance. And to think, I was considering starting up my Twitter account again, this time with a new and sweet persona named “Angel Bear,” and I had a wallpaper illustration picked out for it and everything. Now I’m wondering if I could have even kept up the pretense for a week. Feh. I feel like I must be some kind of bad seed, or something…
Anyway, have a pleasant weekend, y’all. I’ll be likely away from here for much of it, as I’ve got a super-secret, and long, screening beginning this very morning, and tomorrow I’m heading out once again to Suffern, New York’s fabulous Lafayette Theater, where Nelson P. and Pete A. and the gang will be unspooling Preminger’s also-lengthy Anatomy of a Murder, during which I’ll most likely be constantly identifying with George C. Scott’s character.
All right, now that I am done laughing (and that took a while)…I have no problem with people dumping all over Sex and the City 2 since I find the women near-perfect examples of types I would NOT want to get drunk with. My personal objection to some (and it was only some) of the reviews and blog comments about the thing was a question of tone. It was as though the subject matter itself was beneath the consideration of any serious moviegoer, and what’s wrong with making a movie about gadabout Manhattan women and their armies of menfolk? Or a movie about rich people during an economic downturn? Hell, if you take those two approaches, there goes practically every worthwhile comedy of the 1930s. Not to mention our main man Douglas Sirk as well as Max Ophuls, the entire filmographies of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and okay I’ll stop now.
But even when you were refusing to review the thing, you did do SATC 2 the favor of looking at it with whatever mild seriousness you could muster, so I don’t fault you on that score.
As for the “offensive to Arabs” question. Just put that to my resident expert on the subject. He told me no, “they” don’t hate us because of SATC 2. They hate us going all the way back to the TV show. (Incidentally, he strenuously objects to being called Mr. Siren and has requested that I call him Salah-al-din, which may cause confusion should I mention him on certain blogs, but so be it.)
And “Salah-al-din” (he cannot be serious, I have to find a better pseudonym) also mentioned a friend of ours, an Arabic-speaking news producer who had to translate one of bin Laden’s many video valentines to the West. Quote from bin Laden himself: “If we hated you for your freedom and your homos, we’d bomb Sweden.”