Fuck You, Hollywood.

We’re witnessing the end of an empire at the box office.
Sex and the City 2 is lying there like a dead fish, with all the appeal of a used-up 45-year-old prostitute after a night of chasing 8-balls with gin after running the line for a sex-train at a frat party.
Naturally, Hollywood is CONVINCED it’s because the chicks in it are all old.
“Well, of COURSE Sam needs a vibrator — she’s 54!”
Let’s for a moment forget the ages of the women acting in the show. Let’s forget that they’re all around 50+ now.
Let’s do something wacky and think about the movie itself. And, hey, let’s think about the writing.
First: Have I seen it? No.
Here’s why not.
If I’m watching a show where some lead actor/actress from a flick is out whoring their movie, putting on the charm, and they play a clip — just ONE 30-second clip from a 90-minute movie — and the clip sucks shit? I mean, they’re supposed to be showing the one most appealing, funniest, engaging, COME-WATCH-US clip they have from the ENTIRE movie. And it’s shit? Well, I know the other 89:30 probably isn’t gonna be an improvement.
But if that 30-second clip is from a 2-hour-and-25-minutes-long movie and it still sucks shit?
I’m in favour of euthanizing everyone who views it in the theatres.
The shame!
Everything I’ve seen of Sex & the City 2 looks like has-been writers puked up every failed cliché they’ve ever heard, slapped some pretty weird dresses and shoes I’ll NEVER afford onto fancy-pretty chicks, and spliced that shit together.
Let’s see what some of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes are saying about it:

  • There’s only one thing worse than faking an orgasm: faking laughter. Shame on you, Sex and the City 2, for being a 2.5-hour laughless fake-a-thon that never finds the right spot.
  • Shoes, money, outfits, shoes, vagina, money, shoes, jewelry, outfits, money, shoes.
  • It goes from being what we know and love to… what were they thinking?
  • A flagrant insult to the audience that made the first film a phenomenon. Shame on the writers of this soulless drivel for trying to pass this Canal Street bootleg sow’s ear off as a genuine Alexander McQueen silk purse.
  • Early in Sex and the City 2, I started a list of things that could easily be cut because they go nowhere. It’s a long list.
  • It has no plot to speak of, little in the way of wit or intelligence, and is about 50% longer than can reasonably be justified.
  • A degrading portrait of women through an unfunny story about four Ugly Americans abroad.
  • It’s supposed to be Sex and the City. This is Sects and the Souk.

And that’s what pisses me off.
This movie isn’t failing because of the actresses. It’s failing because a director with shitty judgment had his hands on a shitty script that some fucko chose in a Hollywood office, and Decider Dude’s probably been sleeping with vapid starlets and hasn’t had his finger on the real-life pulse of America for three decades.
YET he thinks he knows what’ll appeal to broad-spectrum women around the world. Yeah. Right.
This movie is failing because it’s nothing of what the original series contained — cynical-but-true jabs at being single, sexy, smart women trying to get by in a big-city life at a changing time in American city culture.
So, it’s got nothing that made it great, except for actresses that play characters who aren’t the characters they were when America fell in love with them. Brilliant. Sure, that’ll be a raging success.
And the problem with these failing movies that have “older” actresses is, they’re usually shit from the get-go. They were shit on paper, they’re shit being shot, and they’re shit when they’re edited together for the screening room.
What’s the deal? Actresses don’t get great money-making projects past 45, so they get all scared about their future, then jump when Hollywood says they’ll slap a couple million payroll for ’em onto this lame-ass “but it’s sure to be a hit, look at all the OLD actresses we’ve lined up to appease the suburban-mom contingent!” movie.
The even bigger problem is with fans who’ll take anything shovelled at them under the guise that it’s even REMOTELY connected to the original story enterprise. Yeah, you know who you are.
This has NOTHING to do with the original series. It’s a bunch of chicks doing stupid, contrived things that only a BAD Hollywood writer would come up with.
We need great indie filmmakers to make awesome movies about women in their 40s and 50s that are edgy, ironic, bitingly funny, and not apologetic about crashing a few stereotypes. (I remember one called The Graduate.)
The movies we’re making for women have NOT improved. This is the same stupid-ass writing that’s brought us horrible, horrible, horrible chick flicks like The First Wives’ Clubs and The Women and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and all those cliché my-time-of-the-month films.
Apparently all women have to do in their 40s and 50s is to be unhappy about love, confused about life, and needy about having friends.
The problem here isn’t the age of the actresses.
It’s that Hollywood doesn’t know what real life for women actually entails. It doesn’t know that life’s more complicated than soccer-practice “taxi” trips and bill-payments.
Hollywood doesn’t understand that not every woman gets manicures or pedicures.
It doesn’t get that not every woman is sitting around deviously hatching a plan to manipulate a man.
It doesn’t get that some of us actually love ourselves and our lives.
It doesn’t get that my quality of life isn’t determined by the ratio of man-delivered-orgasms versus personally-given ones.
Hollywood doesn’t understand women. At all. It didn’t 20 years ago, it doesn’t now.
I’ll confess: I’ve never been a real fan of Sex & The City.
That’s more because I’m not a girlie-girl and don’t really get into “girl” shows. I enjoyed some of it sometimes, but I’ve always been annoyed at how much validation its characters received from the male sex, or how much they all had to rally together and prop each other up against the un-validation given to them by male characters.
It always was a cliché — but a really well-written cliché with great laughs and realistic characters, and more true to some of the struggles of women in their 30s/40s than it is about them aging.
Now, though, it’s just another money-grubbing cliché-spewing pathetic example of why the mainstream movie machine is still broken.
And you smart, sexy, intelligent, successful women who are giving your money over to the box office to watch this piece-of-shit movie that stereotypes, demeans, and mocks the modern woman:
You’re part of the problem.
Shame on you.

6 thoughts on “Fuck You, Hollywood.

  1. Leslie

    Yes! As long as women suck up this kind of drivel, Hollywood will keep making it. I could never relate at all to the women in that show, and I have 5 million better things to do than waste my time and money on that execrable excuse of a movie. You know who likes SaTC? My gay male friends. The women in that show always struck me as caricatures of what (some) gay males might imagine women to be. They’re nothing like the women I know.

  2. Bruce

    Brava, Steff. That was a brilliant, and very, very accurate rant. You may have seen my tweets discussing the effect that SATC1 had on me—I walked away in my own house. And I’m the guy who watches EVERYTHING. Including the making of featurettes.
    Movies like the first SATC one are an embarrassment to all involved, regardless of the public exposure. From everything I can gather, the sequel digs a very, very deep hole in order to measure the improvements.

  3. Meg

    I would agree about SATC and the like, but completely disagree that Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is the same sort of movie, guilty of the same things. Both of the STP movies deal intelligently and sensitively with difficult issues many girls in their target demographic must face in real life. As an RA in a college dorm, I know the residents I was overseeing related to those movies (and books), and felt that the protagonists in them mirrored themselves and their friends. Who can say that about SATC, aka rich skanks do dumb things on camera? The way you just dropped STP’s name and then moved on almost makes it seem as if you haven’t actually watched it, or read the books on which either of those movies are based. If you had, I don’t think you’d be lumping it in with trash like SATC, even though it may not hit as close to home for you because of the generation gap.

  4. Derek K. Miller

    I liked the SaTC series, both because it was smart and interesting and funny, and because the episodes were short and snappy: half an hour. The first movie wasn’t all that funny, the central conflict seemed based on a ridiculous and selfish overreaction on Carrie’s part, and it was way, way too long. I didn’t bother to see this one, though my wife and kids did, and they enjoyed it as far as it went.
    You’re quite right, this movie is trailing off for what I suspect is the same reason “Superman 3” didn’t do as well as its predecessors: compared to them, it sucked.
    .-= Derek K. Miller´s last blog ..If you’ve published a book, why, and how’d it go? =-.

  5. Veronica Heringer

    Shame on me!
    Steff you are correct in so many levels. I went to see SJP and her BFFs last Saturday and left the movie theater extremely disappointed. Sex and the City is a collection of horrible cliches. From racist comments about women from the Middle East to Menopause, SATC 2 showed that the brand is dead!
    It is a shame! I would love to see smart North American women in their 40s and 50s talking about their ambitions and expressing their opinions on the big screen. There is a market, but as long as Hollywood is managed by the old guys, it will take us a while to be represented!
    .-= Veronica Heringer´s last blog ..Comment on The Canadian Project: Day #1 by Romanda =-.

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