Sex and the City - and Summer 08.

"[T]hough Sex and the City is every bit as busy as its HBO progenitor was, it's virtually plotless, not to mention pointless," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice, where Lynn Yaeger's got seven open questions for writer-director-producer Michael Patrick King.

"It's hard to feel halfway about these women and their unabashed materialism, overprivilege, and self-indulgence, their overdependence on and objectification of men," writes David Edelstein in New York. "But what a hoot it is to see babes, for once, doing the objectifying - and talking dirty and sleeping around and measuring their fantasies against the sobering truth of male emotional insufficiency. If the core friendship of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte is the biggest fantasy of all - they complement one another perfectly; they're never too competitive - it's a moving design for living: existential haute couture."

Updated through 6/1.

Both Edelstein and the New Yorker's David Denby catch up with Indy 4, while at Stream, Eric Kohn talks with Eric Zala about the already-legendary Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.

"Prince Caspian is all shallow iconography: a parade of portentous images just nondescript enough to have Narnia newbies like myself wondering what exactly the big deal is," writes Matt Connolly in Reverse Shot.

Back to the movie at hand: Alonso Duralde assures fans that "if you'd been looking forward to a Sex and the City movie but were carrying the slightest doubt that the feature film would deviate from the show's formula even a little, have no fear. And have another cosmo."

Amie Simon caught it last night and posts impressions on the Siffblog: "I liken the experience to seeing Snakes on a Plane, only instead of beer-fueled men yelling 'motherf**king snakes' every 5 minutes, it was cosmo-fueled women swooning, sighing, giggling uncontrollably, emitting shocked 'ohmygods' and oohing/ahhing over the parade of gowns, shoes and bags."

"I remember the moment when, as a senior in college, I decided that I could no longer in good conscience watch Sex and the City," writes Karina Longworth in the SpoutBlog. "It was, I think, the premiere of the first season to air after 9/11, and there was a scene where Carrie announced that she was going to help rebuild downtown by going shopping."

At Movie City News, Noah Forrest has a lot to say about his love-hate relationship with the series.

Blogging for the New York Times, Sewell Chan notes that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is not at all happy that his scene has been left on the cutting room floor.

Earlier: "Sex and the City in... London?"

Updates, 5/29: So there's the cover of this week's New York Press. Pretty much sums it up, but if you're in for more: Armond White. Also: the summer's "Film Events."

"At its best - which admittedly was never a sure thing - Sex and the City was post-feminist Edith Wharton, a tour of the status anxiety of smart young women who could no longer count on a WASP hierarchy or a college admissions dean to preselect suitable mates," writes City Journal contributing editor Kay S Hymowitz. "The writers were forever undercutting the characters' illusions about their liberated lives; in the end, these high-achieving, independent thirtysomethings - even the ever-horny Samantha - were mostly in search of men worthy of their fabulous selves."

"Sex and the City was preferable on television, negating race on Sunday nights in much the same way as the superior Friends did on must-see Thursdays," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "On the movie screen, King's desperate attempt at 'racial balance' pathetically backfires but at least proves useful in putting the show's inherently materialistic and borderline-supremacist ethos into sharper focus."

"Under the levity, there's a core seriousness about presenting these women's lives, one emphasized by the willingness of Sex and the City to grow and mature along with its characters," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle.

By the way, notes Emily Anthes, citing research in Slate, "It's the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is."

"In his wrapup to the half-hour groundbreaker of a sitcom that began on HBO a full ten years ago, writer/director Michael Patrick King takes about two or three season finales' worth of tears and OMG jawdroppers and whacks them together into a big, sloppy, gooey sundae of a film that is, for better or for worse, just like the show... only longer," writes Chris Barsanti at PopMatters.

Julia Turner in Slate on what - and who - they're wearing: "[T]here are fewer vintage pieces, fewer off-kilter touches, and the movie, with its emphasis on big-name designers, seems to ignore what the show got right about clothes: that dressing up is a way to invent different versions of yourself."

"[T]he film arrives shrouded in such a fog of expectation, preconception, anticipation and (now with more post-Hillary bite!) gender bias that it's hard to see - or write about - the movie for the trees," observes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Which is too bad, because Michael Patrick King... has done some brave, surprising things with it, mining territory that's been all but abandoned by Hollywood. It's hard, in fact, to think of any other recent examples of movies that explore the complicated emotional lives of characters comically without stooping to adolescent silliness or that are willing to go to such dark places while remaining a comedy in the Shakespearean sense - all's well that ends well."

"By Sunday, if the early buzz translates into huge ticket sales, Hollywood may have to consider a new truism: there's instant girl power at the movies," notes Time's Richard Corliss. "SATC spends too much time dawdling, but at the end it boils its theme down to 12 words. An estranged couple once communicated by reading love letters from famous people. Now, the longtime stud sends this email to his wounded partner: 'I know I screwed it up, but I will love you forever.'"

"It's been a nasty couple of weeks for New York's writing women, both real and imaginary," writes Rebecca Traister in Salon:

What provokes such fury, over Carrie Bradshaw, and - for a flash - over [Emily] Gould (barring a book deal and TV show that will turn her meanderings into cultural furniture) is that in a media landscape in which there are a severely limited number of spaces for women's writing voices, the ones that get tapped become necessarily, and deeply inaccurately, emblematic - of their gender, their generation, their profession. More annoying - and twisted - is that those meager spots for women are consistently filled by those willing to expose themselves, visually and emotionally. And not accidentally, by those willing to expose themselves in a way that is comfortable, and often alluring, to many of the men who control the media, and to many of the women who consume it.

Updates, 5/30: "A little Botox goes a long way in Sex and the City, but a little decent writing would have gone even further." Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "The froufrou and the lunches are back, as are, kind of, Carrie's three girlfriends, Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), all tricked out with their customary accessories (men, children, handbags)," and the movie "is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow - and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong - addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways."

Also, Timothy Williams and Annie Correal talk to fans in neighborhoods "that have about as much in common with the glimmering, candy-coated Manolo Blahnik world of Sex and the City as, say, East Texas."

"Looking back on the series, and on the way it could so often be both breezy and sharp, I can see it more clearly as a grandchild of the jazz age, a cocktail laced with the spirit of Anita Loos," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. But the movie is "a fat, misshapen valise that's a betrayal of the trim, elegant lines of the original show."

"The show's values are reprehensible, its view of gender relations cartoonish, its puns execrable," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "I honestly believe, as I wrote when the series finale aired in 2005, that Sex and the City is singlehandedly responsible for a measurable uptick in the number of materialistic twits in New York City and perhaps the world. And yet... and yet..."

"This is a movie so unbelievably girly, whirly and twirly that, on leaving the cinema, I felt like reading three Andy McNabs back to back, just to get my testosterone back up to metrosexual level," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "It is all very trivial and disposable, and yet for all its contrivances, its brand-name silliness and its amplified problems afflicting the comfortably-off metropolitan classes, I can't help thinking this is still a cut above the sinister romcom slush that we are fed, week in, week out."

"What with one thing and another, dramatic developments cause the four women to join one another at a luxurious Mexican resort, where two scenes take place that left me polishing my pencils to write this review." And... I'll let Roger Ebert take it from there.

Ann Hornaday notes that "it slyly winks at its own ambiguous cultural impact, having spawned the decidedly dubious phenomenon of young women traveling in loud, high-heeled packs, trying way too hard to be just like the show's chic, sexually adventurous characters." Also in the Washington Post, Robin Givhan profiles costume designer Patricia Field.

"I'm not against product placement per se, but even the best-written heart-to-heart scene can only be undermined when you can tell it's choreographed to show everything from Pret a Manger sarnies to Manolo bloody Blahniks in the most flattering light," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "The film could have been witty about this, but its tone of gormless materialism remains as unironic as it is unwavering."

"You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker.

"King knows how to write smart one-liners and throwaway gags, but too often the film screeches to a standstill as it pimps more merchandise - one fashion-show sequence features Carrie breathily reciting a list of couture names that seems to last longer than the catalogue of ships in the Iliad," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

"In the end, the film functions more as a super-sized television episode than a fully fleshed-out movie, but it succeeds in ratcheting up all the series' best defining features," writes Genevieve Koski at the AV Club.

Tom Leonard talks with Cattrall for the Telegraph.

"The three biggest summer movies of the year, all more or less done at the box office before summer even arrives. So the question becomes: Now what?" S James Snyder previews the rest of the season for the New York Sun.

"Helena Andrews at The Root (spoiler alert) has a great piece on the hackneyed 'best black friend' character played by Jennifer Hudson of Dreamgirls fame," notes Dana Goldstein at the American Prospect.

Updates, 5/31: For VF Daily, Kate Ahlborn and Louisine Frelinghuysen list the products placed in Sex and the City. It's a long list.

"If Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull functions on the purest level as a nostalgia machine - a reminder of celluloid's dominance as the twentieth-century's most popular art form, of Spielberg's position at Hollywood's mountaintop, of film's very intrinsic pleasures - then it's also just as much an attempted confirmation of Harrison Ford's continued vitality," writes Michael Koresky in Reverse Shot.

Erinn Bucklan, Meghan O'Rourke, Dana Stevens and June Thomas discuss Sex and the City at Slate. Warning: "There are REALLY BIG SPOILERS ahead. GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS SPOILERS right in the VERY FIRST LINES. Read at your own risk."

Updates, 6/1: "The programme raised the bar or pushed the envelope of sexual frankness in American discourse and is a milestone in the journey from the typical Hollywood woman's movie to the chickflick, though it managed to retain the adolescent dream of slipping a foot into a glass slipper while banging a beautifully coiffed head against the glass ceiling," writes Philip French in the Observer. As for the movie: "What we never see is anyone working, responding to public events or expressing a view about anything except love, sex, money and clothes. The casting of Candice Bergen as Carrie's editor at Vogue reminds us of her screen debut as the intellectual Chicagoan Lakey in the 1966 film of Mary McCarthy's The Group and of a more serious time when women could be seen in a historical context. Everyone is fabulously wealthy, no one looks at the prices on menus or questions the cost of anything."

"[T]he fashion is jaw-droppingly fantastic." An assessment from Eric Wilson in the NYT.

Posted by dwhudson at May 28, 2008 1:20 PM