"Sex and the City 2": a deeper penetration

[This review is a longer version of that published in The Scotsman on May 28, 2010, available here: http://cinesthesiac.blogspot.com/2010/05/sex-and-city-2-scotsman-280510.html.]

And yea, their contractual wrangles and personality clashes having been resolveth, the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse did ride again. With the exception of one xenophobia-enabling fiesta in Mexico, 2008's first SATC feature confined its extended-hen-party ghastliness to domestic soil. This sequel embarks in a form of Sex tourism, eventually dispatching the girls and their Louis Vuitton cases to Abu Dhabi, where you wouldn't be surprised if their sniggering permissiveness (here's Samantha, sucking suggestively on a hookah pipe!) and karaoke renditions of "I Am Woman" led to calls for a jihad on certain fashion houses, or thoughts Sharia law might just have got some things right after all.

The running time, alas, remains almost exactly the same. Around half an hour of Sex and the City 2 is devoted to needless close-ups of watches and stiletto heels, as though the film were determined to replicate for its target audience the experience of flicking through a catalogue filled with items they'll never be able to afford. Writer-director Michael Patrick King makes one concession to any blokes obliged to tag along at this stage: the presence of a persistently braless Alice Eve - a promising TV and theatre actress in the UK, an itinerant pair of breasts (cf. last year's Crossing Over) in the States - as Charlotte's cartwheel-turning, insecurity-fostering Irish nanny.

Elsewhere, seguing from heavenly civil-partnership rites - cameos from Liza Minnelli and Garland impersonator Mario Cantone gilding an already altogether fabulous lily - to Carrie and Charlotte's domestic hells confirms this as a franchise that's gay- and fabric-friendly, yet deeply uncomfortable around anything conventionally straight. In the Carrie-verse, heterosexual sex has grown turgid and hard work. The thrusting of Samantha's latest stud ("I lay concrete," he growls; "That sounds promising," she coos; and we wonder how, exactly? Is Samantha's vagina so like a cement mixer, or one of those pelican's beaks they used for the purpose on The Flintstones?) is intercut with shots of a dog humping a pillow and the sound of Charlotte's baby screaming blue murder - hardly a context of erotic bliss.

It's from this backdrop, however, that a potential saviour emerges: Chris Noth's dependable and debonair Mr. Big, practically a nobody in the first film, whose sudden resistance to Carrie's superficial lifestyle appears not merely sane, but worthy of a whole new White Rose Movement. Not that King cares to recognise this. It's a sure sign a film's value system is all out of whack when Big can be vilified for daring to buy a modest flatscreen TV (SATC2's one essential purchase) in order that he and his lover can snuggle up in bed and watch old movies together. "A piece of jewellery would have been nice," is Carrie's reasoning, to which the entire multiplex - male/female, gay and straight - exclaims as one: you bitch.

It's only upon reflection you realise what King is doing in going after the man of Carrie's dreams: turning him into an analogue for all those supposedly spoilsport boyfriends and husbands who'd rather stay at home with their feet up on the couch than jump in the back of a pink limo and head down the Odeon. Once more, with its revenue streams coming under renewed attack, we find Hollywood attempting to make television the enemy - which seems doubly peculiar in a film so rooted in televisual discourse. As shrill, culture-trashing paeans to globalisation go, Carrie 2 proves marginally less enervating than its predecessor, but widescreen has killed any real or sustainable intimacy between these characters. Given the prevailing crassness, the scenes of sisterly bonding ring predominantly false, and Ms. Bradshaw herself seems more self-involved than ever beneath her expensively ludicrous rags.

There remains one glimmer of hope. At an after-party to which Carrie has dragged her man, we observe Big engaged in conversation with a glowing Penelope Cruz, and I'd like to believe that, while Carrie was off fretting boringly about her exes in the UAE, Big was offering Ms. Cruz an access-all-areas tour of his erstwhile girlfriend's walk-in wardrobe space. Otherwise, we finish back where this franchise started, with some light cross-promotion for the Time-Warner back catalogue: Carrie hailing a cab in Abu Dhabi by channeling Claudette Colbert's It Happened One Night thigh-flashing, in order to snuggle up before Cary Grant on Big's newly installed flatscreen. (See, told you it was worth it.) If Sex and the City 2 fails to satisfy its core audience, it's because it makes the one deviation those classics, or any other romantic fantasy worth its salt, would never allow: the hero ends up with the wrong dame.

Sex and the City 2 is on general release.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of May 21-23, 2010:

1 (new) StreetDance (PG) ** [above]
2 (new) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (12A) **
3 (1) Robin Hood (12A) **
4 (2) Iron Man 2 (12A) ***
5 (new) Kites (12A) **
6 (6) Four Lions (15) **
7 (3) A Nightmare on Elm Street (18)
8 (4) Hot Tub Time Machine (15) ***
9 (new) The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (18) **
10 (7) The Back-Up Plan (12A)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Vincere
2. Lebanon
3. The Time That Remains
4. [REC]2
5. Heartless

Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (4) The Road (15) ***
2 (1) Avatar (12) ***
3 (3) Law Abiding Citizen (18)
4 (new) Precious (15) *****
5 (new) Up in the Air (15) ****
6 (6) Harry Brown (18) **
7 (5) The Men Who Talk to Goats (15) **
8 (8) 2012 (12) ***
9 (new) Sherlock Holmes (12) *
10 (2) Nowhere Boy (15) ****

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. Precious
2. Up in the Air
3. Lion's Den
4. The Unloved
5. Departures

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. North By North-West (Tuesday, C4, 12.20pm)
2. Mary Poppins (Bank Holiday Monday, BBC1, 1.05pm)
3. The Shootist (Saturday, five, 3.35pm)
4. Spider-Man (Sunday, five, 8pm)
5. Camp (Bank Holiday Monday, C4, 3.05am)

Turn it on again: "[REC]2"

Emerging in UK cinemas in early 2008, the Spanish horror pic [REC] had TV cameras following a fire crew into a Barcelona apartment block where the residents were busy developing rabid tendencies; a genre-savvy effort that shuttled its players up and down between levels, like avatars in a computer game, it was enough, at least, to catch the eye of Sony Pictures' Screen Gems division, who remade it (more or less shot-for-shot) as Quarantine within the year. If the original drew on The Blair Witch Project and Doom for its inspiration, then this sequel, again directed by Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, models itself on Aliens by way of CSI, picking up where the first film left off by sending a crack SWAT team into the same building to investigate an incident scene that proves anything but secure.

Though [REC]2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns, rather cursory characterisation (none of the SWAT team has the breakout potential of Aliens' Private Hudson) and some shameless demographic-courting (with the introduction of a group of teenagers who just so happen to have found their way into a building we'd previously been told was completely sealed), tinkering with the concept fixes a glitch that hampered the effectiveness of the original. In [REC], we watched the mounting horror through the detached, third-person perspective of a documentary crew - and thus saw other people getting freaked out, from a vaguely reassuring distance. The action in [REC]2, however, is relayed via the SWAT team's helmet-cams, putting us closer to the carnage, and (in several instances) right there in the middle of it.

Essentially, the franchise has undergone an upgrade, and [REC]2's formal games with cameras (the continual switching on and off, the image dropout, the frames-within-frames) are more sophisticated and dynamic than those effectuated in Blair Witch; it's a conceit that could only be pulled off in the age of digital technology and projection. Even when our heroes are clambering through heading ducts or stumbling around in night vision, the images sent back to us are pin-sharp - except when a lens is smashed, obliging the narrative to double back on itself in a similar fashion to last year's standout Spanish offering Timecrimes. "Record everything," somebody shouts in the maelstrom, "That's fundamental!" No surprise the last character standing is the one with the closest relationship to the recording device, and arguably the emptiest vessel of all.

In [REC]2, the camera becomes a tool for excavating the history of a building, its inhabitants, and the horror genre itself: one of our guides this time out is a doughty priest, landed with the bearing and gravitas of Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, whose mission to contain the mess left behind by his superiors (and keep at least one of the zombified inhabitants alive, in order to extract their blood for an antidote) sets him in direct conflict with the soldiers (whose orders are to shoot on sight) and the surviving civilians (whose aim is to get out unbitten). The theme of mismanagement by the Catholic church is just one way the film attempts to open itself out beyond the boundaries of genre; you sense Bunuel - not to mention any passing etymologist - would appreciate the name given to the little girl revealed here as the source of the infection: Tristana.

[REC]2 opens nationwide today.

The observer: "The Time That Remains"

It's been over a year now since Elia Suleiman's The Time That Remains (subtitle: Chronicle of a Present Absentee) premiered to some acclaim at Cannes, and you can see why its distributors thought it might struggle to find a foothold among UK audiences: its themes at first appear less universal than region-specific, and then very much personal. We open with the director himself sitting in the back of a cab heading we know not where; when flashflooding obliges the driver to make a U-turn, so too Suleiman begins to rewind in his head.

The bulk of the film, set out in a series of comic vignettes, is a history of the Suleiman family, from the Israeli invasion of their hometown Nazareth in 1947 to the present day. Sketches introduce us to the key characters within this household: the debonair, gunrunning father Fu'ad; his loving, nurturing wife; Aunt Olga, with her dodgy eyes and increasingly dotty mind; the family's alcoholic neighbour, whose idea of downtime is to douse his body with petrol and threaten to set himself alight; and little Elia himself, a precocious, inquisitive tyke with a head already firmly in the clouds, who's taken aside by his headmaster at one point for outing America as a colonialist force in class.

As a filmmaker, Suleiman has retained something of the dreamer and the joker about him: suggesting the invasion and subsequent occupation of the West Bank was an absurd and ill-founded (if deadly) endeavour, he keeps his camera at the same distance from the action as the cinema's slapstick pioneers, and thus presents us with history as pratfalls and sight gags. One woman rushes in to greet the invaders effusively, and is promptly shot for her troubles; a Palestinian dresses up his wife as a hitchhiking Israeli soldier to satisfy a fetish, only to see her picked up by another car; a resident of latter-day Nazareth takes a call on his mobile, oblivious to the tank parked directly behind him.

Such droll, deadpan follies are an acquired comic taste, and the lack of political and historical context Suleiman provides may be an issue for those of us with little to no grounding in Middle Eastern history. There is a kerfuffle over something over something called "bulgur" ("bulgur for taboule", the subtitles attempt to clarify), a substance of which I'd genuinely never heard. And in the absence of the expected onscreen graphics explaining when exactly these events are unfolding, we're left to parse subtle changes in decor and costume in a bid to spot the time shifts. Once you've negotiated these hurdles, however, the film proves ineffably human, displaying real warmth in its characterisation. Fu'ad has something of the Fantastic Mr. Fox about him: sporty, crafty, fine-haired, forever one step ahead of the authorities.

The Time That Remains is one of those rare films that gets better as it goes along, in part because Suleiman has such a lovely, thoughtful way of describing time, and of reconciling his past and present selves. At one point, Suleiman's camera watches (at a distance) the teenage Elia watching (from his own safe distance) the scuffles between Israeli and pro-Palestinian forces on the streets below, showing signs of the detached observer he was to become; this teenage Elia delivers the Arab papers to the three men entrenched outside the local pub, and - in a later incarnation - we find Suleiman occupying one of these seats himself, watching the young men of the world striding by. Those distributors need not have worried unduly: the moral of Suleiman's film, dedicated to the director's parents and with a cherishable remix of "Stayin' Alive" over the end credits, is that it happens to us all.

The Time That Remains opens at selected cinemas today.

On DVD: "Departures" and "The Unloved"

Given the American Academy’s spotty record when it comes to picking the Best Foreign Language Film, eyebrows were understandably raised at last year’s Oscars when unknown Japanese entry Departures triumphed over the likes of Waltz with Bashir and The Class. Did the voters get it right? If I say maybe, that’s only to underline the esteem in which I hold the other nominees: while Takita Yôjirô’s drama can’t claim to be as contemporary or incendiary as its rivals, it stands as every bit as human, if not more so. You reach the end credits with an urgent need to ring your parents, or hug your children.

Yôjirô’s protagonist, cellist Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Matoki), has retreated to his hometown after his orchestra is disbanded due to falling audiences. Answering a situations-vacant looking for someone to “assist with departures”, Daigo thinks he’s getting into the travel business; the opening, however, is for a trainee mortician. The musician brings discipline and nimble fingers to the position, gaining a new-found appreciation of life in return: he’s suddenly unable to look at the chopped chicken his wife sets down for dinner, and - conversely - finds himself transfixed by the sight of salmon swimming upstream.

Not for the first time, a Japanese film is steeped in ritual: in this case, that of nokanshi, the art of cleansing and redressing corpses, as performed “live” before the funeral party. Sometimes this ceremony is cathartic, reducing one stern-faced husband to tears; sometimes it’s tragicomic, as when Daigo discovers the young woman in front of him is, anatomically at least, male. The film stresses its hero’s politeness and formality, but never quite lapses into conservatism: it grasps how susceptible we are to change, even as it sets out how connected we remain to the people around us.

Cynics might say Departures typifies the Academy’s tendency to laud films its constituents could imagine themselves making (or remaking) over anything truly challenging. Yet the considerable emotional pull here resides not in Yôjirô’s grandiose flourishes - one montage shows Daigo fiddling away on a mountaintop, like an extra in a BA commercial - but in its quiet compilation of warm, intimate, recognisable moments: a son setting down his cello in his absent father’s spike marks, say, or a husband trying to creep out to work on a winter’s morning without waking his wife - only for the latter to get up anyway, just to see him off.


Samantha Morton's directorial debut The Unloved - screened on Channel 4 in January 2009, and now taking a DVD bow after a theatrical run at the ICA earlier this year - is a haunting, semi-autobiographical account of life in the care system, and the tragedy of one broken home. Events are viewed from the perspective of 11-year-old Lucy (Molly Windsor), a quiet, introverted girl whom we first see being violently abused by her father (Robert Carlyle). Removed by the authorities after a school social worker discovers her physical scars, Lucy is thrown into the fractious, bewildering chaos of a Nottingham care home. A guide of sorts emerges in the form of Lauren (Lauren Socha), but though this surrogate big sister is convinced she has all the answers, it's Lucy who spots there's something amiss about Lauren's relationship with one of the carers.

We'd perhaps expect an intuitive intelligence such as Morton to be good with actors, and in this, she's chosen her recruits from Nottingham's The Television Workshop wisely indeed: she gets a heartbreaking performance from Windsor, who displays much the same spacey fragility as her director in her younger days; a hilariously tough and real-seeming turn from Socha; and a just plain hilarious one from Christopher Russell as the girls' housemate Connor, an irrepressible ginger tyke forever finding some new form of mischief with which to keep himself occupied.

Less expected - and here's where The Unloved reveals itself as more than mere television - is the attention given to the look, and the emotional textures, of the film. Morton's model appears to be the charged, subjective, sometimes magical realism of her Morvern Callar director Lynne Ramsay: the film's sense-memory knows what it is as a young girl to ride the top deck of a double-decker bus, to lie on hallway carpets staring up at the ceiling, to explore one's hometown at dawn, before anybody else has got up, or had the chance to notice someone's gone missing.

The imagery can seem forced or inorganic - Fish Tank's vision of kids slumped in front of My Super Sweet 16 feels more instantly credible than the sight of Lauren and Lucy snuggling up to watch L'Atalante - but there's a wealth of directorial patience and sensitivity to be discovered here; Morton has a particular way with rooms that don't seem empty so much as devoid of love. Compared to the raw, rough-edged, punchily instinctual Precious, with which it came to share listings space back in January, The Unloved's treatment of its abused heroine is altogether considered and poetic, but it's no less compassionate for that: few films have so successfully evoked the places victims of abuse go with their feet and in their heads.

Departures and The Unloved are available on DVD now.

"Sex and the City 2" (The Scotsman 28/05/10)

Sex and the City 2 (15) **

Directed by: Michael Patrick King
Starring: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon

And yea, their contractual wrangles and personality clashes having been resolveth, the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse did ride again. With the exception of one xenophobia-enabling fiesta in Mexico, 2008’s debut SATC feature limited its hen-night ghastliness to domestic soil. This sequel engages in a form of Sex tourism, eventually dispatching the girls and their Louis Vuitton cases to Abu Dhabi, where you wouldn’t be surprised if their sniggering permissiveness (here’s Samantha, slurping suggestively upon a hookah pipe!) leads to calls for a jihad on certain fashion houses, or thoughts Sharia law might have got some things right all along.

Segueing from heavenly civil-partnership rites - where cameos from Liza Minnelli and Garland impersonator Mario Cantone gild an already somewhat fabulous lily - into Carrie and Charlotte’s domestic hells confirms this franchise as gay- and fabric-friendly, but deeply uncomfortable around anything conventionally straight: we’re invited to boo Chris Noth’s Mr. Big for wanting to snuggle up and watch old movies in bed. As shrill, culture-trashing paeans to globalisation go, Carrie 2 enervates less than its predecessor, but widescreen has killed any real or sustainable intimacy between these characters: Parker’s heroine appears more self-involved than ever beneath those expensively ludicrous rags.

From the archives: "Sex and the City"

[In what I hesitate to describe as anticipation of the sequel, which opens next Friday.]

I should, before anything else, register a conflict of (dis)interest: I saw about seven minutes of the pilot of the TV Sex and the City before switching off, thus sparing myself six seasons' worth of twitter about handbags, orgasms and penis size. Of all the HBO shows over the past decade that deserved one last, feature-length hurrah to tie up their few remaining loose ends - and you think of Oz, The Sopranos maybe, Deadwood especially - it's dismaying to think we should have ended up with this. Fans of the show should feel free to disregard everything that follows - for no other film this year will pander so wilfully to a pre-existing audience; the experience of watching it is like going over to a friend's house to watch several hours of a SATC boxset - but it struck me as useful, amongst all the puff and PR hype (the film is "a classic", according to Radio One DJ Edith Bowman), to put across an opposing point of view. After all, if four million people watch the show in the UK, that still leaves over fifty million of us who don't.

First of all, I can see why women might be drawn to the movie Sex and the City: aside from its upbeat, unequivocally escapist celebration of a particular lifestyle, the franchise would appear to be founded on female friendships that are almost incredibly forgiving and unbitchy. Each of the four characters can learn something from the other three; they can take turns to lean on one another when shoulders, padded or otherwise, are required. Fans will surely warm to a long sequence at the heart of the film where Carrie is coaxed out of a romantic depression by Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte. (This show of feminine solidarity is only slightly undermined by the persistent rumours coming off set, and the four actresses' apparent unwillingness to be photographed together when they're not being paid for it.)

It concerns me not whether the show's women are drag queens, gay men in disguise, as has been mooted (it's a franchise that strives to make a virtue out of the business of people in closets), nor does it bother me unduly that the male characters (even the Mister Rights) are, to a man, impossibly dull and colourless. At the start of the film, Carrie is engaged to a construction worker, by the looks of things, and Samantha engaged with a vapid blonde stripper. (There are your closeted gay characters, right there: the straight men in Sex and the City could, with a little more spark about them, form their own Village People tribute act.)

The problem is this: none of it is remotely cinematic. The "film", such as it is, is shot like a TV show, written like a TV show (sketches, linked mainly by Carrie's voiceover; a liability in a two-hour-plus work, particularly one where everything stops an hour and forty-five minutes in so the characters can sit down and watch a fashion show), and performed like a TV show. Of course, if you're a fan of that TV show, again, none of this will matter, but I was reminded of Homer's comment in last year's The Simpsons Movie, which at least tried to fill the bigger screen with its camera perspectives and jokes of scale: "I can't believe there are suckers who would pay to see this when they can see it for free at home."

Even the costumes that were reportedly such a part of the show's appeal aren't made noticeably more flamboyant by the upgrade to the multiplex, though they come with cameos from fashion-world hangers-on, who prove in the main so anonymous they have to shamble on clasping their own monogrammed luggage in the hope of being recognised. (Thank you, "Andre Leon Talley", whoever the heck you are.) This is a curious oversight, as almost every other scene ends with somebody buying something: a dress, an engagement ring, an apartment. The film has a credit card statement where its heart should be; its moral, ultimately, is that money can't buy you love, but it can get you a whole lot else besides.

The bigger question here is whether we need this sort of thing during the moment of the deepest recession the West has faced for several decades, at a time when the majority of viewers are finding it increasingly hard to find two brass farthings (current market value: half a farthing each) to rub together. (The film is comical in its avoidance of consumer realities: we see Carrie has a copy of New York magazine, its headline "When Will The Real Estate Bubble Burst?", on her coffee table, but it's to Vogue, and an article on herself, she reaches for.) The romantic comedy has always been aspirational as a genre, but Sex and the City goes beyond that to become genuinely, alarmingly grasping and avaricious: it promotes a lifestyle only a Hollywood megastar like Sarah Jessica Parker could afford, encourages Christian Lacroix spending on a Primark budget.

I tried to find something to like about the film, some supporting turn, some moment in the dialogue, anything either funny or sexy, but I came up with nothing. In this money-grubbing context, a clip of Judy Garland singing "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis just looks like cross-promotion for the Time-Warner back catalogue, while Charlotte's cute-as-a-button, adopted Asian daughter appeared to be being touted, somewhat less than adorably, as this season's must-have accessory for uptown girls, a Third World brooch, as previously seen on the lapels of Madonna and Angelina Jolie.

It's on dodgy ground indeed whenever it leaves the boutiques behind. To deal with the franchise's whiteness, Carrie hires as her secretary Jennifer Hudson, really cashing in on her Dreamgirls cachet by getting to take dictation for an hour or so; she gets a handbag for her troubles, which may or may not be a step up from forty acres and a mule. And we're supposed to find it charming when all Charlotte's fears about the filthiness of Mexico are proved right with a loud case of the squits. Ah, poo gags and throwaway racism: together at last. This, then, is what a million-dollar movie budget gets you these days: gaudy, tasteless, glossily pernicious, pro-Botox, pro-waxing propaganda, a projection of women at their most synthetic. I just don't buy it.


Mike McCahill
May 28, 2008.


* Read the best printed review of the film yet - with the single greatest headline of any review this year, if not this decade - here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/06/09/080609crci_cinema_lane