From the NYT:
“Sex and the City” and its legion of female fans over the weekend gave Hollywood exactly what it needs to survive an uncertain summer movie season: an unconventional hit.
The romantic comedy, based on HBO’s long-running television series of the same name, unexpectedly overtook the latest “Indiana Jones” movie at the domestic box office, bringing in an estimated $55.7 million since opening with midnight shows on Thursday, according to Warner Brothers., which released the film.
It's very tempting to try to tie the success to the film to a theory of the power of women and the Hillary Clinton campaign and feminism in general. I'm not smart enough to do that. I was smart enough to discount Manahola Dargis' out-of-touch review and see the movie on Saturday with a friend and my daughter. We all loved it. (You can sue me for being the worst, most permissive mother of a twelve-year old girl later). When I read the Dargis review on Friday, I have to admit to being concerned that she may be right to pan the film until I read the last paragraph: (emph mine)
There was something seductive about the bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels. That was a beautiful lie, as the show acknowledged in its gently melancholic return in the wake of Sept. 11. Back in Season 3 Carrie asked, “Are we getting wiser, or just older?” The ideal, of course, is to do both. There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.
Having seen the film, I don't know where she saw the narcissism awash in it since it's very clearly all about rejecting that particular foible of youth, making choices to forgive our partners and friends as we accept the complexity of adult relationships. ("Your forties are about buying the drinks," as Carrie says midway through.) But it was the bit about the Obama button that tipped me to the possible enormity of Ms. Dargis' cluelessness. In case she forgot, the city in question is New York. You don't see a lot of Obama buttons pinned to the blouses of forty-somethings. When I was there recently, I didn't see any pinned to anything, although I was asked by two forty-something female strangers if they could have my Hillary button and was offered a better place in line by a sharp-eyed thirty-something African American man when he saw "Hillary" on jacket collar. Again, I'm not able to spin theories from personal anecdotes and opening weekend box offices but I am smart enough to know that anyone who uses Obama buttons as a measure of Carrie Bradshaw's relevance and appeal just doesn't know what she's writing about and might need to think just a little bit about throwing stones around the glass house of narcissism.
Oh, and since we all know that the Market is Queen and that sex sells, will someone please fuck Maxim?
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