We know that some reviews of Sex and the City have been sexist (according to the website Fantasy Moguls "Rotten Tomatoes presents 139 reviews, 69 percent of which were written by men. Only 49 percent of male critics wrote positive reviews while 51 percent panned Sex and the City. Meanwhile, only 14 of the 40 female reviewers were negative about the box office sensation with 65 percent of women giving Carrie Bradshaw and friends the critical "thumbs up.") but this one in the New Yorker takes the cake.
I'm really ok with reviews that focus on whether or not you like the film, but many of these reviews have been about these looks of these women and whether women could and should be sexual objects. Shame on you Anthony Lane!
Here are the most egregiously sexist lines:
To be fair, there are four of them—banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring.
Next, we have Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Everyone has Samantha, or had her at some point; so she would like us to believe, and this is where the film of “Sex and the City” begins to part company with the original.
Now the whiff has become a blast, and Samantha’s efforts to signal her appeal, which might have seemed languorous on the small screen, are blown up here into an embarrassing semaphore: thudding closeups of her slurping through a cocktail straw or swallowing a mouthful of guacamole.
In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, she honors “new friends like Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera and Christian Lacroix, Lanvin and Dior,” and so on; what I object to is not the name-dropping—think of it as a chick response to “American Psycho”—but the montage itself, which is shot in lazy veils of schmaltz.
In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life?
I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness. All the film lacks is a subtitle: “The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.”
But the kicker (which I can't blame on Lane ) is this David Hughes cartoon
I'm disgusted.
