Is It Really That Bad?

Writers and critics tend to make, sometimes shameless, use of hyperbole. That's what calling the summer of 2010 the worst summer at the movies ever is. Strangely, I've read, if not exactly that statement, something close to it more often than not. Even many reviews of Inception seem to need to first provide some context by letting readers know that this movie has come out in an awful summer. But what are people basing this on? We need some context for the context. What are you defining as a "bad summer?" Is there another bad summer which we are using for a comparative starting point, or is there a clear definition of what a good summer at the movies needs to look like?

If anything, this summer is no worse than last summer. Actually it may be a little better, and it's not even over yet. Sure, not many of the titles will go down in history, but how many of them actually ever do? The summer is about kicking back, having fun, letting the critical safety net slip a little and just enjoying yourself. Sure, Hollywood is phoning it in this summer but who cares that few of these movies will stand the test of time? The point is, as Pauline Kael once wrote in one of the most important pieces of American film criticism every put on paper, to not consume great art, but to enjoy ourselves.

And enjoy myself I have been. Sure the box office is down on a lot of films and maybe next year Hollywood will have learned their lesson and give us less films edited in blenders on full speed and more big budget entertainments made by competent artists who know how to walk the line between commercial and quality. But on that note, we work with what we have not what we want, and what we have, when you look at the titles, isn't half bad.

Sure there were some big stinkers. Sex and the City 2 is about as bad a movie as I can think of, The A-Team was just about the worst made action movie of the year and Twilight:Eclipse was bad, but who thought it wouldn't be? And even with the latter titles, there were some out there who sincerely enjoyed A-Team and argued that Eclipse was the best of the three movies thus far, whatever that means. Also Marmaduke and Killers crashed and burned and although Shrek 4 raked in the dough, Shrek hasn't been good since the first film. And oh ya, The Last Airbender. 'Nuff said.

And then, there were a lot of good ones. The Losers opened the summer to embarrassing numbers but was still a highly enjoyable action movie with a nice performance from Jason Patrick. Both Get Him to the Greek and The Karate Kid were sequels/remakes with no expectations that delivered on the goods. Iron Man 2 didn't quite work for me but it did for a lot of others and even though I think Toy Story 3 is more minor than many have given it credit for, Pixar still managed to deliver again.

Although some of the more cynical and jaded skipped Knight and Day because it's star once jumped on a couch, it was a genuinely well made, funny action flick and now Salt (review this week) is supposed to be even better, getting a four star review from Roger Ebert. Even kid flicks Despicable Me and Ramona and Beezus with Selena Gomez are getting surprisingly good reviews. Not to mention the smaller charmers that snuck through the cracks like the wonderful basketball romance Just Wright, Cyrus with Jonah Hill and The Kids Are Alright with Julianne Moore. And, of course, Inception, which was praised by critics, loved by audiences and certainly the kind of large scale entertainment that every summer needs.

And look, we still have a whole month to go. August, which used to be the month where studios dumped their leftovers has some very promising titles. Will Farrell will maybe redeem his last two or three bad movies against Mark Whalberg in The Other Guys, guilty pleasure series Step-Up will be hitting 3D, Middle Men about the start of Internet porn looks like a teen sex comedy meets Goodfellas, Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables will hopefully bring back the 80s action movie hero aesthetic and give action movies exactly what they've been missing all these years, and Scott Pilgrim doesn't quite have me sold because Edgar Wright still hasn't proven himself to be a great director but many are foaming at the mouth waiting for this.

There's also Eat Pray Love, a human drama with Julia Roberts, a new Nanna McPhee movie, a new Drew Barrymore romantic comedy with the always charming Justin Long, Takers, an interesting looking heist movie and could The Last Exorcism be the new Paranormal Activity? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Sex and the City 2 (0.5 out of 5)

When the cinema is at it’s best it has the power to create great female characters like the ones of Mike Leigh, Jean-Pierre Junet, Peter Bogdanovich, Ingmar Bergman and so on. Has a man’s camera ever loved a woman more than Fellini’s loved Giulietta Masina? That’s what films about women should strive to do: create strong, interesting, intelligent characters, no different from men. That’s not what Sex and the City 2 does. Instead it spends its time instead creating unlikable, superficial, vapid, stupid, vein women who do nothing more than talk about clothing, sex, what a burden children are and so on for an ungodly two and a half hours. These women, contrary to why some might like them, are not liberated but trapped in a petty, meaningless life in which the only way they can fill the black holes that are their souls is to constantly and shamelessly indulge in only the most superficial of splendours. This isn’t a fairy tale, it’s a cry for help. Socrates would have had a field day with these broads.

Carrie Bradshaw (now Carrie Preston) (Sarah Jessica Parker) is still married to Mr. Big (Chris Noth), except now she’s feeling a little skittish. They’ve moved into a different apartment, one not as fancy, although not without the perk of a full walk-in closest, and he would rather watch TV on the couch then go out to fancy premieres and would rather eat in than fuss about reservations. Carrie doesn’t like this. Oh course she doesn’t, it’s too much like real life; maybe her first ever taste of it. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t know what to do with it.

The film begins with the wedding of two of Carrie’s gay best friends. There’s no reason for this except that 1) it wouldn’t be Sex and the City without some referencing to gay man and 2) Liza Minnelli, playing herself, marries the two. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) helpfully explains that “Whenever there’s this much gay energy in one place Liza just has a way of materializing.” This leads to an extended musical number of Liza doing a full out song-and-dance number to Beyonce’s Single Ladies, which only brings to light the sad realization of how truly far from Scorsese’s New York, New York we are. That writer/director Michael Patrick King let’s Liza do the whole song and rarely cuts from it is an early indication that he is both incompetent and knows that it’s all downhill from there so why not make it last?

So Carrie has a mid-life crisis of sorts, Miranda quits her job because she can’t take the new male boss who also hates her, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) can’t stomach her new baby’s constant crying and is haunted by her braless new nanny as thoughts of Jude Law jump through her head and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) throws back the vitamins (in one mouthful of course) in order to keep her sex drive raring during menopause. Cattrall is constantly victim of the film’s worst lines, which are mostly entandras that pack the subtly of a sledge hammer: when she spots a gorgeous man in Abu Dhabi, she refers to him as Lawrence of my labia. Get it? Ho ho.

So, with everything falling apart around them, the women, through Samantha and her publicist powers, scores a free trip to Abu Dhabi, where they fall off camels, have a gay servant named Abdul (like Paula, get it?), offend the locals with their clevage and so on and so forth. There, Carrie meets a former lover and has a worthless moment with him, leading to a stupid climactic scene that is more petty than cathartic, and Samantha gets arrested while lip wrestling on the beach. Samantha’s antics also lead to a chase through market streets, ending in them being rescued by a group of local women, leading to a scene of such jaw dropping stupidity, ignorance and condescending that it boarders on racism. It's not unlike movies to wave the American flag, but to degrade an entire culture in one foul swoop? Impressive.

I didn’t much like the first Sex and the City film either, but I gave that one an easy ride because it was so clearly not made to appeal to me and was an adaptation of a show that I had not seen. I’ve still never witnessed a moment of the show and this film was not made for me either but now I’ve met these women, have a sense of them and know that I am truely irritated by most of them. That they have been dropped into a film that is long, boring, pointless and lacking in anything that could ever come close to resembling wit or charm doesn’t help. If the first film felt like a bunch of episodes strung together with no overarching narrative drive, this sequel feels like a ship that has desperately run out of steam. I’ve been told, on more than one account that the series was clever and sassy and gave the characters actual dimensions. Maybe it’s true, but Sex and the City 2 is no more than a feature length peepee joke.

And then, as if to fuel the flames, the film makes several throwaway references to the struggling state of the American economy. When the trip to Abu Dhabi comes up, Samantha’s selling point is that they’ve been making bad business deals and suffering so much from the economy that they deserve the trip. Really now? That’s ultimately the philosophy of the entire film: life may suck for you, but it’s still pretty darn good for us. Maybe for the third film the girls can be sent on a trip to China so the Asians can see what their money is being wasted on to keep America afloat.