We can all agree that it's hard to look at the Steadman-like illustration (right) accompanying Anthony Lane's review of the Sex and the City movie and not assume that it is, at the very least, an indelicate and possibly hateful attack on the movie and, by extension, the show that inspired it. But what about Lane's review? Is it misogynist? The gals at Jezebel seem to think so; the folks at New York Magazine's Daily Intelligencer are less than convinced.
We're on the fence. Certainly there are plenty of people -- men and women -- who are burning off some long-moldering hatred for the show now that the movie's out. (Hence our discussion of the topic here. BTW, did a serious SatC backlash ever happen? Seems like if it did, we missed it...) But we don't think Lane meant to criticize anything other than the movie's lack-of-comedic focus -- a failure that's been attested to in many other places, and whose existence may, in fact, be confirmed by Emily Nussbaum's comment on Daily Intel that Lane didn't catch the meaning of the scene in question. However, Lane did say some questionable things about Tina Fey's body a few weeks ago -- again, an attack on lack of comedic focus, first and foremost... but second, a little jerkish.
Timothy Noah, on the other hand, with his Hillary Disappointment = Sex and the City Box Office theory? Well, we're guessing that as a pitch, this sounded great; as an actual article, however, it's clueless douchery of the highest order. Like, as in, right from the second sentence.
Does the movie version of Sex and the City owe its success to the failure of Hillary Clinton's campaign?
I haven't seen the movie. That's probably because I'm a man, according to the demographic breakdown of Sex and the City's opening weekend.
Yeah, we're thinking "That's probably because I'm voting Obama" was his first choice there, too.
What's worse: Noah tries to inoculate himself from the shallowness of his own argument.
The connection, I'll grant you, is somewhat glib, but considerably less so than the widely accepted chestnut (disputed persuasively here by Slate's Fred Kaplan) that America embraced the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show because they needed their spirits raised after the Kennedy assassination a few months earlier.
Ummm, no, we're pretty sure you're wiping up in the glibness category here, dude.