Save for the use of the lame adjective "anti-sophisticated," Anthony Lane's New Yorker evisceration of Sex And The City is a schadenfreudian delight. Among the movie's crimes: Carrie whores herself out for a custom closet (women in the audience actually applauded); Carrie is more concerned about losing her access to nice clothes than about the disintegration of her marriage; and, apartment-hunting in a predominately Chinese neighborhood, Miranda, in a charming bit of racism, cries out, "White guy with a baby! Let's follow him." Lane says the film is often "pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach" and suggests the subtitle "The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe." Yes, Lane's takedown is fun, but it's surprising to see the well-perched critic mock Sarah Jessica Parker with horse language reminiscent of, say, Gawker:

In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, [Parker's "Carrie"] 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. Compare the quick-change sequence in Funny Face, with Audrey Hepburn robed in one Givenchy masterpiece after another, and you sense not merely the greater snap in Stanley Donen's direction (with more than a hand from Richard Avedon), and the hotter bloom of the coloring, but the way in which Hepburn herself outglows the frocks, with her smile and her imperious shout-"Take the picture, take the picture!" No thoroughbred was ever just a clotheshorse.



The women in Sex and the City, by that standard, are little better than also-rans, and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.

You know, Anthony, beating the dead horse of the Sex And The City movie is fine because you do it so well, but trotting out insensitive language like this will only saddle you with criticism.

[New Yorker]