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carrie bradshaw
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Sex(ism) and the City
New Yorker Film Critic Anthony Lane Has Female Trouble
The Time Out New York cover portraying the ladies of Sex and the City with duct tape over their maws isn't the only media coverage of the fabulous foursome that has the whiff of sexism about it. Newsweek critic Ramin Setoodeh discusses the near-violent dislike for Sex in the City that many men, particularly male movie critics, have shown. "Movie critics, an overwhelmingly male demographic, gave it such a nasty tongue lashing you would have thought they were talking about an ex-girlfriend," Setoodeh says. And no male critic was nastier than the New Yorker's Anthony Lane. Best Week Ever calls the caricature seen above left (which accompanied Lane's review) "almost masochistic in its grotesqueness." Setoodeh at Newsweek points out Lane's problematic phrasing when he describes Carrie and the girls as "hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring." But what galled me was Lane's description of Kim Cattrall's body, and it reminded me of his unfortunate criticism of Tina Fey's figure in his review of Baby Mama. More »
liveblogs
Sex And The City, The Movie: The Insanity Begins In Earnest
In the weeks (and months) leading up to today — the theatrical release of the Sex and the City movie — everyone has been weighing in on what the show's real significance is, whether these wealthy, sexed-up characters are even feminists, and whether Carrie Bradshaw was even a friggin' sex writer. (In my opinion, she wasn't. She was more invested in dating dicks, not sucking them.) But finally, all the talk and the analyzing and searching for deeper meaning in this shallow show can stop for about 2.5 hours today, because I'm liveblogging the movie. I'm going to a regular old movie theater in Manhattan (the city is the 5th character, didn't ya know?). I'm dying to see who exactly is going to be there at 10:15 AM…and what kind of shoes they'll be wearing. Don't worry. I'll be taking pictures. More »
rooms of their own
Salon Offers A Last, Well-Put Word On A Week Of Women Writers
"We are mired in a repetitious pattern of hate, jealousy and resentment toward those who are plucked by media powers and come to stand — however inefficiently — for the rest of us in the cultural imagination, securing the top spots, the best exposure, the prime media real estate in exchange for opening veins of feminine vulnerability." That's Salon's Rebecca Traister, weighing in on the publishing world's ghettoization and fetishization of the female experience by women writers both real (Emily Gould) and imagined (Carrie Bradshaw). Traister, in a little over 1,400 words, perfectly sums up this writer's inner conflicts over Sex and the City, the nasty, knee-jerk reaction to Emily's NY Times magazine piece, and the aesthetically prejudiced, commercially-limited and critically loathed space occupied by many contemporary female writers. Here's more: More »
living viCarrieously
I Picked The Wrong Week To Watch Every Episode Of Sex And The City
It was one of those cloudless late-spring New York days when the air is just a few degrees cooler than blood-temperature and the smell of blooming trees drowns out that of the garbage and exhaust. In Midtown, the sidewalks were thronged with smiling, sunglassed waddlers offering up their pasty winter faces to the sun. I was late and walking fast, darting out into the gutter to pass slow-moving three-abreast clots of tourists and Orthodox Jews. “Excuse me, sir!” I would have said several times, had I been Carrie Bradshaw. More »
living viCarrieously
36 Straight Hours Of Sex (And The City): The First Two Seasons
It's around 9pm on Tuesday night. I'm midway though the second season of Sex and the City right now. I mean, right now right now, like, as I type this, Big just held up a piece of veal and asked Carrie, "Is this a piece of veal or is this a piece of veal" and then she invited him to have dinner with all her friends for the first time on Saturday night at a hot new restaurant called Denial ("Apparently, everyone in Manhattan wanted to be in Denial." Ha ha.) I'm in kind of a weird headspace. More »
the bushnell administration
The First American Sex & The City Movie Review Revealed At Last!
Yesterday Jessica and I were interviewed on the subject of Carrie Bradshaw; do we like her, is she a narcissist, etc. And the utterances I found coming out of my mouth surprised me. I was, like, defending Carrie Bradshaw, holding that she was a victim of a societal self-absorption addiction that was a natural outgrowth of New York's suspended adolescence, and arguing that Sarah Jessica Parker, in all her suspended adolescent charm, had salvaged from the grim creations of Candace Bushnell — Candace Bushnell being one of those icky dogmatic narcissists who sees only hypocrisy in New Yorkers who claim to have agendas other than fame and shoes and real estate — a sort of heart. In the forgiving glow of distant drunk memory, Sex & The City was a poignant statement about the limitations of all that, a subtle expose of the atrophy that results from the neglect of the basic human need to be needed. "OMG, I'm so kind of exited to see it suddenly!" I told Jess as we walked past a billboard displaying it. So imagine my delight when today, the first ever American review of the movie appears in Anna's RSS feed! More »
spoiler alert
Sex And The City Plot Details Leak; Nobody Dies
Sex and the City premiered in London yesterday and the reviews — and spoilers — are rolling in. So far, the responses to the film are mixed. Fox News loved it, the Times of London gave it two stars out of five, and everyone, including The Sun, thinks that, clocking in at over two hours, the movie is way too long for a romantic comedy. So about those spoilers: Well, contrary to the numerous internet rumors, no one dies. Apart from that, much of the stuff that's been leaked was actually the stuff that we hypothesized from the screen grabs we were able to grab from the trailer.After the jump, a list of details that don't give away too much of the movie. (P.S. No one has divulged the ending yet.) More »
sex and the shitty
Earlier: Toby Young: Sex And The City Depicts An Essentially Pre-Feminist Society
New Sex And The City Clips Leaked
Some new clips from the Sex and the City movie have leaked and — surprise! — Carrie cares way too much about money, material things and what other people think! (But we already knew that.) There aren't any real spoilers here that we didn't already know (Carrie and Big are engaged; they're moving in together; Jennifer Hudson can't act her way out of a Birkin bag), although Samantha is curiously absent from all the scenes. What we do learn from these clips is just how much Carrie makes us cringe — from clits to toes — and how we still can't wait to see this stupid fucking movie.Earlier: Toby Young: Sex And The City Depicts An Essentially Pre-Feminist Society
scary sadshaws
Toby Young: Sex and the City Depicts An "Essentially Pre-Feminist Society"
One of the things that stuck in my craw about the Sarah Jessica Parker profile in New York Mag was when SJP claimed that Carrie didn't care about Big's money. "I really don't think that money was a criteria," Parker told writer Emily Nussbaum. "It never would have occurred to her to take money from a man." British writer and Candace Bushnell buddy argues that Carrie does indeed care about money. In fact, she and the other SatC heroines care so much about money that, Young writes, "once you remove the pixie dust of female camaraderie, contemporary New York emerges as an essentially pre-feminist society in which the courtship rituals are strikingly similar to those depicted in the novels of Jane Austen." More »
"I had to come up with some kind of action, by which I could follow some philosophy about the movie... There had to be a logic behind the way they looked, because those girls are a part of everyone's living room, and they will check it out, detail for detail...The show was very good for fashion. And the designers love to see their clothes on Sarah Jessica, who is a super-model." Oh Patricia Field. The way you continue to insist on there being any reality to Carrie Bradshaw's fashion choices and the sheer importance of it all is really, quite endearing. [LATimes]
bobos in paradise
Sarah Jessica Parker Doesn't Care About Money, Except When She Does
I predict that a lot of people are going to pillory Sarah Jessica Parker for her comments in this week's New York magazine cover story, "Sarah Jessica Parker Would Like a Few Words With Carrie Bradshaw." The crux of the piece is Parker's apparent life of contradictions: she hates things that are "vulgar" and yet she spent years playing a freewheeling sex columnist (albeit one who never took her bra off); she helped usher in a Cosmo-drinking Manolo-clad, expensive-cupcake-eating era in New York, but laments the loss of the gritty, unsanitized Manhattan that existed when she moved here in 1976. Writer Emily Nussbaum paints these contradictions as intrinsic to Parker's charming personality, though I think it will be easy for others to see the internal conflicts as hypocrisy. Thing of it is that Parker is just like every other urban bobo, who partially misses the creative poverty of her youth but mostly likes the arugula at the now-conveniently located Whole Foods. And I don't fault her for it. More »
clips
Sex And The City Cast Were Practically A Parody Of Themselves On Oprah
With countdown to the release of Sex and the City: The Movie officially starting today, the cast appeared on Oprah, in front of a boozed-up, overly excited, Cosmo-swigging audience. It was almost a parody of itself. (As Sarah Jessica Parker walked onstage, one woman, martini glass in hand, was actually seen jumping up and down and mouthing, "Look at her shoes!") So what did we learn? Well, those "dream sequence" stories they were feeding the press while the movie was being shot were all a bunch of bologna. SJP had 81 costume changes. And Cynthia Nixon was "shocked" when she fell in love with her similarly-ginger girlfriend. Clip above, and after the jump, some very gay stills. More »
fashion show
Sex And The City Lingerie: I'm Just Not That Into It
A not-so-shocking prediction: Sex and the City: The Movie is going to be as much (if not more) about shilling expensive shit as it is about sex. In addition to the myriad of product placement opportunities it affords mainstream marketers, the film has inspired a new collection of Cosabella lingerie said to be designed around each one of the HBO series' main characters. Thing is, I see no connection between the creations and the SATC ladies; in fact, of all of them, the "Samantha" collection is the most sophisticated and tasteful of the bunch. After the jump, let's get stupid and play the "which SATC character are you" game with a batch of undergarments! More »
scary sadshaws
What Do Bradshaw, Plath, And De Beauvoir Have In Common? An Addiction To Egotistical Men
There's an article in today's Guardian asking Can a feminist really love Sex and the City? The short answer: yes. A woman's pop cultural affections often have very little to do with her belief system. But the other question implicit in this article would be "Is Carrie Bradshaw a proper feminist icon?" That question is more difficult to answer. One passage, where author Alice Wignall is making the argument against Bradshaw's feminist status, stood out to me: "[The] central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak." In some ways, Carrie's "problematic" love for a terminally egotistical man makes her very similar to a lot of the women in the feminist pantheon, specifically Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, and Rebecca West. More »
the bushnell administration
Maybe It's Time To Stop Hating On America's Scary Sadshaws
When I began conceiving of Jezebel, one of the first "Don'ts" on my list concerned one Julia Allison, sex columnist, media figure and self-promoter extraordinaire. Not only was Julia amply covered by Jezebel's big brother site Gawker, to me, she represented everything that was wrong with young women in the 00's. Called "Scary Sadshaws" by former Gawker editor Emily Gould, these ladies worship at the altar of Manolo Blahnik, regard writer Candace Bushnell as some sort of saint, and, of course, take instruction from a certain HBO series that bore no similarity to how life is lived by the majority of single women. Scary Sadshaws are NYC's version of the stars of Girls Gone Wild, except that Patrick McMullan is their Joe Francis, and they substitute luxury goods for bare breasts. In my mind, they were not only ruining New York, but ruining what it means to be a serious young woman with ambition in the turn-of-the-century America. They were ruining everything for all of us. More »
sux in the city
Sex And The City Really Is Full Of (Expensive) Shit
Question: Is Sex and the City in on the joke? According to WWD, in the upcoming film version of the HBO series, Carrie Bradshaw questions her assistant (played by Jennifer Hudson) about just how she affords a slew of designer accessories on an assistant's salary. [I'd like to see the assistant ask the same thing of Carrie 'I'm a writer in New York' Bradshaw. -Ed.] The assistant's answer? The bag-renting website Bag, Borrow, or Steal. Our answer? Sex and the City is not in on the joke — it's just found another way to land a corporate sponsor! And clearly, striking some strategic branding deals with fashion designers in exchange for costuming credits wasn't good enough. More »
clips
Extended Sex And The City Trailer: Carrie Gets Jilted! (LOL)
A longer version of the Sex and the City trailer has been released, and it's much more "informative" than the last trailer, which was basically just a series of seizure-inducing, rapid-flashing images. In the newer version, we find out Big's full name (John James Preston), that he leaves Carrie at the altar, that Charlotte has a little Asian daughter but then becomes pregnant, and that Steve possibly cheated on Miranda (just one time!). But, like Carrie says, "Life doesn't always turn out to be a fantasy. That's why you need friendships that are real to get you through it all." Uh, I don't know about anyone else, but a closet full of designer shoes bought with a freelance writer's income in NYC is so fantastical that Carrie may as well have a unicorn coming out of her ass. (Actually, knowing Patricia Field, that could very well work its way into the costume design.) Clip above, and after the jump, a breakdown of clues to some other plot points.
More »