On the opposite site of the race/class representation spectrum, I had odd experience of witnessing the Sex movie and The Wire series finale within 24 hours of each other (which made me briefly imagine a David Simon-Ed Burns written Sex and the City movie and how awesome that could be). Equally thesis-worthy, but in an entirely different way, I’m not going to get into the mass amount of possible commentary that comes with the end of a show this intricate. But as I look for a new series to fill the big void left in my lay-on-the-couch time, I thought I’d at least pay my respects to its two-months late end from my own life (dont watch the clip if you haven’t seen the show, and go watch the show if that’s the case).
Sex and the City, as I had somewhat figured, opened with an astounding $26 million Friday, a higher opening day than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and double what most industry folk were expecting. On its way to a $65 million weekend, it will likely break a bunch of records: highest opening for a romantic comedy, for a film with female leads, etc, etc.
There is going to a ton of press about what these numbers mean (though its pretty simple: women are 50% of the population, and get 5% of the movies; Sex shows its time for that to change), and the movie itself will supplant itself into history as the first ever female-driven megablockbuster (other than maybe My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but that happened in a very different way).
Like seemingly every other urban gay or gal, I saw the film this weekend, and have wrestled with an instant love/hate relationship with it (don’t read on past the first paragraph if you haven’t seen it and want to).
On a side note, the viewing experience itself was really interesting. I went to a Thursday night show at the “Scotiamount” downtown Montreal. All 7 screenings were sold out, and women were dressed up in full fledged gowns. Cheers were rampant throughout the film, and the aura of excitement from the second you sat in the theatre was, honestly, really fun. But there’s obviously a dark side to all this spectacle (for a take on that much funnier than I could ever muster: read this), and it was just as much depressing as it was exciting to see people take something so seriously. Not that they themselves are to blame. If Sex and the City: The Movie wasn’t such a rare breed of event-movie, maybe it wouldn’t bring out such desperation.
As a (conflicted) fan of the show (I don’t know if it started now I’d be as in to it as I was back in 1999), for the most part I resorted to a nostalgic self during the actual viewing of the film, pretending I was the significantly less educated and cynical person that first fell in love with the show almost 10 years ago, just so I could get past a thesis-worth of issues. And, granted, this wasn’t hard. The film is at times very funny, genuinely moving, and even occasionally shines light on often-ignored (and in terms of big summer movies, entirely ignored) themes like the fear of aging, the complications of monogamy, and the dark side of human emotion.
But there were times during the film I couldn’t help but snicker, roll my eyes, and resist vomiting. The cheesy dialogue was in full force, especially in Carrie’s “reading” of some parts of her “books” that she’s now making a very good living of writing. At the very end she reads a section of unfinished new book that resulted from the events of the film, and I couldn’t help but wonder: You’d think that Michael Patrick King would be capable, as a at times very good writer, of making Carrie seem like she herself is capable of being a good writer. Her “insight” into “love” sounds like it comes from a high school writing workshop.
And sometimes, so does King’s (see the scene when Carrie figures out the password to her hidden e-mails). What’s worse is King couldn’t manage to come up with anything new here. The plot of the film is basically a rehash of the final season of the show, done bigger and (sometimes) done better. Breaking up Carrie and Miranda from Big and Steve (which we’ve already seen at least three times each) just to give the plot something to work with is as desperate as the girls wearing gowns to the screenings.
But at least there are some human-esque qualities to the as-seen-on-TV stories, and sometimes we get glimpses into the film Sex could have been. Cynthia Nixon, even with her tired storyline, rises above her work on the series and continues to push Miranda into her unique place among the 4 women: the only character with real problems. Even Samantha, who I felt was placed a few steps away from caricature and a few toward character, is given a story that - unlike the end of the series which awkwardly ended her story as being in a stable relationship - explores the idea that monogamy isn’t for anyone, and Kim Cattrall does a really good job making this work on levels of both funny and affecting. Too bad Kristin Davis does the opposite, making Charlotte MORE of a caricature than she’d ever been and causing me to unintentionally laugh out loud at her shrill line readings on more than one occasion (her shitting herself in Mexico, though, was the funniest part of the film).
Carrie, always my least favourite character thanks to her remarkable self-absorption (evident here again when she consistently cuts off her friends’ discussion of their problems by making a pun that transitions the conversation to her own drama), has a few moments of realism. One really good scene shows her looking to the mirror, sans makeup and voiceover, examining a face that very much looks her age. Its a minute of insight into the challenges that women face in a materialistic world based so much on how people look. But unfortunately, Sex champions this world way more than it criticizes it, so any insight it might give into the problems these ladies have is ruined by the fact that this film, and the series it came from, played a role in making them (which the film even winks to on a few occasions: 4 20something girls are shown walking in a gang at the beginning in an homage to many Sex-posers, and a scene toward the end shows them all drinking Cosmos and acknowledging they stopped drinking them because “everyone else started.”)
“Labels and love” are the reasons Carrie gives to women who move to New York City, and she exemplifies its still the reason she stays there by shrieking at the sight of designer gowns, fancy bags, and, of course, shoes. Her character feels even more shallow that she did on the series. She’s also even more well-off this time around (thanks to her books or thanks to her Big sugar daddy?) and this brings the film to a whole new level of depicting social hierarchies. This is most offensively displayed in the relationship she has with Jennifer Hudson’s “we have a black person on Sex and the City!” character. Hudson’s Louise is Carrie’s assistant, and correct me if I’m looking to far into things, but their relationship plays a bit like Driving Miss Bradshaw. Louise is at Carrie’s beckon call, unpacking her boxes, running her errands, returning her e-mails. And Louise, supposedly there to represent the differences in age-privileges among women, stands out as a representation of class and race differences. She can’t even buy a bag, she “rents” them, and freaks out like a starved child when Carrie, rich, white woman that she is, buys Louise a real-life Gucci (I could have the brand wrong) bag for all her hard work she did making sure rich, white Carrie has an organized apartment and her e-mails returned. There’s another scene that furthers these themes that outright shocked me. Miranda and her son are looking for an apartment in Chinatown and are surrounded by Asian people. Miranda sees a white man and her baby walk by and says to Brady (word for word, seriously) “follow the white man with the baby, he’ll know where to go”. And you wonder how subtle racism is bred among children?
These outstanding offenses aside, I do think that Sex is susceptible to more criticisms than the average movie. Its issues are all over the pop cultural map, but with Sex, the fact that, as its box office shows, it has such an intense following and extreme influence, people take more notice. If you take it simply as a summer popcorn film, its a very fun time. But Sex and the City, mammoth of estrogen-fueled following that it has, failed because it didn’t take a very rare opportunity to be a little more critical of the world it examines and influences. I left the theatre thinking of my 15 year old sister, who went to see it with a big gang of future Carrie wannabes, and thought, THIS, Juno and Tina Fey aside, is the only role models Hollywood can muster up for them? Even if I look critically at myself, who watched the show from the ages of 14-20, I see my own vain, shallow, materialistic qualities and how Sex played a role in pushing them along. But Sex certainly didn’t create them. Its just a big fish in a shallow ocean. And one might even argue that the materialism it displays is sadly a somewhat realistic portrayal of the rich, white world its portraying.
(for a different take, check out the always insightful - seriously - Reel Geezers:
Because of the unexpected excitement I’m feeling re: this weekend’s impending Sex and the City movie (and the fact that I am one episode away from finishing The Wire, which I’m saving for a Wire themed Friday night gathering, where were all drinking raw eggs in beer), I couldn’t help but wonder: How much has television shaped my existence? Mostly because I need a break from editing ye ol’ thesis, I did the following as a fun exercise in television nostalgia and reflection: Ranking series in terms of how influential they were at the time, or even now. Don’t take it too seriously, and maybe just watch the clips, after the jump.
1. Roseanne
Even if I don’t ignore the last two seasons of this underrated, at times brilliant series, the personal influence of Roseanne is too undeniable to not place at the top. And I suppose I could even say that the mediocre season eight and painfully horrific season nine taught me to understand how to cope with being disappointed by someone or something.
I started watching Roseanne in 1990, in its third season. I’ve since rewatched the entire series dozens of times on reruns and then on DVD, and am not quite sure whether I actually got it way back then. Maybe I was just trying to make my mother think I understood something she enjoyed so much and laughed along with the jokes even when I didn’t know what they meant. But I do remember just simply enjoying watching Roseanne, and the rest of the cast, and feeling at ease watching people that probably resembled my own family more than anything else on television at the time. I also know that by its fourth season, I can vividly remember that it wasn’t so much about whether I understood Roseanne but about how Roseanne was making me understand other things. It let me to ask questions, and to see outside the box that most of other popular culture expressed. And when you’re 7, 8 years old, that’s a powerful, and imperative, thing.
I can say with complete honesty that Roseanne taught me partially, or in some cases entirely, about homosexuality, masturbation, birth control, erections, what it means to be working class, what it means to be a woman and probably in the sense that holds the most to this day, what it means to be a sibling. From a creative perspective, it also showed me what it means to blend comedy and drama in a manner as close to perfect as it can get. And thats how Roseanne was so powerful. It wasn’t just that it talked about all these things no one else talked about, but it was how it talked about it: Poignantly, unforgivingly, and with a lot of well-written jokes. Specifically from 1991-1994, Roseanne churned out three seasons (4-6) that I promise you if you (re)watch them, you’ll at least reasonably agree with me.
Best Character: Darlene Conner Best Season: Five Best Episodes: “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home”, “It’s a Boy”, “A Stash From The Past”
2. Six Feet Under
The scope of its effects are less, because by the time I watched it I was well aware of what it was depicting, but in a sense, Six Feet Under and Roseanne have a lot in common in terms of what I got out of them. Like Roseanne, Six Feet Under was one of the realest things I’d ever seen on television, as it depicted a family, or maybe just people, that I related to intensely. Though thankfully my father is still alive, the show mirrors the number, sexes, age range and, in some cases, personalities of my family to a near tee (as did, to a lesser extent, Roseanne if you switch the sexes of all the children). It also came at a climax of my own immediate family’s early 2000s crisis, and I can remember at one point the only thing we all did together was watch 6FU on Sunday nights, with awkward tension building as it referenced themes in our own lives that were slowly unfolding into the open. As depressing as it is to reflect on, Six Feet Under was probably a very therapeutic experience for all of us.
I watched the final season of Six Feet Under in three days. By that point, I had moved out of my parents house, and was sick of waiting for the one-week Canadian delay in episodes. My third year undergrad roommate Shaun and I became obsessed. We rewatched the entire show together leading up to the fifth season, chain smoking away while he drank his iced tea and me my diet coke. When it finally came to the last episode, I can still remember the two of us, huddled under a blanket on this falling apart hand me down coach with his laptop on the coffee table. My other roommates ran into the room to see if we were okay because we were both crying so loud during the final sequence (we shushed them rudely despite the fact that they were just being concerned). We watched the episode again the next day, and it was the hardest parting-of-a-television-show I’ve ever felt. As corny as this sounds, letting go of Six Feet Under was simultaneous with letting go of a whole (horrible) chapter of my very young adulthood, and its now hard to even watch an episode because it reminds me so much of stuff I’ve let go of and forgotten.
Best Character: Ruth Fisher and/or Brenda Chenowith Best Season: Two Best Episodes: “A Private Life”, “In The Game”, “Everybody’s Waiting”
3. Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Thankfully, my relationship to Buffy The Vampire Slayer is far less literal than the first two on this list. And much less intense. I just really loved the show, and it introduced me to my interest in mythology-based narratives that would be exemplified in many shows to come (Alias, Lost, both of which I’m not including here simply because Buffy is so much more). I got engulfed in Joss Whedon’s complex world of vampires, demons and their slayer.
On a personal level, I watched the entire series three times over with a wide range of social groups, roommates and significant others, each time creating some initial bonding opportunities. I also underplayed it when I said “really loved” the show, because whatever word I should use to describe that should be enough to suggest I was so vocal in this love that many people associated the show quite predominantly with my interests, even to this day. Buffy wasn’t just a mythology series, it was a metaphor for taking responsibility, finding yourself, and accepting others. Typical themes, yes, but done in such a extremely creative and insightful manner here that its hard not to be drawn in, that is if you could look past the vampire stuff (a pet peeve of mine was when people wrote this show off because of its “silly” content). And considering that the characters on Buffy were the same age as myself as they aged over 7 seasons, maybe I was wrong to suggest my relation to it was less so that the others, vampires and all.
Best Character: Willow Rosenberg Best Season: Five Best Episodes: “Becoming”, “The Body”, “Once More, With Feeling”
4. The Wire
The most recent entry to this list is still an episode away from being complete (for me), as I noted. But The Wire, which I started watching on March 1st, the same day I started writing my thesis, was already well on it way a few weeks into its personal run on my laptop. An unexpected comfort food during a time where a lot of pressure and stress filled pretty much all of my everyday, if this list was based solely on the merit of the shows, I’d have to put this at the top. Basically flawless its execution and ability to blend an interesting narrative with a brilliant analysis of the underrepresented socio-economics of inner-city America, I had delayed watching the show for years.
After three failed attempts at getting past the first episode, for reasons I feel lazy copping to the fact that I thought it seemed boring, but its sort of true, The Wire was pretty much the only television I watched from March to May of this year, with the exception of a stray 30 Rock or South Park. This trend passed over to some of my fellow thesis-writers, and our weekly meetings to discuss academic progress usually ended up playing like a Wire discussion board, complete with constant catch phrase use (“Shheeeeeeeeet”) that must have severely annoyed the half of us out of the loop (though they never expressed this, bless them).
The content and themes have nothing to do with my thesis or my personal life or pretty much anything in my universe, but I guess you could say its brilliance was so inspiring that I thought, “what’s a 125 page thesis on gay film distribution compared to what these people have created?”
Best Character: Omar Little Best Season: Four Best Episodes: “Port in a Storm”, “Middle Ground”, “Late Editions”
5. Queer As Folk (UK)
I can still remember the promos when they started running on Canada’s Showtime network sometime in 1999. I knew it was coming, and I sorta knew what it was bringing. But that 30 second ad, to the tune of a song called “I Feel Good Things For You” by an artist whose name escapes me and I’m too lazy to look up, left my jaw wide-open. Naked, hot boys! An actual narrative surrounding them featuring actual writers! There was only one VCR in our house, and I planned for weeks a way to ensure that my parents would not be using it and that I could tape it while watching something else I had to pretend to be so enthusiastic about that I needed to watch it on “the big family TV”. I settled on CBS’ Monday Night comedies because there wasn’t anything else, and I remember my father watched it with me, and it was very incredibly nerve-racking. I kept checking the tape and looking all shifty. But either way, it was a success. And became a weekly ritual, and I wondered if the fact that my parents saw me obsessively watch Murphy Brown every week when I was 15 was any less gay than if I had explicitly watch QAF.
Either way, I must have watched all of the 10 episodes a dozen times over that fall, when only one soul knew that I shared some commonalities with the people on the show. I think it terrified me as much as it entertained and, let’s face it, tantalized me (most notably Aiden Gillen as Stuart Alan Jones, who recently popped back into my head when Gillen popped into the world of The Wire). But it definitely introduced me to a whole new arena of gay, the stuff Ellen and Roseanne certainly didn’t talk about. And it was also a fantastic show. Unlike the American remake (which I despised throughout its run in pretentious protest of people’s ignorance toward the far superior original), it was so well-written and acted, and didn’t push itself into campville by overindulging in its soap-opera elements.
Best Character: Stuart Alan Jones Best Season/Episode: N/A (They all blur into one for me)
6. Sex and the City
7. My So-Called Life
8. Arrested Development
9. Gilmore Girls
10. The Simpsons/Seinfeld
So I’m shifting all these into one blurb, and not just because I’m lazy, but because a) it would get a little repetitive, one only has so many “themes” that can relate to television and b) it would get a lot self-indulgent, if it hasn’t already. But, briefly, and in order: Sex and the City was to me as it was for any 18 year old homo who lived in a dorm in 2002, a shallow obsession that bonded me with half the girls on my floor (I had all the DVDs); My So-Called Life could have been at the top of this list if it had stayed on a bit longer, and remains the most stunning portrayal of teenagehood ever created. Ive bought the complete series TWICE on DVD (they made a better set), and have seen each episode about 20 times, AND bought a “Save MSCL” t-shirt when I was 11 years old; Arrested Development will always remind me of undergrad, and my 3 male roommates from when I lived in a dorm. I can recite the episodes and would argue its the fastest, funniest half hour series in the past ten years, and I swear it broke some serious ice between 4 very different people living in a very small space; I watched Gilmore Girls in its entirety one summer when I was basically living on a strangers couch in Halifax. Lorelai and Rory were my best friends that summer, and it was also a unique experiment in that I watched all seven seasons in reverse order; Seinfeld and The Simpsons didn’t really do anything specifically, but Ive seen every episode so many fucking times I’m sure its deeply engrained in my brain, and together they are probably the two most iconic television series of my childhood and teenage years.
Also of note? Will & Grace, for obvious reasons, but honestly by the time this came around, Roseanne and the UK Queer as Folk had it covered and I found it sort of annoying; The Larry Sanders Show, which I watched over three weeks so really did nothing but put me in an isolated den of laughter during a really horribly cold January, Absolutely Fabulous, for making me take up drinking, Friends, which should have been higher on this list if I was being totally truthful of a series’ influence.. I got beat up in grade six for wearing Friends t-shirts, that I bought on ebay nonetheless in its earliest formation, on a way too regular basis.
Four weekends into summer, and things have not ended up the way they were planned. Iron Man was an even bigger hit than expected, showing the rare blockbuster staying power; Speed Racer was an even bigger failure than expected, unlikely to gross more than $40 million and even busting overseas; and while Indiana Jones is doing the big business everyone thought it would, $200 million budgeted Narnia just suffered a massive second week drop off from a first weekend that was already well below expectations (it probably will end up with about half the first film’s gross, bad news since the 3rd film is already in production, but good news if you like the idea of Walden Media owner and Christian fundamentalist Philip Anschutz crying in his reclusive mansion somewhere).
For me, though, it is this upcoming weekend that I’m most curious about.
As far as pundits go, Sex and the City is worth $70 million on Hollywood Stock Exchange, which means they predict it will make $70 in its first four weeks. Most opening weekend predictions are in the $25-40 range. I think they are seriously underestimating the mammoth this movie really is. Women (and gays) do get summer movies, but they are always “sleepers” that have “legs” and end up “surprising” everyone (Hairspray, The Devil Wears Prada...). But Sex and the City is an event movie. Arguably, its the first gay/gal summer event movie, well, ever. Never have I seen this sort of advance response to a film from those neglected demographics. 50% of every woman or gay man I know, if not more, are going opening weekend, many with cocktail events planned around it. Some are going to two different ones. Even women as young as my 15 year old sister and her friends are very excited, given that DVDs and TBS reruns have introduced them to the show in the past few years (and here in Canada they don’t even need a parent to get into it, though in the US maybe they’ll find ways via older sisters or mothers who also want to see it). Its already sold out Thursday previews and most Friday showings in all the downtown Montreal theatres (except a few French dubbed showings (“Sex A New York”), which are still available).
Obviously I’m no data research/tracking company and my statistics are basic observations from one person. But many other people I’ve talked to in varied social realms and geographic regions are reporting the same responses. People who haven’t gone to the movies in a year (or years) will make it out for this. Straight men and boys get 6 of these events a year, and it creates a bit of a fatigue. Even Iron Man, the juggernaut that it was, wasn’t something everyone was talking about for weeks and weeks before it opened. Sex and the City is an event movie for people starved of having one. And unlike Prada, its going to be a frontloaded event. I’d guess more than 1/3 of Sex‘s overall grosses will come opening weekend. That number? Maybe I’m crazy, but I’m guessing at least $50 million. And I feel like I’m being conservative.
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