Sex and the City 2

Some weeks I check the paper for the movies playing at the shitbox Olde Town Theater and ask myself why I chose reviews as a hobby. Why the fuck didn't I go with my first idea, collecting necrophilia daguerreotypes. On a weekend like this, it would be a hell of a lot more rewarding flipping through brittle prints of violated corpses than sitting through the latest Hollywood shitpack.

Once you pick a hobby, though, you gotta commit. Sometimes, you just suck it up, go to the theater and see a shitty movie. It would be cheating to stay home and just make shit up, even if there's a cold case of Schlitz your wife bought as a bribe to get you to stop crank-calling her at work.

So, I did. I rode my bike to Olde Town and bought myself a ticket for Just Wright because I was too embarrassed to tell the ticket taker I really was seeing Sex and the City 2. I'm glad I did. What a delightful and charming movie!

I was never a fan of the original Sex and the City TV series for a few reasons. First, it was on HBO, which is for rich assholes. Second, it didn't have nudity. Third, it was fucking awful. It featured a gaggle of screeching hens that were pretty in a way non-threatening to ugly women. You know, the kind that makes girls go, "She's so pretty!" and guys go, "Bleh." The girls on the show bought a lot of expensive crap, pined after even more, and talked about shoes. They fretted over their shallow love lives and always ended up with the sort of wooly-sweater, emasculated men who like going to Broadway matinees. Despite the title, there was very little sex. When there was, it either got talked about until it was no longer arousing, or it served as the basis for some shitty feel-good message.

I realized Sex and the City 2 would be nothing like the TV show in the opening moments when red-haired bonehag Cynthia Nixon bares her rat teeth at the horsefaced Sarah Jessica Parker and snarls , "Hey, cuntface, how's your nasty loose gash?" Parker responds, "Crawlin' with crabs, bitch. Wanna see?" They are soon joined by the leathery folds of octogenarian skin known as Kim Cattrall and the hairy wretch Kristin Davis. These are the same four women who have been doing this Sex nonsense for like twenty years.

In Sex and the City 2, it was refreshing to see four old women recognize and understand that they are too old and hideous to pretend to still be attractive young women. One look at their weathered faces and receding gumlines and I knew they didn't even bother with makeup this time around. Their faces have more topography than Afghanistan. It's brave for them to be on the big screen, telling the world, "We're barely human anymore. Suck it." The ladies are also more bitter than a quart of chemo patient bile. After years of phony friendships and feigned compassion, they finally unleash their barely contained hatred.

Sex and the City 2 documents the power of seething resentment. This is what happens when you live superficially, pushing all the ugliness down below the shiny surface. I haven't seen this much hairpulling since Bessy Kurtz puked on Tiffany Hoover at my sophomore year spring formal. Parker rips chunks of crusty blond out of Cattrall while Nixon makes Davis' scalp bleed. Cattrall bites into and takes a slab out of Nixon's eyebrow, spits it aside and growls, "Tastes like skank." To which Nixon replies, "You should know since you lick your own pussy, whore!" Parker chimes in at that point, "That's why I got a dog."

The movie has more rancid cussing than a year's worth of my reviews, but special attention is paid to one word. Cunt is spat out like chaw at a cowboy bar. One of the most illuminating exchanges in a script full of quips was this: "You're a cunt!" "No, you're a cunt!" "We're all cunts." "Maybe so, but you're the cuntiest cunt of all, cunt." Oscar Wilde only wishes he wrote that. Each time these four women say the C-word they do it with more spit and fury than the last. By the end, Parker, Cattrall, Nixon and Davis glisten and drip.

The plot, which feels more like an excuse for the women to gouge at each other than anything important, is about the women being whisked away from their subterranean lair in New York City with the promise of an "all-expenses-paid" trip to Dubai. It allows them to be fish out of water for a change. As with all of these "free trip" scams, the trip isn't what it seems. Rather than being transported first class, the girls are sent in the holding pen of a slow tanker where they are forced to wallow in the shit of livestock. I'm not going to spoil the movie for the fans, so I will only say two of the girls fuck a goat. I won't reveal which, or which one loses an eye in a catfight over that same animal. It was fun to watch, though. My favorite boat scene here was when, in desperation, the girls catch and eat rats to stay alive. Nothing makes me happier than watching these four women on all fours, filthy and tired, grasping for rodents in the hay.

Parker, et al are still hopeful that a luxurious hotel awaits them with warm showers to wash off the urine they soaked themselves in, only some intentional. Davis overhears the ship's crew, however, and learns the girls aren't headed for a four-star resort, but instead to be sold into slavery. At first the girls are horrified. Cattrall, however, convinces them that it will be sexual slavery and, that, for the first time in ages, men will want them. They fantasize that the slaveowners have a thing for droopy, soft-boned white women. Even if they are a blight in Manhattan, that somewhere, some man wants selfish, callow, shit-and-urine-stained women who have aged badly and can't shut the fuck up about themselves. Hey, if people like humping in bunny costumes, why not this?

As it turns out, the businessmen are as horrified by these filthy, shrieking desiccated humans as we have become. Their initial plan was to use them in fields to reap crops and later to beat rugs and punish children by speaking to them. However, after seeing the girls' emaciated bodies and hearing them shriek about shoes like a normal woman would about a child's death, the Middle-easterners choose instead to turn the women over to a charnel house. Any animals that came in contact with them on the ship must be cremated.

Again, I don't want to spoil the movie for the big Sex and the City fans, but they die. They die gruesome, bloody deaths, one at a time. I won't reveal the details, but will let you know that it's so, so very satisfying. To see them dangling in the wind, lifeless in a barren desert, brought the same thrill as seeing Humphrey Bogart play Phillip Marlowe. It's that just right.

Sex and the City 2 is everything a fan of the show deserves, and more than a non-fan could hope for. Rush out and see this fantastic piece of moviemaking. Four Fingers. The only reason I don't give it five is because I'm not sure why someone didn't kill these women off a long time ago. Boy, am I glad I took my duties seriously and went to a theater this week.