Big Dough, Sad Observation

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Due respect to Variety‘s Anne Thompson and other industry analysts who are seeing yesterday’s Sex and the City numbers as proof that the film, as Thompson put it, is “a big-titted hit,” but SATC is so far only a one-weekend wowser. If it shows legs next weekend and the one after that, great. Well, not so great when you think about it.

Michael Patrick King‘s film is, after all, an insipid thing to sit through — one of the most spiritually appalling successful films of all time — and, as Manohla Dargis and Thelma Adams have written, a capturing (or resuscitation) of a lifestyle attitude that has come and gone.
Right now it’s a huge first-weekend female moviegoer phenomenon — a marketing success extraordinaire based on viewer loyalty for the HBO series plus more inspired marketing. It’s also, arguably, an indication that a certain portion of middle-class American females — pre-teens, teens, 20- and 30-somethings, middle-agers — are, no offense, social dimwits and aesthetically clueless saps with the collective depth of three or four quarters laid on top of each other.
The single biggest negative for the image of African Americans over the last 15 years was their widely reported elation when O.J. Simpson was found not guilty. People read those stories and saw the video clips and said to themselves, “What…?” The SATC phenomenon, I submit, is on a par with this — a cultural snapshot showing everyone in the world how utterly shallow and culturally nowhere mainstream American women have become, for the most part. If, that is, they continue to embrace this film over the next few weeks. One weekend’s worth of enthusiasm doesn’t make it a bona fide hit.

I’m obviously not speaking of women who are educated X-factor urbans, academics, journalists, hipsters, poets, creatives, etc. I mean the average American suburban woman with her fucking credit cards who sees herself as being “in the game” regardless of her age.
The Zelda Fitzgerald-Daisy Buchanan neurosis that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived and wrote about — something that was pretty much confined to the upper classes in the 1920s — has, of course, become ubiquitous today. A nation of Daisy Buchanans….good God! And what do the media mavens say about this? They say “great box-office,” “let’s make more of these,” “Michael Patrick King…the new Phil Alden Robinson!”
Thompson’s “big titted hit” line is a lift, of course, from Paddy Chayefsky‘s Network when Robert Duvall proclaims that The Howard Beale Show is “a big fat, big tittied hit!” (That’s tittied, not titted.)

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Sex Bucks

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At 6:15 pm last night Variety‘s Pamela McLintock projected a $20 million Friday for Sex and the City. But sometime after 11 pm Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason posted a “shocker” report that SATC earned $28.25 million yesterday and is looking at a $70 million gross by Sunday night.
A Friday figure in the neighborhood of $20 or $25 million easily ranks as the biggest opening-day tally for a romantic comedy. As McLintock pointed out, The Devil Wears Prada — the last sizable chick-flick hit — earned $9.4 million on its opening Friday and $27.5 million for that weekend.

Green Pine

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Scallop Avenue in East Hampton — Saturday, 5.31, 8:15 am. A land where high thread counts are never questioned, much less commented upon — a given.

Departing Thoughts

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Getting on on Air France 777 now (1:03 pm), having missed the 10:15 am flight. (Don’t ask.) Before every flight, I cross myself and ask God Almighty not to seat me next to a morbidly obese person. There are at least two whales in line right now, and I’m feeling a very slight apprehension about this. There are thousands of people in Paris who look well-fed or stocky or fat, but I’ve seen no Jabbas. You might expect otherwise in a foodie city like Paris, but nope.
Update: No fatties but Doug Liman is on my plane. He’s returning from a trip to three African countries, at least one or two of which (Rwanda or Uganda or both) proved to be fairly dangerous. He told me was arrested once, and possibly twice. I admire the cojones of anyone willing to risk the worst to order to encounter things unique, surprising, challenging. We talked about the red-clay color of Uganda’s dirt. Liman’s boot laces were untiedcand flopping around as we walked and talked. He was wearing a round-brimmed straw hat.

Give It Up

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I need to be fair and and admit that the career-spanning video on Tom Cruise‘s website is nicely cut. (The Air France terminal I’m typing this on won’t let me load links, but it’s www.tomcruise.com.) Now and then some of it makes you grin in admiration for the guy…truly. The one scene in the entire reel that brought a genuine smile to my face? When Cruise’s Joel Goodson spots Rebecca DeMornay‘s prostitute character in the lobby of a plush Chicago hotel and does that little two-shakes-of-an-index-finger wag as I way of saying “I see you, you see me, we’re both here…tah-tah!”

Lugubriously South

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“There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.” — from Manohla Dargis‘ SATC review in today’s N.Y. Times.

Done Right

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By a standard set many years ago by Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, “the women in Sex and the City are little better than also-rans,” writes the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane, “and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be.


David Hughes’ illustration for Lane’s review; one of Fancis Bacon’s Popes.

√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äú’When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,’ Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (‘I got it’), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. ‘I can build you a better closet,’ he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come.
“The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding.
“The tactic here is basically pornographic — arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach — and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.
“When the wedding hits a bump (look out for Kristin Davis screaming ‘No! No!’ at Chris Noth like a ninth grader auditioning for The Crucible), and the bridegroom veers away, our heroine’s reaction to the split is typical: ‘How am I going to get my clothes?’ What, honey, even the puffball skirt that you wear to the catwalk show — the one that makes you look like a giant inverted mushroom?

Red Burn

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The red-band trailer for the Coen Bros.’ Burn After Reading (Focus Features, 9.12) tells you it’ll almost certainly be — surprise! — a dry, deadpan thing mixed with broad slapstick, and probably hilarious. My favorite aspect, though, is the photography by Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezski, whose legendary work on Children on Men was passed over last year for the Best Cinematography Oscar. A larger version.