I remember when I saw Titanic, at the end it’s an overhead shot while she’s floating on the big wooden door, and he’s dying in the cold water next to her, and all I could think was “there is totally room for two people on that raft.” I mean, sure, he’d made one pitiful attempt to get up there, it had tilted, and then he just gave up. WTF?
Anyhow, that’s exactly how I feel about the main plot of the Sex and the City movie. Major spoilers behind the cut.
Okay, so Big has been going out with Carrie for ten years, and is getting married the next day, but doesn’t have phone numbers for her best friends Samantha, Miranda, Charlotte, Stanford, or the wedding planner? Any of whom he could have called and said “I need to talk to Carrie” when she wasn’t answering her cell phone. One hour, multiple calls, trying something different never crossed his mind?
And he didn’t humiliate her. She humiliated herself, by totally overreacting when he finally did reach her and said “I can’t do this.” So she immediately drops the phone and says, “it’s off! get me out of here!” Yeah, he totally could have been talked down from that—she knows it’s the hoopla that’s the problem, not her, she’d already talked him down once, yet she totally freaks out instead of trying to do anything to save it? What bullshit.
There was almost a wonderful and much-needed message in there about not letting the pageantry of a wedding become more important than people, but unfortunately Carrie was able to displace her own guilt for ruining it all onto Miranda’s ill-chosen cry. Like Big, of all people, would pay any attention to the words spewed by a woman who’s just been arguing with her estranged husband who cheated on her.
Add in Jennifer Hudson playing the wise old mammy despite only being twenty, and I didn’t really like Sex and the City. I enjoyed watching it, it was cute, but I didn’t like it.
4 June 2008 at 1:54 pm
I thought the same thing about Carrie’s claims of humiliation and her over-reaction. WTF? At that point, no one knew except the people she trusted most, so why not sit quietly and privately in the car and talk him down from the ledge?
That’s bad plotting that was almost worked out, but not quite. They couldn’t make Big simply not show up, or call from a long way away — that *would* have been humiliating and uncouth and therefore a wrong note entirely (and too melodramatic). So they tried to compromise and yet still had Carrie react as if he had simply failed to show up entirely. It felt like a *draft* script.
And you’re right about Jennifer Hudson. She was merely a function rather than a character — so ridiculously saintly! — and a rather obvious attempt to say, “see, we’re not so white — we have a token black chick now.” Puh-leeze.
4 June 2008 at 4:08 pm
The bigger issue is that all plots are suffering from the abrupt withdrawal of the classic “can’t get in touch with X” device, now that everyone has a cell phone. This is another failed attempt to make it work regardless.