Sex and the City 2 (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Michael Patrick King. Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon.
Yes, I watched Sex and the City 2. It was really long. It was a baffling ordeal that cost me most of an evening.
There is nothing I can say about this show's premise that anyone who cares doesn't already know better than me. Sex and the City is about a group of whiny rich women who do things in New York City. Among the things that they do: complain about trivial problems, go to weddings, drink lots of alcohol, giggle at restaurants, ogle men. If you like these things, then you will like Sex and the City... I guess? Maybe you won't. I don't know.
See, I am so far removed from this franchise's target audience that Annie Sullivan wouldn't be able to teach us to communicate. I could complain that the movie has no plot and no tension. I could moan that whatever meaningful discussion it attempts regarding married life, growing older, and raising children is abandoned for 90% of the film in favor of shopping and sightseeing.
I could tell you that it relentlessly pushes a brand of shallow, Barbie-doll feminism that crosses an event horizon of stupidity when a group of Middle Eastern Muslim women tear off their traditional clothing to reveal New York designer outfits beneath. But nobody who likes Sex and the City cares what I think.
And I can hardly judge what I don't understand. Take this, for example: Liza Minnelli has a song and dance number in this movie. Why would anyone in the world want to see Liza Minnelli do anything? I don't know.
Later, there's a joke that draws the biggest laugh in the movie (from the characters). It goes: "There ought to be a law against hiring a nanny that looks like that." Retort: "Yeah, the Jude Law!" What the hell does that even mean? I haven't got the faintest idea! I could spend the rest of my life trying to answer these questions and die frustrated.
The best I can work out is that Sex and the City 2 isn't supposed to be a proper movie. For fans, it's more like a vacation with an old group of friends, which is why at least 3/4 of its running time is comprised of the characters chattering about nothing and taking in the sights of Abu Dhabi.
I can't give this film a score. Like something out of Stanislaw Lem, it's not merely foreign to me; it's unknowable.
Rated R for sides of Kim Cattrall that no one wants to see anymore.
You Don't Know Jack (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Barry Levinson. Starring Al Pacino, John Goodman, Susan Sarandon.
Tasteful and well-made biopic about assisted suicide advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
The film paints Kevorkian (Al Pacino) as a slightly weird but essentially harmless old man - sincere, but bad at human and public relations. Pacino is low-key with a fiery stubbornness that flares up more than once. It's among his best performances.
You Don't Know Jack is obviously on the doctor's side, but it doesn't romanticize his work. The harsh reality of euthanasia is shown in detail, its ugliness overshadowed only by the suffering that it averts. The aftermath of each death is depicted in black & white crime-scene-photograph style: a reminder of what Kevorkian's patients must have looked like to an outsider glancing in.
The film's palette is bleak, but then again, that's kind of a natural consequence of the awful cars and hairstyles of the early '90s.
The less-than-perfect score below is no fault of the filmmakers. Kevorkian's story simply doesn't make for the compelling, emotionally-charged drama that would warrant such a thing. He's no villain, and not much of a hero: just an ordinary man doing a job that someone had to do.
Unrated for depictions of... murder? Suicide? We need a jury on this.
4 out of 5
