"J'accuse!"
Jaccuse!
  • “J’accuse!”

I did it. It was me. I murdered that fucking thing with my bare hands. Or, at least that’s what Chris Noth says:

If Sex and the City is dead, what killed it? Noth is unequivocal: the blame lays solely at the feet of the critics. He told New York magazine: “The press killed it. Your magazine fucking killed it. New York Magazine. It’s like all the critics got together and said, ‘This franchise must die.'”

But is he right? Possibly. After all, Sex and the City 2 did come in for more of a gleeful savaging than any other film in recent memory. Roger Ebert opened his review with the line: “Some of these people make my skin crawl.” Peter Bradshaw noted that Béla Tarr’s seven and a half hour black and white Hungarian miseryfest Sátántangó “zips past like an episode of Spongebob Squarepants” compared with the United Arab Emirates portion of Sex and the City 2. And let’s not forget the gloriously ferocious bludgeoning the film received at the hands of The Stranger‘s Lindy West, full of lines like: “If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes.”

Good night, friends. My work here is done.

(Via The Guardian.)

Lindy West was born an unremarkable female baby in Seattle, Washington. The former Stranger writer covered movies, movie stars, exclamation points, lady stuff, large frightening fish, and much, much more....

36 replies on “Better Call the Major Case Squad Because I Killed Sex and the City”

  2. Yay! Pissing off the people who made SATCII is its own reward, but your review was a spectacular bonus.

    Noth, Parker, Cattrall, et al. should be staked out over an anthill and covered with honey as far as I’m concerned. And you, Lindy? You’re my hero.

  5. Bonus line from Stuart Heritage: “[…]and the official SATC 2 yoghurt. I can’t think of a single well-received film that’s ever had an official yoghurt.”

  6. You WISH it was Noth who namechecked you instead of just whoever wrote that no-byline summary for one of the Guardian’s blogs. Wait, no byline… could the writer have been….YOU, camouflaging your style to make it seeeeeeem like quoting yourself wasn’t the whole point.

    J’accuse encore, cherie! (Srsly, congrats again.)

  10. Lindy’s praise-worthy word-smithing aside, another factor that led to S&TC’s demise was its utter irrelevance to society when there is a world-wide recession and wars that are now in their 10th year. Self-absorbtion as entertainment is a joke that amuses for only so long. In the meantime Lindy, keep your eyes open, there are still may an egregious franchises out there.

  15. Didn’t they already film the third one at the same time that they filmed the second?

    And, unfortunately for our society and species, SATC II was a modest commercial sucksess. So unless Daddy O slams his riot fist down on the bang button, we’re gettin’ SATC III–whether we like it or not.

  16. I’m stipulating in my will that at my funeral, Lindy West shall deliver a scathing review of my existence, to make sure I am thoroughly dead before interment.

  20. We don’t want to STOP them! Or am I the only one who would rather read a Lindy evisceration of a bad movie than watch a supposedly “good” one? In my dream world, all Hollywood movies would be as bad as SATCII. Maybe the place would go out of business then.

  23. 534 comments on the original review! Do you guys have a Most Commented Hall of Fame or something?! That one’s gotta be up there–eat your heart out, Dan Savage!

  24. Sorry, I’m busy watching that new TV show about that Ordinary Family that goes to the Amazon and gets super powers.

    Including the ability to get the most posts on SLOG, ahead of Dan.

  25. Best watch out Lindy- once the rest of the ‘mos get word that you killed Sex and the City, you’ll have a thousand glittery assassins on your ass!

  26. One more “Thank You Lindy!!” here. Fuck that stupid franchise sideways.

    BTW, Chris Noth is a moron. Go to Rotten Tomatoes sometime and see how many thoroughly panned movies top the box office each week. SATC2 failed because even the dumbasses that comprise the bulk of the moviegoing public didn’t like it.

  33. Much as I (occasionally) enjoyed the original series (even though the characters might as well have been Martians for all the empathy I was able to muster up for them), the movies were terrible, like Cathy cartoon strips made into films. Please tell me there are no actual women who behave like those characters. Please.

  34. You know what really killed the Sex in the City franchise? Having a sometimes-shallow-and-daffy-but-mostly-cool-and-smart woman like Carrie go apeshit over a douchbag like Big.

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