Worst Movie Ever

[Pas]

Is this real, the condoms in the face of men part etc?

If so: epic.

Great review.

[Fernando]

a review of Sex and the City 2 that almost justifies the existence of that abomination.

hahaha. I almost want to see it just to know if everything she wrote is real, but won't, this hilarious review will do.

thanks for posting that, made my day.

[Gold Trumpet]

Very cool this review was posted over here. Something I had to read a few times over to get all of the laughs out.

[©brad]

That review felt so good to read.

[©brad]

And so did this one:

Why the Sex and the City 2 reviews were misogynistic
Women-led films often attract sexist derision. Yet critics rave over male films such as the execrable Hot Tub Time Machine. Why the double standard?
Source: Guardian

I didn't enjoy Sex and the City 2. The script was blunt and repetitive, the characterisation illogical, the set-pieces overlong, the direction sloppy, the tone erratic. The scenes in Abu Dhabi were shallow, baffling and ignorant. Writer/director Michael Patrick King now has to tote this big glittery cake of caca on his CV for ever.

Oddly, though, for a film written by a man, the critics' insults were reserved for women, in a dazzling display of put-downs. Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph sneered at the women for "all getting older" adding that Sarah Jessica Parker "looks like a cross between Wurzel Gummidge and Bride of Chucky", while Miranda "looks badly embalmed". In the Observer, Philip French ridiculed the "bitchy heroines" who enjoy "an orgy of self-pity" and described Carrie as "equine" (horse-like, people).

In the London Evening Standard Andrew O'Hagan seethed like an Olde Worlde pontiff giving himself a hernia over the vile perfidy of Woman. "These girls are so hung up on looking great they've forgotten there are several ways to be ugly." The women are "greedy, faithless, spoiled, patronising . . . morons". Samantha is a "blonde slut" with "the desperate mentality of the School Bike", Miranda is "the ginger one", Charlotte plumbs "the depths of her own venality" and Carrie is stuck in a "wind-tunnel miasma of selfish needs. Yuck." The women behave like "materialistic whores".

So, the critics didn't like it. Neither did I. But they went one further. They used the opportunity to open their mouths and spew out a sexist torrent completely out of proportion to what they were reviewing. The spectacle of a lot of grown women together – particularly ones who are not suffering – apparently fills them, bafflingly, with contempt. The women/actresses/characters/whatever are old, ugly inside and out, bitches, lewd sluts, whores, venal, selfish, haggard, vulgar, self-pitying, neurotic "girls". These are all words from the reviews.

Those I've read by women were equally negative, but contain some basic human respect and don't stoop to insulting women's looks. Times critic Kate Muir wrote, "As subtlety and wit drain away, you feel a sense of loss . . . this sequel is not Sex and the City – it is Menopause in the Desert, and a waste of four great characters."

Given the critical bile on offer, you would think that Sex and the City 2 had been made by a convicted rapist such as Roman Polanski, a famous misogynist such as Lars Von Trier (the plot of all his films: brutalised woman suffers), featured a convicted rapist such as Mike Tyson in The Hangover or depicted women being grateful for hate-filled violent sex before being murdered, such as Michael Winterbottom's acclaimed The Killer Inside Me. Yet none of these films, even when reviewed badly, attracted any of the sizzling contempt reserved for Sex and the City.

It's jaw-dropping. Reviewers do not appear to despise a real rapist such as Polanski, but they do seem to despise four fictional women who are portraying mildly silly lives. Similar treatment was meted out, with hilarious obviousness, to the first Sex and the City film (Anthony Lane in his infamous New Yorker review: the women are "hormonal hobbits") and also to the hugely successful, women-led and, one would have thought, totally inoffensive Mamma Mia.

SATC2 is currently topping the UK box office, above Streetdance 3D, Prince of Persia, Robin Hood, Tooth Fairy, Iron Man 2, Space Chimps 2, The Losers, Bad Lieutenant and Four Lions. The Streetdance boys and girls are buff paragons of unalloyed dance ambition. Space Chimps is a searing portrayal of the effects of astral travel on primate development. The other seven films are all standard ignorant, cliched, macho, brutal, brainless, gung-ho, numb-knuckle, totally male-dominated, exhilarating toss. They feature large clubs of self-involved obsessive stupid men and their multiple male nemeses and cronies and one or two completely outnumbered women in demeaning, underscripted roles. All but one or two blockbuster films are about men – many men, sometimes all men – and are often a thousand times more venal, selfish, avaricious, consumerist, ignorant, aspirational, shallow and one-dimensional than Carrie and co. But there is no critical hate for them and their values – or their faces. That is saved for four women in one film no stupider than anything else Hollywood produces.

Yesterday I watched a comedy that seemed like the boy version of SATC2: Hot Tub Time Machine. Four forty-something guys assess their lives. One plot quirk delivers them back to their 80s youth. And there follows a deluge of overt sexism in script, characterisation, subtext and sight gags. The plot hinges partly around the indignity of a man having double-barrelled his name with his mean, lying wife's. This provokes absolute horror from his friends – being publicly associated with a woman is apparently deeply degrading. He goes back in time, finds his wife when she is nine years old, phones her and verbally abuses her. Back in the present, freshly re-masculinised and single-surnamed after his retro-corrective abuse, his wife is docile because she's been traumatised by a nasty phonecall she got when she was a kid.

The film is one big male attack on women, who are all written as lying, controlling, craven, castrating, brainless bimbo deceivers.

Hot Tub Time Machine is like a thousand other successful films, a sexist piece of trash written, produced and directed by a club of men. The guys' interests are just as small-scale, culturally myopic and selfish as those in SATC2. You'd think the critics would have the same response to these loathsome lads as to the loathsome New York ladies.

Ha! French called Hot Tub Time Machine a "lively comedy . . . an amusing homage to the genre . . . funny, sexy . . . among its pleasures is . . ." yeah, great, thanks, whatever. James White in SFX magazine said it was "disarmingly fresh and very funny". Tom Huddleston in Time Out called it "post-pub perfection". Hey, only if you don't particularly like women. But hey again, maybe I'm just being selfish and mean, just like those old, selfish, ugly, stupid, vulgar whore-bitch-neurotic slut-hags in Selfish in the Slutty.

[Pas]

Haha she's so right. God critics are stupid. It's good that she calls out the pro critics who hate the movie because Carrie looks like a horse or XYZ other character is a slut. That's like saying the Godfather sucks because Michael is an evil guy and Luca Brasi is ugly.

Too bad she called BL brainless, but it's alright. great article.

[Alexandro]

no, that's the usual crap female writer response to the critics when they hate something utterly idiotic like sex and the city 2 and describe the characters just as they are.  she conveniently excludes from her quotes the way critics describe characters in the hangover or the judd appatow films. see what she's doing? quotes the critics on characters's descriptions of the sex and the city movie, excludes their opinion on the film itself, and then quotes them on the other films exclusively on what they thought on the film without quoting what they said about the characters. check it out on the original reviews, most of them are described as morons, sexist idiots.

look, hut tub machine and the hangover, etc., those films are portraying these characters but also openly MOCK their idiotic behavior. Sex and the city the films, are just a CELEBRATION of the idiotic behavior not only of women, but of the world in general. What those critics, quoted right there, are saying, is that the characters and the film's philosophy and pandering are exactly the same thing, there is no irony involved. Sex and city has evolved into a women's magazine. Please, that sex and the city reflects the rotten aspects of our consumer's society better than something like "capitalism, a love story" is not even up for question. It's an ugly picture of humanity in the 21st century right there, including the supposed female supporters who try to invalidate critics accusing them of being misogynists. The fact that it's a stinker of a film is not denied even by her.

[Pas]

those films are portraying these characters but also openly MOCK their idiotic behavior. Sex and the city the films, are just a CELEBRATION of the idiotic behavior not only of women, but of the world in general.

Well, I mean it would be more accurate and useful to accuse to film of that celebration instead of calling Sarah Jessica Parker a horseface.

But I totally agree with you on the point you make.

[cronopio 2]

That Guardian piece made me so angry, I think i've found myself a new internet enemy.
I haven't seen Four Lions, but i'm dead sure it's not "about standard ignorant, cliched, macho, brutal, brainless, gung-ho, numb-knuckle, totally male-dominated, exhilarating toss." Chris Morris is one of the most incisive and intelligent persons working on media in the entire world, so to dismiss the film as casually as that speaks of a profound lack of professional integrity. It might have characters with some of those traits, but it's not about them. That excuse of a writer wrote that boring sentence  because she wants the world to fit in her irrelevant and narrow journalistic point of view. The worst part of her review is that patronizing "I am able to critique with objectivity the reasons why this is not a good movie while the rest of you is just seeing it for what is is" part. At least she didn't talk about how bad the lighting was.

My main problem with her argument is that her idea of misogyny is not the same as mine. In this age, I understand misogyny as lying to a woman just to fuck her.  Or making fun of her weight when you know it's going to hurt her. Texting her "you're worthless 2 me." Hurting a woman for fun is misogynistic. Using the word 'bitch' to insult another human being. It's more or less the acceptance of the idea that the universe has given more power to the male gender, but  it is not necessary to be a man to accept that. (If you need evidence, look at how many female staff writers there are in a show like Mad Men.) Denouncing four female characters who embody some of the most erratic human behavior in contemporary western culture is clearly not misogynistic, it's just one of the rights of criticism in fiction, the ability to be unmerciful and judgmental, like our beloved Gold Trumpet does skillfully in his reviews and commentaries.  Where else are you supposed to do this? It's like people who don't dare to say Medea was out of her fucking mind flat out, so they dance around the idea by saying that she was a victim of her circumstances, blah blah blah. So what this journalist is saying is, the concept of a materialistic whore shouldn't be discussed. You're not allowed to say that Sarah Jessica Parker's face is, by some standards, ugly, in the context of a film that's all about bringing aesthetic values and beauty to the table. She's not defending anything, she's just censoring her peers for being sincere. It's as if a critic started saying other critics are anti-patriotic for calling Glenn Beck's The Overton Window a bad book. It's the same, flawed logic.

I take this topic personally because I know a lot of fucked up girls who really believe that Carrie Bradshaw is the ultimate independent woman, a truly toxic thought, like a dude taking Don Draper, Gordon Gekko, Stringer Bell or Scarface as a role model.

Alexandro also mentioned how she's only quoting out of context from other reviews. She even wrote her own remake of Hot Tub Time Machine to prove a point. That's wrong and it's lazy, and I hate seeing it, specially from women journalists who use their gender to write hard-hitting, heroic journalism, (something you don't see with in the professionalism of people like Rachel Maddow or Lara Logan). That review by Lindy West posted by P was fantastic because she talked about the movie from a perspective where she respected her integrity, femininity, and intelligence . I follow her on twitter since I read that (one of the best reviews I've read in my life) and she's very funny, the kind of person you want to hang around with, because she knows that you're allowed to be cynical about certain issues.

The main reason I hate Sex & the City is because I think it's a show that genuinely confused a lot of young people on their ideas about sexuality, marriage and possessions. The world is still recovering from a colossal economical catastrophe, so to still riff on the idea that good old capitalism has a way of making things right in the end seems disrespectful. I'm no commie, but I expect some sort of sincerity from entertainment, and I think that show and its movies expose a very evil life style.

It's funny because I saw Hot Tub Time Machine  just yesterday and I adored it. It reminded me of the VHS films you died to rent when you were a kid, and you knew you weren't supposed to be watching them, yet  you managed to see it with your friends one saturday night and laugh, followed by some porn on Cinemax. All those good things. And now that I think of it, even that movie has a character dealing with suicide and another who's being cheated by his wife and cries when he's forced to "cheat" on her. I'm not saying it's deep (you'd have to be Bidisha to think that) but those are god damned movie characters. They weren't remotely similar to a person you might meet in real life. This writer, a supposed adult, needs to learn to distinguish between reality and fiction. But she was probably one of those kids that threw themselves from the roof because she thought she could fly like Superman, and her mom threatened to sue DC comics for her daughter's imbecility.

Saying that Sex & The City is like Hot Tube Time Machine is easy, but I'd compare it with something like Mad Men. I enjoy Mad Men, but I've learned to watch for escapism and its design and glamour and all of those idillic fantasies. Everyone in that show is gorgeous. I don't like the idea of having guilty pleasures, but I think I end up lowering my dramatic standards when I watch it, although I like being surprised. It's not a the show I go to if I'm looking for advice on how to live a decent and successful life. I think the 'novelty' of watching a story about a society that's abusive towards women fades soon and you're left with pretty cardboard characters.

What was she defending anyways, when she wrote this rant?

[Pas]

Maybe I don't understand clearly that article but what I got from it is that it's moronic to write a criticism of that movie to say:

Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph sneered at the women for "all getting older" adding that Sarah Jessica Parker "looks like a cross between Wurzel Gummidge and Bride of Chucky", while Miranda "looks badly embalmed". In the Observer, Philip French ridiculed the "bitchy heroines" who enjoy "an orgy of self-pity" and described Carrie as "equine"

That's like saying ''Ugh, nazism was awful... and what's up with Hitler's moustache!''

[©brad]

It's no wonder we have no women on this board.

Denouncing four female characters who embody some of the most erratic human behavior in contemporary western culture is clearly not misogynistic, it's just one of the rights of criticism in fiction, the ability to be unmerciful and judgmental, like our beloved Gold Trumpet does skillfully in his reviews and commentaries.  Where else are you supposed to do this? It's like people who don't dare to say Medea was out of her fucking mind flat out, so they dance around the idea by saying that she was a victim of her circumstances, blah blah blah. So what this journalist is saying is, the concept of a materialistic whore shouldn't be discussed. You're not allowed to say that Sarah Jessica Parker's face is, by some standards, ugly, in the context of a film that's all about bringing aesthetic values and beauty to the table. She's not defending anything, she's just censoring her peers for being sincere. It's as if a critic started saying other critics are anti-patriotic for calling Glenn Beck's The Overton Window a bad book. It's the same, flawed logic.

Uhh no, scolding Sarah Jessica Parker for looking like a horse and calling Glenn Beck's latest nonsensical drivel "a bad book" are absolutely not the same things. I agree with most of what you said, but the point of her rant was the level of vitriol spewed at these women, not even the characters but the actual actresses themselves, was mean-spirited, misogynistic, and uncalled for. No one is denying the movie wasn't awful, tone-deaf, damaging, a waste, etc. But you can make those points without cruelly making fun of 4 actresses who are indeed getting older. I don't see what calling Cynthia Nixon "badly embalmed" does in an overall criticism, besides making the critic look like a total dick.

And fucking Christ, misogyny is not lying to a woman just so you can fuck her. It's just general hatred, disgust, or fear of women and it's rampant, even around here. 

[socketlevel]

And fucking Christ, misogyny is not lying to a woman just so you can fuck her. It's just general hatred, disgust, or fear of women and it's rampant, even around here.  

Well i do have a general hatred, disgust and fear of women in moments. These feelings are different kinds of hatred disgust and fear of men (that i do have as well) but i do not consider myself a misogynist.  I think my point is that both have qualities that are gender based shortcomings. I think within western society, and in turn film, we've come to a point that the male characteristics have been pointed out enough that it's become commonplace to discuss and depict. If i write a deplorable female character, and i make her tragic flaws based on my perception of female shortcomings I'm labeled a misogynist. a woman writer/director doing the same thing about men's character isn't. it's applauded or considered astute.  i just saw "love burns" and Norah ephron made a career outta it.

ironically, it is often said that there are poor female characters in cinema because we don't take them as seriously as we should (meaning men writer/directors), i think the real truth is because we're not allowed to write them as they actually are (3 dimensionally flawed) without being called sexist. the very people holding back good meaty female characters are in my opinion the very people calling out for better portrayals. just because i depict a woman in a bad light doesn't mean I'm not being honest or sexist. and the moment we can do this, will be the moment there will be great flawed female heroes.

i was listening to Oliver stone's commentary for wall street about a year ago and he discussed how he got a lot of flack for his female characters.  there wasn't an outcry from men of the shortcomings of Michael Douglas or charlie sheen, who are obviously flawed themselves.  rather, people got pissed about how he depicted Darryl Hannah. and i loved his reaction on the commentary.  he said something like "hey, these are the women i saw in this world. this is what they wanted from life and how they reacted to men around them."  so as you can see he was pressured to effectively portray women not as they are, but as they 'should be depicted'.  horseshit i say.  

flaws are what make good characters, not you-go-girl attitudes and outsmarting men. sure the way it is now makes women feel good about themselves, but no great character that's influenced me to become a better man was so two dimensionally empowered and always in the right.

[Alexandro]

 

[©brad]

And fucking Christ, misogyny is not lying to a woman just so you can fuck her. It's just general hatred, disgust, or fear of women and it's rampant, even around here.  

Well i do have a general hatred, disgust and fear of women in moments. These feelings are different kinds of hatred disgust and fear of men (that i do have as well) but i do not consider myself a misogynist.  I think my point is that both have qualities that are gender based shortcomings. I think within western society, and in turn film, we've come to a point that the male characteristics have been pointed out enough that it's become commonplace to discuss and depict. If i write a deplorable female character, and i make her tragic flaws based on my perception of female shortcomings I'm labeled a misogynist. a woman writer/director doing the same thing about men's character isn't. it's applauded or considered astute.  i just saw "love burns" and Norah ephron made a career outta it.

ironically, it is often said that there are poor female characters in cinema because we don't take them as seriously as we should (meaning men writer/directors), i think the real truth is because we're not allowed to write them as they actually are (3 dimensionally flawed) without being called sexist. the very people holding back good meaty female characters are in my opinion the very people calling out for better portrayals. just because i depict a woman in a bad light doesn't mean I'm not being honest or sexist. and the moment we can do this, will be the moment there will be great flawed female heroes.

i was listening to Oliver stone's commentary for wall street about a year ago and he discussed how he got a lot of flack for his female characters.  there wasn't an outcry from men of the shortcomings of Michael Douglas or charlie sheen, who are obviously flawed themselves.  rather, people got pissed about how he depicted Darryl Hannah. and i loved his reaction on the commentary.  he said something like "hey, these are the women i saw in this world. this is what they wanted from life and how they reacted to men around them."  so as you can see he was pressured to effectively portray women not as they are, but as they 'should be depicted'.  horseshit i say.  

flaws are what make good characters, not you-go-girl attitudes and outsmarting men. sure the way it is now makes women feel good about themselves, but no great character that's influenced me to become a better man was so two dimensionally empowered and always in the right.

We can all agree that great characters should be both dimensional and flawed. That's an obvious tenant of drama. I don't care what your sex is, you can and should be able to write compelling characters for both sexes. The best writers/filmmakers are able to do this. The mediocre and bad ones aren't, and they should be criticized accordingly. And anyone who is afraid to write a character because of impending attacks from whoever is a total pussy.

Stone got shit for Wall Street because his female characters weren't dimensional in the slightest. Daryl Hannah's character has no arc whatsoever, she remains a self-proclaimed golddigger from beginning to end. Gekko's wife is even more repulsive and one-note. And let's see, there's the hooker who blows Charlie Sheen in the limo, a few bits with happy-go-lucky secretaries, and that's it. I love Stone a ton, but it's a man's universe with him.

[Stefen]

Pedro Almodovar is a dude and he probably writes better for women than anyone else. And he hates women.