Gidget Gormley, "the world's cutest dog," stars in SATC.
In the Answer Man column for Friday, June 13, I write: "Oddly enough, searching the AM's Google Mail account for questions about 'Sex and the City,' I found that all the messages, every single one, dealt only with matters of masturbating female dogs. But surely I was mistaken? Surely with such a popular film there would be messages about something else, especially since it was a popular movie, my review was negative, and my hit-counting software indicated that tens of thousands had read it? Was the only thing they wanted to write me about was the leisure activity of Samantha's pet dog? Surely not. Then I had a brainstorm.
Some weeks ago, to rid the Answer Man of tons of spam, I changed its gMail address. Perhaps there was a glitch, and there would be more broadly-based SATC messages back at the old address. I went back and looked. That account has piled up an inbox of more than 22,000 messages, but only one was about "Sex and the City!" There seemed to be a total disinclination to write me about my review, however widely-read it may have been.
The author of that single message deserves recognition. He is Ian Gallaher of Fullerton, CA, and he writes to me: "In your review of 'Sex and the City,' you wrote, 'But this is probably the exact 'Sex and the City' film that fans of the TV series are lusting for,' and, as a 24-year-old straight male who's seen the entire series (but only after my sister already bought it) I can say the movie was a complete letdown. To the casual observer, the series was inch-deep raunchy girl talk, but if you give the series time, you get to know each character and their intricate personalities and subtextually honest flaws. The television episodes truly are a work of art, if you can peel back the glossy pink wallpaper and take a look at why the walls and foundation of these girls lives are deeply flawed. But alas, the movie was a disappointment. The girls' pasts were apparently wiped away in favor of cookie-cutter representations of their previously rich selves. My only guess is that the producers got ahold of the script and watered it down in order to appeal to everybody, and, in doing so, made it universally unappealing. If you have the opportunity, give the series some time, it is excellent."
I regret, Ian, that I will never have the opportunity. Wild horses could not drag me to the opportunity. SATC is so definitely not my cup of tea that, for me, it is not tea at all, and does not come in a cup. As I made clear in the first sentence of my review, "I am not the person to review this movie." But I found aspects of the movie curious, and one of those aspects was the sight of Samantha's female dog masturbating with great joy and energy in a way that my sadly limited experience had led me to believe was unlikely. I always had male dogs, who went about such matters in a straightforward way. In the Answer Man column you will find how ignorant I was, and I am informed that a great many female dogs masturbate just like male dogs and apparently have no complaints.
Trying to puzzle out this situation, I have concluded: (1) Those who loved SATC or hated my review just abandoned me as a hopeless case, but that (2) people love their pets, and love to talk about them. So those few shining sentences about Baby, Samantha's dog, stood out for them in a sea of hopelessness, and they sprang to their computers, eager to tell me about Tessa, Timoune, and other beloved lady dogs. The lesson, of course, is that sex is important, but our pets are more important, and have a more direct connection to our daily lives than do the sex lives of four fictional women in The City.
I talked to lots of friends who rushed to the various midnight screenings and Cosmopolitan-drink-fests that accompanied the opening of the film, and what I gathered was: (1) Yeah, the movie was okay; (2) it was pretty long; (3) it helped if you've seen the series; (4) the Cosmo is pleasant as a drink, but not as a habit. (The recipe, Wikipedia reports, involves: "vodka, Cointreau or Triple Sec, cranberry juice, and fresh-squeezed lime juice or sweetened lime juice. Informally, it is referred to as a Cosmo." A man named John Caine brought it from the Midwest to San Francisco around 1987, and then faded from the pages of history.)
So I am back where I started. Millions of people watched the series, wanted to see the movie, and have. They are not much moved to defend it or discuss it, at least not on my web site. But their mother-in-law's beloved Tessa is altogether another matter. I recommend a sequel titled, "Tessa and the City."
The question is, what dog would it star? Here at the movie desk we stop at nothing to inform our readers, and so I can tell you that Baby is played by a dog named Gidget Gormley, who has countless web pages in her honor, mostly pink. Search as I did, I found no information about how Gidget was trained to masturbate on demand. but since Gidget is billed as "the world's cutest dog," maybe all it took was a mirror.
I love the all-together lucid construction of this post. It's all out blog anarchy!
I can't comment about Sex and the City, but I can comment about the line I saw at the movie theater with tons of pussy-whipped guys standing next to their bubbly girlfriends. Thank God my girlfriend wouldn't touch that vapid sexual consumerism with a ten foot pole!
I watched a season or two of SATC with my wife. I tuned out when I pictured writer's meetings consisting of two carnival wheels, one containing the four main character's names, the other containing a checklist of sexual situations. The two wheels were spun and... ppppppppddddrrrrrr... ok this week ..... "Miranda"..... has an experience with..... pppppddddddrrrrr... "threesomes!"
It's funny, my sister (who's watched the series for years) loved the film.
Marcia (of the Reel Geezers) makes a good point in that (despite how good or bad this film is) people who look up to this film are looking up to characters who don't do anything with their lives.
I mean, sure it's a commercial production and they're trying to please fans of a television series, but it still seems very shallow and disappointing.
The interesting thing was, I had no desire to see the SATC movie, but I was still reading reviews about it. The only line in your review that got me thinking was the dog line. I've never had dogs, being the cat person that I am, so I, too, wondered how it would work.
So, yes, I'd rather spend my time thinking about dogs' sexual habits than watch an episode of the show, but I'm happy that the fans are (mostly) happy with the film. Everyone's allowed guilty pleasures.
If you listen in on "The Lucky Dog Show" blog radio interview, trainer Mary Gormley explains that she simply re-enforced Gidget's "natural tendancies" with food treats and eventually the Yorkie learned to hump on command.
While I agree with your very astute comments about Iron Man, I heartily disagree with your opinion of this film. I am a most definitely hetero male with three children, an OK fan of the series, and a writer who sees a LOT of movies. I found myself connecting with the characters in this film in ways I hadn't expected--all except the dog--and at some point I realized I was sitting in a theater full of people, male and female, who seemed to be trying not to let anyone see them crying. When is the last time you can remember that happening? Tootsie? Benji? As you have been so fond of saying in the past, I found this movie had a lot of heart. I think we all might be surprised when they start handing out some "popular" awards in a few months!
I just want to mention, that "Sex and the city" was a big hit in Germany, too. I watched some episodes but I never really loved it. Carrie & Co. seemed always kind of stupid in their behavoir.
What I don't like about the movie is the fact, that it was a gigantic product placement machine!
But what's really suprising to me is that the entire "Sex and the City" series was created by a man (Darren Star). Isn't that ironic? A TV world which is loved by millions of women around the world, with characters which many women admire and sometimes identify with, was created - and in case of the movie also written and directed - by a man (Michael Patrick King) :-)
I went to see the film this weekend in Istanbul (apparently those proverbial wild horses are much stronger than I originally thought) - it was a packed house, mostly women, and had one of the least enjoyable experiences of my life. And remember (always remember this fact, please) - I was circumcised when I was ten.
I took issue with many men, who turned their rightful disdain for the franchise in general, and the film in particular, into flat out sexist commentary on women. Nonetheless, it doesn't change the fact that the film is terrible beyond compare. And I never thought I'd say this about a film that features an onanistic canine.
Your conclusion about people and their pets reminded me of a recent interview on CNBC with the CEO of a Medical/Dental/Veterinary supplies manufacturer who stated that sales in the Dental area were the first to drop in recessionary times and that the Veterinary Supplies were the last to fall and first to recover.
I wonder if some of the animosity surrounding the movie has more to do with the milieu than the characters - more trouble with the 'City' than the 'Sex'. What with Manolo Blahniks and Manhattan penthouses, these characters are now no more a peer of, say, the women of Columbus Ohio or St. John's Newfoundland than Leona Helmsley. "I can relate" was one of the initial attractions of the show. Now, they have become the stereotypes that make most people think twice about entering a cocktail bar in Manhattan.
I agree that everyone is allowed a guilty pleasure. I, on one hand, have seen more than enough episodes of Sex and the City to know that I have no wish to see any more, nor a movie. But I would never begrudge anyone's desire to have silly, disposable fun. It's what most television shows are for.
Unfortunately, on the matter of this particular show I feel it more and more dififcult to stay quiet. Many people I know do not see it simply as a little TV show, but as some sort of serious sociological/post-feminist statement. I don't get where those people come from. At all.
In addition, I've always felt that use of the term "chick flick" is a cop out. I've been in several discussions regarding this series and upcoming film for several years, and often times the idea comes up that "it's a chick flick [loathe that term]; you [being a straight male] wouldn't understand." Apparently, one must be of the narrow demographic that a film consciously plays to in order to criticize it.
Anyway, this is a long way to go about saying that I must be the only person who ever formed an opinion of this series divorced from notions of gender. When I first watched the show several years ago, what disengaged me was not that the characters were female, independent, strong-willed and promiscuous, but simply that the four women were interchangable compilations of base characteristics, unrelieved by insight or perspective. The series goes out of its way to depict these characters as self-absorbed, petty, shallow, cruel, manipulative, gossipy, materialistic, cynical, narrow-minded and small. All of these would be ok if we ever found out anything else about them, but no such luck. If all four characters were male (and they are, on HBO's ENTOURAGE), I would still be bored by their one-note antics (and I am). I don't require that I LIKE characters in entertainment, even ones that I would see every week on television. But shouldn't they at least be interesting?
But, again, maybe I'm over-analyzing just a silly little TV show. When "this is a major event" is crammed down my throat, I just get uncomfortable.
As a note to Patrick's comment above.
According to Wikipedia both Darren Star, and Michael Patrick King (major writer/director of the series as well as the movie) are both openly gay. This is not a discriminatory statement, merely culturally interesting to me as an anthropologist.
Well, I've seen an awful lot of the show, and I'm going to concur that the show is much, much better than the movie. My wife liked the show, so I was exposed to it, and I am forced to admit the show was decent. I hated the idea, I resisted it greatly, but what it came down to was that it was, A: more interesting and intelligent than the average TV comedy (which isn't saying much), and B: had a much more honest and realistic interpretation of people and relationships than your average romantic comedy (which also isn't saying much).
Neither of those things was true of the movie.
So an okay show became a painful, excruciating movie as all the things about the show I despised (idiotic obsessions with clothing, casual acceptance of alcoholism, incredibly low expectations for what successful adult women are and/or should be like) were amplified to an inane degree and all the things I kind of enjoyed were replaced with the typical romantic comedy tradition of having characters, particularly men, behave in idiotic and/or abusive ways that fit with neither sense nor established character traits in order to create drama, and then resolve it in neat, predictable ways.
My wife didn't much like it, either.
SEX AND THE CITY is nothing more than an Adam Sandler/Rob Schneider movie for women.
There are two reasons why its even remotely taken seriously:
1) Its about middle-aged women, therefore it "means something"
2) Product placement (women in some audiences have actually gasped when seeing a designer label)
I knew there was something about you that I liked. I used to write for ERB-APA, a quarterly fanzine dedicated to the life and works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (still being published, I believe), and I have a small collection of early fanzines, including some early copies of YANDRO. Do you (or any of your readers)know which issues you had a letter published in? I felt the same thrill when I saw that you had printed my comments about SATC. The ARPANET has surely become a strapping teenager! Re: Arthur C. Clarke. Recently, I stayed up late one night reading The Sentinel, Barnes and Noble's collection of Clarke short stories. A couple of days later, I read that Clarke had passed away, and the story noted the time. It was right when I was reading his The Wind From the Sun, a story he wrote in 1963 about a race to the moon using "yachts" powered by solar sails...surely Clarke at his best: "But even at the orbit of Mars, s(he) would be gaining a thousand miles an hour in every day. Long before then, s(he) would be moving too swiftly for the Sun itself to hold her (him). Faster than a comet had ever streaked in from the stars, s(he) would be heading out into the abyss."
May he Rest in Peace.
My sister and wife loved it.
$40 bottle of wine before, and a 4 pack of wine screw tops minis
during. Truth be told, Watching them was much better than watching the movie.
thanks for writing about gidge...
fyi...all her" tricks" are just natural behaviors that I reward with food and give each "trick" a word and the click of a dog training tool called a clicker....she can sneeze, dig, attack, bark, ect
I guess you could call her a method actor : )
she will be this years dog of hope for tailsofhope.com and use her celeb status to do funraising for friendsofsnuffy.com
xx mary
I used to watch the show with my wife from time to time. Though it was mildly amusing, for the life of me I can't remember any of the episodes I saw. I fear that if and when I see the movie, I won't be able to forget the masturbating dog. Heck, I think I don't even have to see it now, there's the mental image of that dog going at it again!
jack mallette: I haven't yet seen this movie (it looks like something I'd rent), but your comment reminded me of another popular film: Tootsie. Now, I enjoyed Tootsie very much--some very good comedic acting in it, but the warm fuzzy that it seemed to give everyone died in me when I realized that it was essentially a story of how a man teaches women how to be well, women. I've never been able to view it any other way since... We watched the TV series on and off; I find my patience for such characters as these 4 wears thin quickly. Not sure I can handle 2 and 1/2 hours of "the girls".
I was disappointed by the movie but I do think that the series was different than the movie suggests. The movie would have you believe that the most important relationships the women had were with the men in their lives. Part of what women loved about Sex and the City (the series) was the relationship between the 4 best friends and that there were women "out there" who had similar dating experiences as women experienced in "real life."
Moreover, the show was an adaptation of a book written by a woman. Just thought I'd mention it.
Onanistic canine. You can't find that word combination on anyone else's blog anywhere.
If you can figure out why people respond so strongly to an opportunity--ANY opportunity--to talk about their pets, and can find a way to capitalize on it, then you'll be set for life. It mystifies me.
I did radio for years. Got a slow day in a small market? Tell some saccharine story about your pet (or someone else's pet, or a pet you saw in Reader's Digest, or a dead pet...whatever)and ask for call-ins for pet stories. Not only will your shift write itself, but people will call you for weeks, EVEN IF THEY KNOW IT WON'T BE ON THE AIR. It's craziness.
I had a Chicago friend who told me that televising obits would one day make millions for somebody. I think he was right--but they should be pet obits. People will line up to pay money to get that stuff on the air.
Oh yeah, sex and the city. Is it irony, or an unpuncturable sense of self, that allows Sara Parker to endorse a line of clothing called "Bitten"? I mean, all those teeth and that big jaw...it's...it's like a pet iguana I had once that had this cute onanistic habit...
I watched a few episodes of the first season of the show, and I thought it was basically a rip-off of Seinfeld. Four self-destructive friends in New York get into ridiculous situations, then sit around in a restaurant and talk about it.
The main difference is that the characters in Sex and the City have more money than the characters on Seinfeld.
It's a dominance thing, not masturbation, as I'm sure your many emailers told you. Every female dog I've known has done this on occasion, just as they pee on each other's pee-spots.
Oh, dear: you seem to be assuming (as men for some reason do) that humping is always a form of masturbation. Not true: humping is more often a dominance behaviour than it is a sexual one. Dogs castrated before puberty (and therefore true eunuchs) hump, little baby puppies hump, dogs born without sex organs hump.
I found SATC the series and the movie wonderful. The series was smart, funny, sexy, and heartwarming. It's not just about the clothes, but they were definitely the cherry on the cupcake. The most important underlying message in the series (and the film) is the importance of maintaining and honoring female friendship.
Little girls have great friendships, but when girls get into their teens everything changes. Competition for boys, intense pressure to wear the right clothes, to look the right way, and being bitchy to other girls becomes the norm for most girls. College friendships are a bit more meaningful, but as we get to our late 20's and early 30's we finally realize that fighting over guys and trying our best to impress them is stupid, and actually our girlfriends are just as important, if not more so, than our partners because they understand a part of us that men never will.
I am not a man-hater and neither are the characters in SATC. On the contrary, they love men (and so do I). The show demonstrated accurately that women can love their friends equally and with a similar intensity as the love they have for their partner. Perhaps it is not surprising that men don't get that part of it, and to be perfectly honest with you, they don't need to get it.
Roger, you are right. You are so not the person to review this movie. This movie was for the people who saw the series and wanted more, and that's just what the movie delivered.
p.s. comparing SATC to Seinfeld is like comparing The Sopranos to The Simpsons. They both contained families led by fat, balding fathers so they must be similar, right?
On the contrary, they love men (and so do I).
I am surprised this sentence was not followed by "Some of my best friends are men."
Interesting that you point out "There seemed to be a total disinclination to write me about my review, however widely-read it may have been." On the site Everyonesacritic.net (to my knowledge, the only site that allows anyone to "become a movie critic") SATC has only 7 ratings and 2 actual reviews. By comparison, Indiana Jones has 49 and 7, and The Strangers has 9 and 1. Is it really that people are just more interested in pet dogs than sex? Most sitcoms seem to revolve characters' sex lives, and they still seem to rate higher than shows like (wait a second, there aren't any sitcoms that revolve around pet dogs!)
Well, anyway, I thought the movie succeeded on two levels: as a reflection of our culture-- it showed our consumerism and our tendency to look to sexual relationships as our primary source of meaning. And also it tackles some relevant questions-- it called all big weddings "circuses" and portrayed marriage as a "meaningless complication" for the first 9/10 of the film. And it made these claims seriously, not as side jokes as most films (that I've seen, at least) would.
Maybe other movies have dealt with these topics, and I just haven't seen them yet, but I found thought SATC shared some useful insights.
I'm not surprised that a lot of reviewers, Mr. Ebert included, have no use for this movie. I haven't seen it yet, but I can imagine all of the ways that the series, which was fun and sometimes smart but not always, wouldn't translate. What surprises me, though, is how _mad_ everyone seems to be at it. People keep attacking it as "commercial," but good lord, what major studio movie isn't? In a way, SATC isn't even as harmful as films such as Iron Man, which are connected heavily to merchandising that will primarily target young children. The labels that are glorified in SATC are beyond the budget of most of us, so the movie isn't in any realistic way an advertisement for Manolos (or whatever), because most of its fans won't actually be willing to go spend $500 on a pair of shoes, any more than Batman fans are going to try to purchase utility belts.
So why aren't people angry with all of those comic book adaptations? Again, I'm not trying to defend the quality of the film, which I haven't seen, but I think it's telling that so many reviewers seem set on skewering this film at the same time that they're willing to grin and shrug and say that Adam Sandler's latest steaming pile is guilty fun.
I don't understand the criticism of these characters being shallow. So what? All the characters on Seinfeld were completely shallow, but since it was funny, nobody seemed to care. This movie was also very funny, as the audience I sat with laughed loudly and often. I guess people only care about shallowness when it's on the big screen? *puzzled*
Yes, both Seinfeld and SATC featured shallow characters. In fact, the characters on both shows, really, are thoroughly unlikeable.
The reason this worked on Seinfeld was it used these flawed characters as a foil against the way things usually work in life. It contrasted social mores and acceptable behavior by pitting people who had a skewed aptitude for these things against them. This, to me, is a sound comic principle. Seinfeld worked because it knew its characters didn't deserve the things they wanted, because they set after them in the wrong way. Frequently, they would even get punished or humiliated by a turn of events that they enabled by being so selfish and dismissive of other people. That's funny. In addition, a lot of their problems were born out of some sort of desperation. Desperation is funny, and it makes us all kinda selfish and unlikeable.
SATC, to my eyes, celebrates shallowness instead of commenting on it. The characters are not desperate, because they all have great jobs, wear designer labels, have terrific apartments, are generally self-sufficient and generally don't seem to have many problems. Shallowness in this context? Not funny. I've seen several episodes of the show, and I never laughed at it. The characters weren't needy enough to get away with how mean-spirited they were. I was turned off by the sheer decadence, desperately in need of a point of view and some reality.
I don't think when people attack it as "commercial" that they're complaining it's part of a million dollar advertising/merchandising campaign. Many movies are. It's the way things work, sadly. But if a movie pauses to name-check designer labels in a giddy montage (as per the description of the reviews I've read)...there are few ways to see that other than a ploy by the filmmakers to pad their runtime with pandering to consumerism. This happens in a lot of movies, and it's always irritating, regardless of what gender is doing the buying. Why the ire right now? Given the sorry state of the economy currently, I would find any movie that supplants parts of its story with a sequence of blissful conspicuous consumption to be more than a bit...tacky.
I dislike the show because it so brutally and mechanistically targets insecure women with shallow forms of self-expression and identity absorbed from glossy magazines and lifestyles they don't actually live. It adds nothing to them which they don't already bring. It's just a quick and nasty 'reminder' of who you think you are, so you can continue the process of ignoring your real self.
A show about rich professional women might be interesting but I think we will have to hold out a little longer for that, whilst this muck gets all the airtime. "Desperate housewives" is crisp and intelligent by comparison and always wins my admiration rather than my ire.
Nevertheless, might I suggest a spin-off series "Sex and the country?" There is nothing more titillating than a field of cattle, a copy of "Farm Journal" and a pair of gumboots.
By the way, I think The Sopranos and The Simpsons are most definitely similar and mutually comparable in the way they deal with America and Americana.
I don't think this movie was ever meant to be looked at that way - that way meaning "too long" "too shallow" "designer labels" "not realistic" "who lives a life like that?"
If you peel off all the onion skins, SATC is really about friendship. And honestly, although the lives of the four characters are totally surreal (PH suite on fifth avenue? oh come on), the frienship between them is acutally very realistic. Haven't you ever received a phone call from your best friend at night telling you how she needed someone to talk to, and then 2 seconds after you hung up with her you decided to go all the way to her house just to see if she's okay? There are many tiny little gestures in the movie which make me smile, cause all those remind me how good it is to have real friends in life.
I was never a big fan of SATC series, but I totally enjoyed the movie.
The other night I dreamt that a girl in a clothing store told me I ought not be proud of how I dressed. I then went and started looking over expensive clothes. Truth is - it felt good, and I woke up considering buying new clothes.
It disturbs me a little that consumerism runs so deep in our culture that it invades even my dreams, especially considering the fact that I could have dreamt myself dressed to kill (technicolour dreamcoat?) and yet I so identified with a certain consumption pattern that I dreamt myself a social inferior. It is true I wasn't ashamed despite this dream woman's snobbery, but what the hell was she doing in my consciousness in the first place?
I need an exorcist.