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Gallops of Conspicuous Consumption

Submitted by Adriana Rae on June 6, 2008 - 11:47.

Anthony Lane reviews the Sex and the City movie in the latest issue of the New Yorker. The movie depressed him.
Here's an excerpt;

...their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be. “When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

Check out his scathing review here.


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