I could understand why you would comment if you were having lunch with the ladies at work, SATC came up, and you were involved in the conversation. However, on a message board where you can easily avoid the topic, why come in and say something? I don’t get that. I do get why you wouldn’t like the show. My husband wouldn’t either. It’s not a guy thing, and that’s OK.
And these people gave you shit for saying Charlotte was the prettiest? She is. That seems pretty obvious. Your opinion of her is probably not much based on her character, since you don’t watch the show, so whatever. I don’t find it offensive. As Cisco said, Kristin Davis is the most conventionally attractive member of the cast, so it’s not surprising at all.
I don’t find it insulting that so many guys seem to like Charlotte the most, but it is something I’d observed when the show was still on and it is interesting because she did approach relationships in the most old-fashioned, reading The Rules way (or at least until that episode where she exclaimed that she just wanted to ‘get pounded really hard’ to her country club friends… or the episode where she discovered The Rabbit). But then I suppose it’s slim pickings if you want someone hot who wont outdo you – or chain smoke – in bed.
I think it’s been discussed on SDMB before, but people do seem to get especially nasty when it comes to the show and Sarah Jessica Parker. Entourage’s writing is ridiculously bad and the (quasi-)celeb cameos are laughable – I’m pretty sure it’s actually been called SATC for men, with exclusive sneakers instead of Jimmy Choos – but it doesn’t seem to garner as much attention or venom as SATC.
ETA While I think the show was mostly shopping porn and groan-worthy puns, I honestly think it did a lot for women when it comes to opening up about their sexuality. It normalized discussions about masturbation techniques when, prior to the show, most of my female friends wouldn’t even admit to the act. But while I’ll defend it in general, I’ll also be the first to complain about Scary Sadshaws, the girls and women who flock (flocked?) to New York with an oversized fake flower in their hair, ready to take on the city and eat cupcakes and blog about their sex lives. I think it’s sort of died down, except for the bus tours. But there are bus tours for fucking everything.
Yeah, I’ll just report this post and move on with the rest of the thread, where people aren’t swearing at me and losing their minds. I did not change the course of the discussion. Please read more carefully before you freak out on people.
I like reading all sorts of different topics around here. Especially on cultural touchstone stuff like Sex and the City. As for why I’d comment at all, I have seen the show and I know exactly why guys get so nasty about it… because we all have to watch it at least once. And any guy who says he’s never seen it is a damn liar.
Neither of the comments you quoted actually insulted the men who liked Charlotte, and they certainly weren’t “slams” as you claimed. They weren’t favorable, but someone calling a preference “funny” is pretty far from being a slam. It’s barely even snide. Perhaps you’ve heard much worse from women in real life, but that isn’t Cat Fight’s fault. I don’t understand why you want to call her out over a brief, mild comment she made a year ago.
Every woman who has dated men has had to either watch some boring sporting event or watch the guy play video games, yet those topics do not garner the same kind of venom. And it’s always the same kind… let’s go back to the OP, shall we, to remind ourselves what the topic of this thread is:
IOW, the actresses are not attractive enough (except maybe Kristin Davis) to be starring in a show called Sex and the City, and getting lots of action. The thing is, they are pretty attractive, for their age, and they aren’t dating “young” men either. So this perception that the show is utterly implausible is based on faulty premises IMO, and a jaundiced view of the show.
I do apologize on behalf of my gender if some woman forced you to watch the show against your will. I can understand why that would be terrifically annoying and would rub you the wrong way. However, really, the show has more merit to it than you’ve been given to understand from your limited exposure to it, and probably not the merits you think, either.
The first time the Lola software was used in a movie - officially - was the third X-Men film. But the company has been around for ten years before that 2006 film. Their previous work was reported as “secret digital retouching of aging pop divas”. So, I’d say that you have seen it already. I’m sure there are film contracts where the lead actress or actor has specified that Lola will be used, in the same way they would specify a particularly favored hair stylist or make-up artist.
Who has used it? We’ll never know for sure. It’s a testament to the discretion of the Lola FX staff that they were working in this field for a decade without the secret getting out. As I said, it was used to de-age Brad Pitt, and will doubtless be used to similar effect if Ian Holm plays the much younger Bilbo in the upcoming film version of The Hobbit.
Back to the question, I have no doubt that all four of the leads in the Sex and the City sequel will be made much younger in the flashbacks - and may even be slighly tweeked for the rest of the film. But I have no idea what Lola processing costs.
I am the rare heterosexual male who saw, and enjoyed, the Sex and the City movie. My only real problem was the purse Carrie gave her devoted assistant. Bleagh! It looked like she stole it from a dead circus clown! Is that really supposed to be fashionable? In the same way, I thought the outfit that Stanley Tucci’s character dressed Anne Hathaway’s character in, in The Devil Wears Prada, was hilariously ugly. So what do I know?
According to wikipedia, Carrie Bradshaw came to NY when she was 18 and a freshman in college, so in the flashbacks would have to strip away about 25 years. This is what SJP looked like at 18 in real life, much different from how she looks now. Considerably less glamorous, kinda dorky actually. I think SJP benefited from her stylist’s attentions. It will be interesting to see if Flashback!Carrie is made to look really pretty or what, since IRL she really wasn’t a raving beauty at 18.
Kim Cattrall is 52. This is what she looked like at the age that Samantha supposedly came to NY in the late '70s. Pretty hot.
I’m not sure you understand the implications of saying a guy prefers a woman because she’s “virginal”. That’s basically code for “he’s an old-fashioned misigynist scumbag who only wants his women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen”. It’s a slam, plain and simple.
Okay. But you may be giving other viewers too much credit for having the perspective you do. I don’t find the characters articulate or engaging (as someone noted upthread, like most I have been subjected to viewing enough of the show to know, whereupon I stopped, but also as I made clear in my OP, I am not trying to make anyone else stop; it was “Yeah, great honey, hope it’s a good one this week, I’ll be down at the bar for an hour or two.”). But MMV. And another area where MMV is your realistic perspective.
I wrote the OP in extremis or maybe better in exasperation after having the experience for the nth (n>>>>>>1) time of hearing a Japanese acquaintance use SATC as a reference point (the reference point) for what life is, was, aspirationally should be, in a big Western city (I had made the mistake, God help me, of attending a baby shower with her, don’t ask why, and apparently there was some SATC template for baby showers that she kept cross-referencing and using as a baseline for critiquing the IRL one). Every and I mean every foreign woman I have had occasion to discuss American culture with (and I meet a lot of them in business) has spontaneously brought the show up in a way that made it clear that they viewed it as a documentary of life in the big American city and/or an aspirational, modern day Horatio Alger tale for young and not so young and not so long ago young women. And I can also assure you – again, from discussions IRL – that there are American women outside big cities who have the same outlook or who want to believe the same fairytale.
You correctly point out that it is not a fairytale in all aspects. From some small amount of what I’ve read from Candace Bushnell, she’s not a dummy, any more than I think Helen Fielding is (I’ve read all her books, by the way). I think there is a place for observational humor about modern metropolitan life for women, and I further understand that a bit of exaggeration around the edges is standard comedic technique, even if the end result ends up being not my cup of tea. But once you’ve processed it through the fab gay producers and the fashion-porn prop artists, I’ll guarantee you the depressing and self-parodying aspects that you correctly note come through, to you, are registering nowhere on the screens of my little Japanese business associates who have I kid you not used the words “admire,” “envy,” and “successful” in describing the show’s characters.
Plus, I think we can all admit that the tagline from my link is pretty good – Mummies With Hoop Earrings is hard to top.
I reply to this with trepidation, as I do not want to be accused of further hijacking, but since Huerta88 is the OP and seems to want to talk about it, I will assume it’s OK unless a mod tells me otherwise.
Maybe. Someone else must like it, though, since it’s pretty popular, and they must find the characters articulate and engaging. Thanks for acknowledging that my perspective is realistic. This reminds me of conversations about The Sopranos, where some critics were all up in arms, saying the show glamorized being in the mafia, when really, it didn’t, at all. SATC seems glamorous because of the clothes and style, but the characters are often very openly and obviously unhappy, always looking for something and not finding it. They make really bad decisions and suffer for them, and even the most ardent fan would have to admit that. That aspect of the show doesn’t seem like something people would want to emulate.
The only baby showers I can remember being shown in SATC seemed hellish to me, but it’s been a while.
Honestly, I’m puzzled, since I don’t see how ANYONE can view that show as a fairy tale. Either they’ve only seen a few eps, or have a selective memory, or they’re like those Sopranos fans who think the mafia is cool despite the show being about how crazy and dysfunctional the characters are. I guess what I’m saying is, blame these women who are incapable of an accurate and intelligent viewing of the show, not the show itself. The show itself is very critical of the characters. The fairy tale is how expensively they all dress and the shoes they can afford, but beyond that? I don’t see it.
Well, OK-- there are aspects to admire and envy about these women. They are in their 30s and 40s and have killer bodies, even though they are shown eating and drinking out in every episode. They can afford very nice apartments and clothes/shoes. All of them, even demure Charlotte, have successful, high profile careers that would earn them generous salaries in NYC. In those respects, there is much to envy and admire about their success. The whole irony of the show is that, despite the trappings of success, they all have a great deal of difficulty having a satisfying romantic life. The only stable relationships they have are with each other, and that’s the basis of the show. So, while you might envy their material success, their emotional failures are on full display, and are often their own faults.
I guess what it boils down to is this: I think these women’s emotional travails are pretty realistic, even if their outer trappings are not, for most women. Their looks, however, are what become the focus for most discussions, and I think that’s silly. These women do look above average for their ages IMO when compared with regular women, and their bodies are most definitely far above average. If the criticisms were about the content of the show, you’d get no rancor from me, but it seems to ALWAYS be about how they look, and that’s both shallow and silly IMO. It’s also become so predictable as to be annoying.
Yeah, but furthermore, this is not the right subject to have this discussion.
I mean, in order for there to be a meaningful discussion of whether men like one women in a cast more than the others based on her ‘virginal’ qualities, all the women must be of approximate equal attractiveness.
Charlotte is just simply way better looking than the rest. She has the classic features that men like…no big wart, witchy nose, weak chin, or whatever. Her skin looks young and healthy, her hair isn’t fried and dyed. She just looks better.
Hey, why do people always say, “I don’t watch the show, but my wife watches it and so I have to take it in through osmosis” or whatever?
I’m not a huge fan of the show, but it is a part of pop culture, and I have seen episodes of the show, I know the characters, I’m familiar with the overall plot. No need to pretend we ‘catch glances’ of the damn show; if we are going to discuss it, let’s at least admit we’ve watched it, first.
Regardless of what you think was implied in Cat Fight’s posts, they were brief, mild remarks that weren’t targeted at you or any particular poster. They were not slams by any stretch of the imagination. I think it was poor form for you to drag her into an argument you were having with someone else, especially since the posts you’re calling her out for are both old (one from a year ago, one from four years ago) and pretty weak support for the point you were trying to make. I also think you’re taking Sex and the City a wee bit too seriously if you get this worked up over anyone expressing the slightest disapproval for your favorite character.
I was living in Japan when SATC was on the air, and I can confirm that the show was very popular there. I was actually the only woman in my office who’d never seen it before (and would not until several years later, when it was in reruns on the CW). One woman I knew once asked me if it were really true that single women in America had their own apartments “like on Sex and the City”*. This particular woman happened to love shoe shopping, but the housing situation was the aspect of SATC that she was most impressed by. Like most single Japanese women, she lived with her parents.
Frankly, if I were a Japanese woman I too would admire and envy four single women who had good careers (not just jobs, CAREERS!), lived independently, and could talk openly about sex and relationships. None of these things are common for women in Japan. Female friendship is also a less popular subject for TV shows/movies in Japan than it is in the US, so a Japanese woman might be attracted to SATC because she admires the women’s friendship. I don’t doubt that many women also find the fashion aspect of the show interesting, especially since Japan is very brand conscious in general, but that’s not the only thing about the show likely to inspire envy in a Japanese woman.
*My reply was “Uh, they do often have their own apartments, but I don’t think it’s like on Sex and the City.”
And come on, it’s laughable to say that Charlotte is virginal. She isn’t, at all. She has plenty of sex on the show, just like everyone else. Of the three, she is the most traditionally marriage/relationship oriented, and is squeamish about really graphic or crude discussions of sex. She also dresses the most conservatively. However, to call her virginal is absurd. Prudish and judgemental, yes, those things she is, if you find that appealing. I also would have to think most guys would find her personality pretty annoying, since she wants a rich, handsome doctor/lawyer/whatever to support her so she can have babies and be the Perfect Wife and Mother. Men complain about women like this, who only want to date very rich men, and who are picking the china pattern after the third date, unless they are super-cute like Kristin Davis, I guess.
