life is great when black people fix everything for you [movies]

sex and the city: the movie

white people are bad role models
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carrie bradshaw is a dead beat. i'm not tryna be a hater, it's simply a statement of fact. i don't care how many women out there idolize that bitch, i'll still say it. carrie fuckin' bradshaw (sarah jessica parker) is a class A dead beat.

now, i'm not one of those guys that hates everything related to sex and the city by any means. i have a woman, so by default i've seen pretty much every episode and i try to keep an open mind about things. the series had it's high and low points. it was funny at times when it wasn't trying too hard. the characters, aside from carrie, grew on me and the supporting cast (kim cattrall, cynthia nixon and kristin davis) is pretty excellent for the most part. my main problem with the show was that it followed such a strict formula and had such a low opinion of it's audience that it became tedious at points. having the main character hold your hand and point out every single metaphor and parallel drawn by the writers through overly clever monologues lowered the show from something that could have been very smart and introspective to something that was like arm-chair psychology for people that read redbook. but like i said, it certainly isn't without it's merits.

here's what i don't get...are people, specifically women, supposed to identify with carrie bradshaw as much as it seems like the writers and producers want them to? because while she is witty and always has a biting retort to any and every passing remark, when it all comes down to it she's really quite an awful role model for anybody to aspire to. for one, she's a total fraud. she lives way above her means, using designer fashion as her ticket into the upper echelons of society so she can rub noses with and in turn be validated by people that can probably see what a fraud she is from a mile away, but are too passive aggressive to ever tell her directly to her face. and if someone ever did have the balls to tell her, she'd just pretend it didn't matter to her, get indignant for a second, issue some catty insult in return and then go home and cry while the the words eat her alive from the inside out. she lives in a crappy studio apartment with a closet filled with millions of dollars worth of clothes and shoes so that she can pretend to be a part of high society and yet she's somehow too proud to let anyone call her out on the fact.

she uses the guise of "keeping it real" to rationalize her extreme fear of failure. it happened all throughout the series and it happens in the movie as well. what i don't get though, is that the writers seem to glorify this aspect of her personality. i remember an episode from the tv show where carrie's book gets optioned for some kind of film or tv show by matthew mcconaughey. she flies out to L.A. to meet with him and eventually gets cold feet and abandons the project because she doesn't like the way mcconaughey talks about the character in her book (which, of course, is modeled on herself). essentially, what he says hits too close to the bone for her, she has a panic attack and rather than confront the flaws in her personality or admit that perhaps her own actions may be the catalyst for many of the unpleasant things that happen to her, she shuts down, chain smokes ciggs and essentially says "fuck that, i don't need this, i'm keepin' it real". then her friends all gather around to console her - "aww, don't listen to them, carrie, you're a great person, they just don't know you" when in reality she's an awful person. she isn't even a good friend. whenever one of her friends has important news like "i'm getting married!" or "i'm having a baby!" or "i have cancer!", her response is always "that's great, but let's talk about me some more now". i fucking hate people like that - always making it about themselves. who gives a fuck about your petty problems that you mostly bring upon yourself? shut up and listen to your friends once in awhile, you bitch! they're much more entertaining than you are anyway.

i'm sorry to say that the few year hiatus hasn't done anything to mature carrie bradshaw. she's still as self-centered as ever. most of the movie focuses on the huge wedding between carrie and mr. big (chris noth), whose real name was finally revealed to be...wait for it...wait for it...john james preston. how incredibly lackluster, right? but let me just break down the events of the wedding day, which of course, goes horribly awry, leaving carrie devastated.

first of all, mr. big has been married a few times already and they've all gone to shit. he admittedly wants to get married to carrie, but doesn't necessarily want to go through the whole wedding aspect again, but he humors her because...well, he loves her for some ungodly reason that i'll never fully understand. because she's such a self centered basketcase, the wedding quickly turns from a quaint, friends only affair into a massive red carpet event with hundreds of guests and naturally, john james preston begins to get cold feet. he calls her billions of times before the wedding to try to get her to talk him down, but she's so involved in herself, she misses all of them. he freaks out and bolts (actually, he's not even a big enough jerk to really bolt, he just pussyfoots outside the church about 50 feet from the front door, well within walking range). eventually, carrie finds out that he's left her hanging and instead of doing the logical thing - calling him back and being like "yo, wtf, get your ass down here and stop being a pussy", she instead throws the worlds biggest temper tantrum and runs away crying like her entire life had just been destroyed by something that technically hadn't even happened yet and was still totally fixable. as if we'd expect something different from a person that has made a career out of making it all about herself. then, of course, her friends continue to indulge her childish behavior by going on a vacation to mexico where she wallows in her own misery and completely ignores them whenever she's not treating them like servants. priceless, right?

upon returning to new york, carrie hires a personal assistant to help her move back into her crappy studio apartment and continue "keeping it real". in fact, she's so determined to "keep it real" that she doesn't just hire any assistant, she hires the realest of all possible assistants, a sassy black woman. louise, played by jennifer hudson, to this day holds the guinness world record as the longest standing non-white character ever featured on sex and the city in all it's 10 years. an honor i'm sure the academy award winning actress is incredibly humbled by.

this is where the film turns from simply being an annoying, but occasionally funny rag into an insulting, stereotypical hollywood snoozefest. the writers rely on what we in the biz like to call the "magical negro" device in which an inept white person is swept away and taught to be a decent human being by a cuddly, unintimidating minority whose sole purpose in life seems to be bestowing wisdom upon unsuspecting crackers. and she does literally just that - she shows up, teaches carrie how to manage her shit and get her life back on track, then exits abruptly, never to be seen again, as if yanked off stage by giant hook. it might not have been that bad or offensive if there had ever been another black character on the show in all it's six seasons (or any other non-white race for that matter), but no...the only two black people i can ever remember appearing on the show were in the same episode, a brother and sister, and were gone by the time the end credits rolled. you rarely see such a blatant representation of tokenism these days and frankly, i'm surprised jennifer hudson didn't back hand her agent for placing such a backwards ass script in her clutches.