Hi, this is Dana Stevens Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate's spoiler special on Sex in the City 2.

Joining me in the studio is Julia Turner. Hi, Julia.

Hi, Dana.

Who is Slate's deputy editor and also my partner on the Culture Gab Fest and also my partner in seeing the movie last night.

So, Julia, I sort of know because we walked out of this movie together, but go ahead and first give me your overall reaction to sex in the city.

Oh.

It was so disappointing.

I mean, I don't know.

You wanted to like it, right?

I did want to like it.

I have a real soft spot for Sex and the City. say about the emotional lives of single women and also had something interesting to say about

fashion and the role it can play in a woman's life and her self-making. And the first movie

disappointed me somewhat on both of those friends. I thought it was a little more conventional

than the show in ways that were disappointing, but I still thought it was a pretty fun romp and

the characters were funny and the lines were good and the clothes were amusing. This was a mess. I thought,

I thought the dialogue seemed hackneyed. I thought the show has much less interesting.

I thought the movie had many less interesting things to say about married life than it,

than the show did about single life. And I thought that the film, which takes us on a field trip to Abu Dhabi,

had kind of a gross handling of the politics of the Middle East in a way that felt glib and weird and left me unsettled.

Yeah, I mean, I have to agree.

We'll get into a plot summary in a second.

But I feel like with this movie, all of the criticisms that people who hate sex in the city have always leveled against it seemed completely true to me, things that I might have at least mildly defended the show against before. Yes, it's materialistic and consumeristic and kind of silly and trivial. But I probably would have just defended the series on the grounds that it's a half hour once a week show that gives us a glimpse that we don't often get into female friendship.

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