brandapalooza

John-Jacobson

I have a challenge for all you faithful IMDb users. Who can count number of times Abu Dhabi is mentioned in Sex and The City 2. I tallied 642. See if anyone else can do better. I wonder how much the Emirates Tourism Board offered the filmmakers for each time this occurred? If you Google "Sex and The City 2" and cross-reference the term "product placement" you will find over a thousand results. It seems I am not the only one who thought I was watching a 2.5 hour infomercial. Before the movie had begun I'd already suffered a million commercials for the usual chick products: adverts for Chocolate when you're feeling ugly, and adverts for beauty products to fix up the damage done by the chocolate. However, when a movie fades in, I expect the advertising to stop. Brandchannel.com called SATC-2 a "brandapalooza". The sequel even beat the first movie's record of 94 brand placements.

When I wasn't counting product plugs, I was laughing at Samantha. Apologies to Kim Caterall as I was not laughing with you, but at you. You would think by time you are 52 years-old you would be over your daddy issues and realise frequent intimate encounters will never fill the emotional void. On two occasions we were subjected to watching this sad lady desperately trying to fill her void with some guy. As predicted, lazy Sam lets the man do all the work. It's always the ones who brag about it who are the worst at it.

The most hilarious part was watching Sam and her pals sing the feminist anthem "I Am Woman", and why the hell not? Helen Reddy had long ago sold out her song to Coors and Burger King for "a gigantic amount of money", in her words. I smiled while I pondered, "this is what forty years of sexual revolution has given women: the right to be a slave to overpriced fashion." The punchline of this joke is that they were singing "I Am Woman" in the United Arab Emirates - one of the most sexist countries in the world wherein women are commonly and legally abused. Sex And The City has a cute solution for Muslim women in the UAE: Just swathe yourself in Dior, sing bad karaoke, and everything'll be alright.

score 1/10

John-Jacobson 1 July 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2271923/