How is it possible that Hollywood cannot see how stupid it makes Americans look when it creates movies like Sex and the City-2? I mean you start out with four relatively intelligent, well-read and well-travelled (we hope) women: a writer, a lawyer, a PR person and an art curator. How can these women who’ve spent years in their respective professions behave like such complete imbeciles? Well actually, Miranda and Charlotte do behave themselves, but the queen bees of the foursome, Carrie and Samantha act like absolute idiots.

I get that Samantha is Samantha – deliciously irreverent when it comes to sex and society. But I also get that while she flirts outrageously, and takes home a lot of goody bags, she generally doesn’t act like a moron in her home city. It seems that lack of hormones and hot flashes makes her go a little insane. She flagrantly flaunts social codes (which are a religious and legal issue in the middle east), while being the business guest of the sheikh who has kindly flown her friends and her first class in complete luxury to his home country, so that she can think about representing him in a PR capacity. It appears that Samantha could do with some PR of her own – and some re-training in the way to behave in public; not like a hormonal teenager on heat. And you can argue that that’s just Samantha – but is it? Did she become a top PR executive by showing hordes of conservative men her middle finger, breasts and her latest lay’s boner? I’m not really sure. It just seems that she’s finally becoming senile. Where even her Samantha-ness is no longer acceptable.

Do Americans really know so little of other cultures and behave this silly when they travel? What they do in New York is not really acceptable in Abu Dhabi! And flaunting social norms is not funny, it’s just stupid. Why does Hollywood not understand that when they make movies like this, they are not ridiculing the closed cultures of the world while heralding the joys of the librated ones, they are only proving that Americans can be really socially inept, culturally dumb and truly lacking in common sense, basic decency and courtesy and in any amount of general knowledge? And Americans are not really like this – the ones I’ve met are genuinely interested in other cultures and politely respectful of them. So who are these Americans that Michael Patrick King is idolising on big screen? What happened to the girls who regaled us with their smart repartees, chic appearance and layered conversations? The girls who may have used the metaphor of sex, but were making important observations about society, life, men and people. These are not the women we see now – the women now are haggard, bitchy, unable to learn from their lives’ many lessons and choose to regularly regress to inept teenage-world.

Miranda and Charlotte’s troubles are actually real and funny – they deserved more room to mature and grow, but instead the story got sucked into the vortex of Carrie’s stupidity and Samantha’s ridiculous faux pas. Carrie is just being plain ridiculous – she is tired of the relationship in its current form, she takes time off from their house, but when Big tries to intervene and asks for some time off too, she freaks out and goes and makes out with an ex-boyfriend. I mean really? Do these girls never grow up? What Carrie did when she was 20 and 30 is not really still acceptable at 45+! Does she never learn from her mistakes? Or is the writer so unimaginative that he can’t move or think beyond the usual troubles of the 4 girls? Where is the Carrie who only believed in the love of her life, and went through men trying to find happiness but unable to do so, because she truly loved another? Her affair with Big (when she was dating Aidan) was allowed, because he was the man she loved. Why would she cheat on the man she loves with Aidan? Just because he was too tired to go out to party with her after a long day at work and bought her a plasma TV instead of jewellery? Is she really that shallow?

And the clothes! The styling! What an eyesore! What the show had been known for, renowned for, were the supremely stylish clothes and looks. What have they done here? They’ve taken the brightest, gaudiest fabrics possible, stuck on extremely shiny, often pointy things, added the most garish of accessories that made them look like Christmas trees at best, and called them clothes. I can possibly accept that 4 of the 750 clothes actually looked reasonable, and the only good thing to come out of this is that Miranda got a makeover. The plain Jane of the series and the tubby-mommy of the first movie looked the best of the lot here. Carrie should have thought about mummifying her look from the series and staying cryogenically frozen. She has not aged well, and well, botox doesn’t work for everyone.

The movie would have truly worked as a spoof of the show and the series – outlandish clothes, haggard-looking women, absolutely no story, weak dialogues, stupid characters, social faux pas galore, trivialisation of social rules and a caricature of American intelligence (or the lack of).

I thought the first movie did injustice to the supremely brilliant shows, but in retrospect that movie was Oscar-material compared to this hunk of junk that fans of the show were forced to sit through for 146 minutes! Maybe King needs to think about handing the writing over to Darren Star – who put together 94 episodes of the show that won 8 golden globes. This movie, I’d be happy if it won a Razzie. Two funny lines and four decent outfits do not a movie make. I may just have to burn the box set of the Sex and the City after the incredibly bad taste this movie left in my mind and soul, ruining the iconic characters forever. I hope King gets the message and lets everything and everybody rest in peace, without a third piece of torture barraging our mind and the cities.