Skimming the reviews for Sex and the City 2, I was surprised  (no, flabbergasted) that the film took so many hits for it’s blatant consumerism.

Of the film, A.O. Scott of the New York Times wrote,

But the ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense. Over cosmos in their private bar, Charlotte and Miranda commiserate about the hardships of motherhood and then raise their glasses to moms who “don’t have help,” by which they mean paid servants. Later the climactic crisis raises the specter either of Samantha going to jail or the friends having to fly home in coach, and it’s not altogether clear which prospect they regard as more dreadful.

Slate Magazine’s Dana Steven’s adds:

And it’s true that this movie’s absolute tone-deafness, its complete disconnection from our current economic and geopolitical reality, by moments achieves a perverse Warholian profundity. In one scene, Carrie asks her personal hotel butler, Guarau (Raza Jaffrey), about his family. His wife is back in India, he tells her; he flies home to see her every few months, when he can afford the fare. Carrie looks at him for a moment in silence, and we wonder: Is it possible she’s confronting the unimaginable gulf that separates their two lives, the vast global network of consumption, exploitation, and injustice that’s brought them together in this alien and alienating place? But no: Although she will later do Guarau a good turn, Carrie is merely wondering how she can get Big to appreciate her as much. Perched at the pinnacle of material comfort and social privilege in the waning days of the American empire, she can still find something to pout about.

And finally, the always-witty Roger Ebert wrote:

…the girls are given a $22,000-a-night suite and matching Maybachs and butlers, courtesy of a sheik who wants to have a meeting with Samantha and talk about publicity for his hotel. This sequence is an exercise in obscenely conspicuous consumption, in which the girls appear in so many different outfits they must have been followed to the Middle East by a luggage plane.

Consumerism is nothing new to Carrie and co.  Since the 90′s, the girls have flounced around New York in overpriced designer duds; to the best of my knowledge this hasn’t been critiqued until this point.  Why now?

Some suggest that the film is insensitive in light of the current economic situation, but I think it goes deeper than that. After all, for as long as film has captured our imaginations, it has been a source of escapism. Consider the films of the Great Depression Era – many of them featured decadence that the average American family would never experience.  It is worth noting that Society Papers – which detailed the lives of socialites and the well-to-d0 – reached popularity during the Depression.  I doubt we are suddenly embittered and turned off to imagining life as the other half lives.  Personally, I would kill for Carrie’s Manolos.

Instead, I wonder if we’re just sick of Sex and the City. After 12 years, it’s safe to say that any collective hope that four well-educated, successful professionals would find more to talk about that men and shoes has been squashed for once and for all.