It seems New Line Cinema is bringing back Sarah Jessica Parker and the rest of the movie cast of the “Sex and the City” crew for a sequel to last year’s successful effort. Don’t get me wrong; at least one of the movie’s stars (Kim Cattrall) used to be what my friends called “prime spank bank material,” and she was quite the hottie in “Porky’s,” that 1982 paean to teen angst and coming-of-age in Victorian England. Oops, wrong movie. Porky’s mostly revolved around crude penis jokes and a few nude shower scenes interspersed with, well…even cruder penis jokes supported by several more nude shower scenes. Today, it’d be called “classic Hollywood moviemaking.”
1982 was a great year, by the way. Ms. Parker was starring in a TV show called “Square Pegs,” which ALSO happened to be a paean to teen angst and coming-of-age in Victorian Hollywood, or some such other dreckola. Hey…I told you there’s nothing much original emanating in La-La Land these last 60 or 70 years, didn’t I? I didn’t? Okay, I implied it. Try to keep up with the historical tour bus, folks.
Where was I? Oh, yeah…1982 and Square Pegs. It seems to have lasted all of 1 season (1982/1983) and is most memorable for, uh, for, uh…well, the fact it’s memorable is something you’re just going to have to take on faith. So: We’ve got Kim Cattrall comfortably ensconced in our collective memory as an actress in one of our favorite “Spanktravision” movies of the time, and Parker establishing her serious acting chops in a TV series that’s memorable only for its complete and utter anonymity. Somehow, she and Cattrall and two other women, one of whom I found playing a major role in a1986 movie entitled “The Manhattan Project” (Cynthia Nixon, the teen love interest of a boy who makes an atomic bomb out of kitchenware and Palmolive dish soap, near as I can tell) found themselves magically transported to the year 1998, which was only memorable for the fact of a juiced-on-steroids Mark McGwire breaking Hank Aaron’s major league baseball home run record, in my humble opinion.
Leaving aside all the issues surrounding steroids in sports, that’s about all I can remember from that year. Except it seems Parker et al began starring in an HBO series entitled (wait for it) “Sex and the City.” Where’s all this leading? Nowhere, for the most part, except for this: Hollywood just can’t let something die an honored and dignified death, and it never will. I’ve got nothing in particular against older women getting together to make their own paean to middle-aged angst in Victorian Manhattan, or whenever this movie’s supposed to be taking place, but haven’t we gotten past the point where we expect even our 50-something women (in Cattrall’s case) to come across as some sort of sex-obsessed MILF? It was cute the first 4,000 times I saw it in the “American Pie” movies, but watching and listening to girls sit around, talking about how big “Mr. Big” really is, can be as tiresome as listening to a similar group of men sitting around in a TV commercial, singing “Viva Viagra” in a bad imitation of an even worse Elvis Presley song.
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