Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells titled his post about the matter "Not Supposed to Say," claiming that "movie critics haven't come within 20 feet of mentioning this [unremarked-on interracial marriage] in their reviews." We're not sure what critics Wells is reading, but a boatload of the ones we've looked at mention exactly that — and they do it in a way that seems to beg for someone to bestow an aura of au courant hipness on their courageously un-PC observations.

Both EW's Owen Gleiberman and New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane take great pains to mention the film's unmentioned racial diversity, though to hear Lane discuss it, it sounds like he'd rather be watching a blunt parable like Crash. "The wedding party is the ultimate guide to Demme’s benign vision: the groom is black, the bride is white, she and her bridesmaids are dressed in saris, [and] nobody so much as mentions race," says Lane. "I don’t know if there were any Republican voters involved in this movie, but, if so, it must have been a lonely time." Ok, yes, some Republicans are racist — but damn, Anthony! Are you really implying that conservatives can never be bred within a cultural melting pot?

Worse is Wells, who virtually calls Demme a fetishist of all things African, rattling off some of the black characters Demme has previously included in his oeuvre before concluding:

So it feels very Demme-ish that the union that's endlessly celebrated in Rachel Getting Married, his latest feature, is between a very alabaster lassie (Rosemarie DeWitt, playing Rachel) and a handsome Afrique-ebony guy (musician Tunde Adebimpe, playing Sidney the groom). It's also a very Demme thing that nobody so much as mentions this.

You can say "well, why would anybody mention it?" and I'd take your point, of course. We all like to see ourselves as color-blind. My point is that in real life someone in the wedding party would at one point or another throw some kind of slider ball — something anecdotal, flip, netural, whatever— into the proceedings. In the same way someone would say "oh, it's raining" if a cloudburst were to happen. My other point is that such a remark (which wouldn't necessarily be coarse or gauche ) is verboten in a Demme film because it doesn't reflect his values or sensibilities.

...If the blunt-spoken alcoholic played by Howard Duff in Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978) had been invited to Rachel and Sidney's wedding, he would have said something or other, trust me. Because he was the kind of wealthy middle- aged guy who didn't give a shit because he was always half in the bag.

Why, though, does it need to be said? One might think that by the time Rachel and Sidney had gotten married, their families would have gotten used to the idea that they were of separate races (in fact, Rachel's divorced father has since remarried a black woman, and screenwriter Jenny Lumet is the product of an interracial marriage herself). Are these critics really unable to set aside their apparent discomfort with the idea unless an on-screen surrogate points out the obvious? What if Rachel's family were Latin (imagine Penelope Cruz donning Anne Hathaway's smudged eyeliner instead) — would their non-white, mixed marriage suddenly become less of an issue for these older, Caucasian film critics?

Guys, there's plenty of actual criticisms to be made about Rachel Getting Married (won't someone address the interminable sequence that is the dish-washing competition?). Why don't you stick to film critique and leave the awkward investigation of racial dynamics where it belongs — at a Sarah Palin rally?

Here's Lane on Kim Cattrall:

Samantha’s efforts to signal her appeal, which might have seemed languorous on the small screen, are blown up here into an embarrassing semaphore: thudding closeups of her slurping through a cocktail straw or swallowing a mouthful of guacamole. No self-respecting maker of soft erotica would countenance such shots, and, as for the matching dialogue (“Something just came up,” Samantha murmurs over the phone, as her boyfriend stands beside her in bulging briefs), it’s a straight lift from flaccid, mid-period James Bond.

And here's his take on Tina Fey in Baby Mama:

[Fey's character] Kate stalks around bare-legged in skirts that lurch to a halt two inches above the knee, which is a length that Christy Turlington would struggle to carry off. It’s possible that Fey, like other television stars, is unused to being framed in full length, and, though in complete command of her delivery—dry, spiky, but unthreatening—she hasn’t yet made up her mind how funny her body is meant to be. She isn’t big enough to make a joke of her ripeness, like Bette Midler, but she’s no Lily Tomlin, either. She could do worse than steal a trick from Lucille Ball—a lovely, elegant figure who taught herself to be graceless.

It seems that Lane has a problem with women of a certain age being sexual on the big screen; he can take mature sexuality in the bowdlerized form he sees on television, but once those over-30 legs are stalking around, larger than life on celluloid, he must object.

But Lane's female problem is nothing when you read Timothy Noah's comparison of Carrie Bradshaw and Hillary Clinton in Slate. Basically, Noah posits that the older white women who watched the SatC movie are the same ones who voted for Hillary, and went to see the movie because they were bummed about Hillary's primary loss. "By this past weekend, however, it was becoming clear to all but the most delusional Hillary supporters that the game was up. Sisterhood was powerful, but in this case it wouldn't prevail. That realization left a lot of white women all dolled up with nowhere to go. And so … they went to the movies," Noah writes. "The connection, I'll grant you, is somewhat glib," he adds…glibly. So glib, in fact, that it makes no sense whatsoever.

Even with all the punditry, the Sex and the City movie's popularity at this point, is similar to the appeal of the much-loved SatC-approved Magnolia Bakery cupcake. You have to wait on long lines to consume it; it is full of saccharine and empty calories; you might feel a little sick to your stomach when it's over, but you were happy to let yourself indulge, just for a little while, in a buttercream fantasy. And once it's out of your small intestine, you forgot it ever existed.

Sexism And The City [Newsweek]
The New Yorker Turns “Sex And The City” Gals Into Monsters, All Of Them [Best Week Ever]
Carrie [New Yorker]
Switching Places [New Yorker]
Hillary And The City [Slate]

Earlier: Sarah Jessica Parker Squeals In Dismay Over Time Out New York Cover