The same weekend “Sex and the City 2” hit theatres, the email copied below (which was leaked to Big Hollywood), titled: Is Sex & the City 2 Bad For America’s Brand?, made the rounds in the obvious hopes of kicking up and furthering the narrative that SATC2 was not only racist but also stereotyped Americans in a way that reinforced why Islamists hate us (as though the motivations of pure evil matter).
This email was disseminated to various media publications on behalf of Adam Hanft, a “branding and marketing expert,” eager to offer his important self up for interviews in the hopes of tarnishing and “branding” as racist a film that strayed from the Liberal Plantation — a cinematic fairy tale that dared to indulge in materialistic luxury and display an open defiance of Islamic Nazism.
And would it surprise you to learn that this same Adam Hanft is a HuffPoster?
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Date: Fri, May 28, 2010 at 12:24 PM
Subject: Expert Avail: Is Sex & the City 2 Bad For America’s Brand?
To: XXXX@XXXXXXXXHi XXXXXXX,
As the second Sex & the City flick hits theaters this weekend, cosmos and fashion are not the only thing in moviegoer’s mind. Scenes in which the NYC gals encounter misogynist attitudes from Middle Eastern men and joke of women wearing the niqab – a Muslim face veil – when they visit Abu Dhabi, have caused quite a stir among film critics.
Is this movie contributing to the negative stereotype Americans have of culturally insensitive people?
Branding and marketing expert, Adam Hanft, has recently commented on the topic. Below, please find some of his thoughts:
“The movie is bad for America’s global brand. It reinforces every fundamentalist stereotype that we’re decadent, superficial, materialistic robots. It stereotypes the Arab world and makes it a playground for our consumerist fantasies, no different than it was for 19th imperialists who plundered the world to feather their own self-indulgent nests.
If Goldman-Sachs is capitalism at its most selfish, Sex and the City is capitalism at its most self-centered. I don’t know if it’s going to make a lot of money, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it created a lot of terrorists. If I were running recruiting for the Taliban or Al Qaeda, I’d put clips of it in every online video.”
Please let me know if you’d like to speak with Adam, and I’ll be happy to schedule an interview!
Thanks!
This is how the Leftist entertainment media works. It’s all about crafting a narrative to teach a lesson to those in the artistic community who don’t follow the bouncing ball through the leftist talking points. No one anywhere, especially Hollywood, wants to be accused of racism or “cultural insensitivity.” And imagine being accused of creating a product that aids in the recruitment of Jihadists.
And Hanft wasn’t the only one pushing this meme. This email is just one example of the vicious slander SATC2 writer/director Michael Patrick King has faced since the release of his hit film. And while I feel bad for King — who doesn’t deserve any of this — watching him get run through the leftist enforcement media-mill has served not only as a reminder of how difficult it is for free-thinking individuals to operate in Hollywood, but also how vicious and wildly hypocritical the blacklisting entertainment media is.
Michael Patrick King
Before we get to that, though, first my favorite part of any article: naming names:
Before leaving Abu Dhabi, the increasingly loathsome quartet become involved in a mishap that ends with Samantha … in the middle of a busy town square, holding up a package of condoms, thrusting her hips and shouting, “I have sex!!!” as the Muslim call to prayer is sounded. Sex and the City 2 won’t win any awards (save for a few Razzies), but it could become an effective inspirational video for suicide bombers[.]
I was first to plant a flag on the SATC-terrorism thing.Way back on May 28, 2008, after seeing Sex and the City: The Movie at a commercial Paris cinema, I called it “another Taliban recruitment film.” In a followup piece I suggested that “young Arab men might be so repelled by its celebration of putrid 21st Century chick culture that joining the Taliban might seem freshly appealing.” …
The spiritual cancer at the heart of the SATC franchise was just as pernicious two years ago as it is today…c’mon. Both films were sired by the same seed.
Casting aside the filmmakers’ breathtaking cultural insensitivity, their astonishing tone-deaf ear for dialogue and pacing, their demented, self-serving idea of female empowerment, the biggest sin of “Sex and the City 2” is its lack of beauty. It’s garish when it should be sumptuous, tacky when it should be luxe, wafer-thin when it should be whip-smart and sophisticated.
Pumped full of botox, popping hormones like Tic Tacs, she gets kicked out of Abu Dhabi for promiscuity, narrowly escaping an angry mob. After all those years of redefining female sexuality, we’re suddenly back to the beginning–Samantha has become a slut.
Wajahat Ali was correct to complain in Salon that King’s portrayal of the Muslim world is dumb and offensive: The “SATC2” coven has no problem with the “new Middle East” when it’s all about private manservants, endlessly flowing fruity-tooty cocktails and a comped luxury suite that looks like Al Pacino’s house from “Scarface,” only less tasteful and metastasized to infinite proportions. The foursome develops a sudden concern with the oppression of Arab and Muslim women only after the pipeline of pornographic bling-juice is cut off.
Incredibly, Salon also calls the film, directed and written by the openly gay King, “homophobic.”
The above examples are just that: examples. I could have buried you in them and not even begun to touch the frequently cruel and openly sexist (a word I don’t use lightly) attacks our so-called progressive media friends launched against the film and its female cast. For more on that you can start here and then click your way around the blogosphere.
King’s sin? Obviously, he forgot that among his Hollywood brethren; above liberty, women’s rights, gay rights, and human rights, the left’s highest value is the nonsense they so lovingly call multiculturalism — which is really nothing more than a license to label bigotry, cowardice, and anti-Americanism as some kind of virtue.
Though I touched on this in my review/defense of the film, SATC2 is nowhere near racist or “culturally insensitive.” The various Middle Eastern characters are all given their humanity, except for those who don’t deserve it: the mob of Islamists menacing Kim Cattrall’s character simply because she dares to wear a pair of shorts.
What’s interesting though, is which film the Left chose to label as a “terrorist recruitment video.” Yes, suddenly they’re patriots terribly concerned with America’s brand. Nice of them to finally join the party.
Granted, terrorists are no doubt willing to use whatever they can as recruitment tools and may well use SATC2. Who knows? Who cares? If not SATC2, then it will be something else. Should we put a stop to everything evil uses to beget evil? Unless it’s MSNBC or DVDs of “Thirtysomething,” I say no.
Whatever its creative short-comings (the film is far from perfect), in a sane world, King’s fairy tale of consumerism and criticism of sexist Islamism would be celebrated as an act of open defiance against an enemy that long ago declared war on us and our way of life. Which makes one wonder…
Had he been born 70 years later and produced a “Great Dictator” aimed at Osama bin Laden, would the Adam Hanfts of the Left be out attacking Charlie Chaplin for creating some kind of recruitment video? Obviously, from an artistic point of view, Chaplin’s masterpiece and King’s wish-fulfillment fluff are as far apart as you can get. But both stick a provocative finger in the eye of evil. Chaplin’s film was also released before the war. Would today’s elite critical class blame him for helping to cause the war?
And where is all this Leftist concern about our “brand” when Hollywood pumps out one toxic and provable lie after another about America and its military in the form of films like “In the Valley of Elah” and “Redacted,” which portray our troops as monsters; or “Green Zone” which told the world — based on a true story — that America lied about WMD and in the act of trying to cover that lie up caused the deadly insurgency in Iraq?
If you truly care about “America’s brand” — after sitting on your flag-waving hand during a years-long glut of box-office propaganda bombs produced with the obvious goal of undermining the American people’s will to win a righteous war, — you don’t suddenly use this untapped reservoir of patriotism to savage one of the few films with the guts to portray our enemies as they are.
Maybe it’s time someone teach these people that there’s a difference between appeasement and patriotism.
[INSERT WITHERING CRITICISM OF GLENN KENNY HERE]
Mr. Kenny, a well-known leftist film writer and critic, was going to be a part of this article, but… Well, let’s back up a bit.
So I’m sitting at my desk in my favorite position — minding my own damn business — when someone emails a heads up that Kenny’s trashing me at one of those foo-foo film sites. Curious, I check it out and lo and behold not only is he savaging me but also the USS Big Hollywood, John Simpson and The Boss. A few highlights:
[H]ow to get your own Two-Minute Hate session at Big HollywoodAlthough he’s a bit of an insufferable blowhard, [John] Simpson’s right.
And, no, what I was going for was not another example of how “They” are bad. Rather, I was making a direct assertion that Nolte and Breitbart are bad. And opportunistic.
As for my knowledge base on Nolte and Breitbart, I don’t feel particularly uncomfortable with it. Just to name a single for-instance out of any number of potential pieces, Nolte’s defense of the film “Kick Ass” and its Hit Girl character is not just objectively stupid, it’s so objectively stupid it could make you go blind. Breitbart’s a rage machine whose preferred method of arguing is to shout down whoever he thinks is in his face.
After engaging in a little of the ole’ back and forth in the comments, I then announced on Twitter my intention to respond on Big Hollywood (okay, it was more of a taunt — I am childish that way), and here’s part of an email Kenny sent in response to that: [emphasis mine]:
To: jjmnolte@hotmail.com
From: glennX@XXXXXXXX
Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2010 22:00:37 +0000Keep your claque in its own cesspool. I will hold you personally responsible for any threats I or any member of my family receive, by the way. In fact I’m calling a lawyer now.
Yes, shame on me for daring to engage in a fight I didn’t start. And just the thought of being sued by what I’m sure is the law firm of Glenn, His & Mommy has me trembling.
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.