Let me just state to the floor that I hold no animosity towards anyone mentioned in that subhead. Not even close!
Ari is a fascinating, gifted filmmaker whose work I am forever eager to engage with; Carrie is a fictional character in the Sex And The City universe who has provided my wife and I with decades of entertainment and now proceeds to trauma bond us on a weekly basis.
David’s take is spot on. HBO Max’s SATC sequel is a brain-bleedingly dumb show that we have tuned into like clockwork for three seasons and counting.
But it is not a hate watch.
“To take pleasure in laughing at or criticizing a disliked [insert here]” is a lame and corny way to move through life. And inaccurate, insofar as explaining And Just Like That’s black hole gravitational pull.
The show’s appeal is not irony or schadenfreude — though the Ze Germans are long overdue to come up with a good word for whatever is drawing us in.
Jake Nevins penned a fantastic NYT essay searching for answers.
It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.
Go on…
The characters are bizarrely estranged from their origins — they register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature… as the characters negotiate the indignities visited upon them by the revival, it’s as though they’ve crossed over into something else entirely — some kind of beyond-camp puppet state that feels hypnotically watchable. This is not merely a case of something being so bad it’s good, like fast food or Real Housewives, a franchise I adore even as I feel actively corrupted by it. By taking indelible characters and debasing them, And Just Like That encourages a sort of meta-engagement available to few other programs, putting itself in conversation with its predecessor and, by extension, us. We drop in on the characters’ lives with glee or secondhand embarrassment — laugh with them, then at them, or both at once.
That meta-engagment is real (see also: “The ‘And Just Like That’ Writers Know Everyone’s Mad at the Show”). Everyone involved knows there’s already audience buy-in for these beloved characters, so anything is possible; when our gals aren’t busy dealing with Today’s Problems™ (pronouns, podcasts, the inexorable march of time), they’re serving borderline fourth wall-breaking “can you believe this shit?” commentary like a sentient Evan Ross Katz screenshot.
The title of that Times piece btw?
“The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt.”
Does the show hate its characters? Its audience?
Both?
On some level, I think the latter is true — especially if we like the abuse.
Ari Aster’s Eddington is the length of five AJLT episodes back-to-back, though its particular flavor of current event fueled knife-to-brain is quite literally depicted onscreen.
My thoughts live on Letterboxd (LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE), but I’ve been texting back any friends asking if they should see it with some variation on “the parts I liked, I liked a lot.”
How could I not? Darius Khondji in this MF!
The film attempts to strike a delicate (and odd) tonal balance of smalltown Altman collage and Oliver Stone paranoid style mashed up with epic westerns and RoboCop. Like Aster’s batshit Beau Is Afraid, it’s also an endurance test by design — cinema made to grind the viewer down alongside the characters’ endless emotional and physical degradation.
My man doesn’t direct so much as inflict.
As such, the success rate for “the year’s most divisive film” remains up for debate. I think anyone calling it 2025’s best is buggingggggg, but agree that “it is hard to have a medium sized reaction to an Aster joint.”
Like it or not, Eddington makes you feel something. In my case, a blunt object to the frontal lobe, which is not necessarily a criticism…
As Aster’s friend, the comedian and filmmaker Bo Burnham, puts it: “The recurring motif in his work of severe head trauma is the single best metaphor I’ve seen for what it feels like to be alive today.”
What would Ari’s A24 version of And Just Like That be like?
Could the master of discomfort find a way to make Miranda’s meme even more heart-stoppingly cringe? A body horror take would be almost too on-the-nose; Charlotte already has power tool experience from 1987’s Doom Asylum, now streaming on Tubi (and restored on Blu-Ray for the real maniacs. “If you thought Sex And The City 2 was a stomach-churner, you ain't seen nothing yet…”)
Somehow even a bone saw pales in comparison to AJLT as it already exists.
But pleasure is relative. When Eddington doesn’t work (or works exactly as intended? WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS HERE, PEOPLE!) it indeed “seems possible that Aster isn’t trying to entertain anyone, full stop.”
But when it does, it is singular and mesmerizing — not unlike the misadventures of Carrie and her cohorts.
I couldn’t look away if I tried.
Playlists updated!