Here come the girls

When the first Sex and the City movie came out, the movie industry was left scratching its head about how they didn't see this one coming. Here was a movie aimed at women, based on a TV-show, about a fickle footwear-fetishist dithering over whether or not to get married, and it made over $400 million dollars at the global box office.

After a performance like that, it's safe to say that expectations for the sequel are higher than the heels on one of Sarah Jessica Parker's ridiculous shoes. The buzz has been building for months, with the film being pitched as ideal counter-programming for World Cup widows, and gays with nothing better to do for a couple of hours.

The movie's trailer gave audiences a pretty comprehensive peek into what the movie has to offer - lots of female bonding over pink drinks, Carrie and her pals dressing like a group of clowns who charge by the hour, and a whole lot of camel toe. I'm not being disgusting there, they actually go to Dubai and ride camels.

Well, the movie might be set in Dubai but it was filmed in Morocco, which was a little more welcoming to a film about four sexually promiscuous Cosmo-quaffers. Put off by the UAE's somewhat conservative views on women and alcohol consumption, director Michael Patrick King thought that the North African country would be a more workable location, sensitively describing it as "Muslim light".

Not that we should expect a thorough examination of the role of women in contemporary Muslim culture from a film in which Carrie describes the girls' Middle-Eastern jaunt as being "just like Jasmine [the Disney princess from Aladdin] but with cocktails." Judging by the sneak peaks released so far, Sex and the City 2 looks set to make Carry On Up The Khyber seem like the height of anthropological veracity.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh here. After all, this is a film about sex, shopping and slingbacks. Audiences will be far more interested in seeing how extreme the fab foursome's outfits can get without one of them being sectioned. There's a reason why the film's costume budget has been rumoured to be as much as $10 million.

More importantly, the real question on fans' minds is whether or not Carrie will succumb to hunky carpenter Aiden's charms and cheat on husband Mr. Big. The trailer tries hard to give nothing away, but eagle-eyed viewers have noticed that there are other clues pointing towards Carrie's penchant for infidelity.

Carrie's ever-present Macbook is as central to her character as a closet full of Manolos. OK, I never said this was deep. And from the pilot episode, right through to the last movie, we've always seen our heroine sitting in the window, tapping out her thoughts in the glow of little white Apple. But not anymore.



She's done the dirty on her beloved laptop, and picked up an HP instead. Which I'm sure has everything to do with consistent character development, and nothing to do with the fact the PC giant signed a massive product placement deal with the film's producers.

Even the Guardian has weighed in on this important subject, with Zoe Williams arguing that "Macs were invented for [people like Carrie], people without IT support, with no skills or office training, with very little likelihood of ever accruing any knowledge or expertise, with no backbone or basic housekeeping procedures."

More importantly, the Macbook is the Louis Vuitton holdall of the computer world. Depicting Carrie working on a generic laptop is like expecting her to go swinging down the street in a pair of Hi-Tec trainers, with a Lidl carrier bag over her arm.

This is one franchise that owes Mac a little loyalty. After all, it must have taken a whole warehouse full of them to muster the necessary computing power needed to generate the poster artwork for the new sequel.

Testament to the power of Photoshop, the posters have been rightly slated for making the girls look about as realistic as Jessica Rabbit. In particular, Kim Catrall is completely unrecognisable, almost as though she's undergone an experimental facial treatment using a PedEgg and a bottle of Tipp-Ex.

So much for the female empowerment and sisterhood that the series always prided itself on.

Sack the researchers

Thanks, once again, to the Mail on Sunday for yet another extraordinarily lazy piece of 'churnalism' based on blind speculation and a willingness to ignore the facts.

In today's paper they ran yet more pictures from the New York set of the forthcoming Sex and the City 2, showing Kristin Davis as permanently peppy Charlotte York, along with insinuations that the actress appears unnaturally fresh-faced.

The much publicised sequel to the surprise smash hit (surprising in that no-one in Hollywood realised that women watch movies too) reunites the whole gang for more sex talk, uneaten lunches and shoe porn.

One of the key scenes currently being filmed is a flashback sequence set in the 1980s, that allows all the show's lead actresses to showcase a range of 'hilariously' dated outfits, only marginally worse than most of the clobber Sarah Jessica Parker modelled in the long-running TV show. SJP herself looks like a basketball player on his way to a fancy dress party as Madonna, whereas Kim Catrall seems to be channeling a grandma who charges by the hour.

As for Charlotte, well, she just looks the same. Peppy, fresh-faced and twee, with a cashmere sweater draped around her neck. But those keen-eyed journalists have spotted a difference, pointing out telling patches between her eyes and hairline.

The Mail speculates that, despite a lifelong fear of needles, Davis may have had a big date with Mr Botox. They even go so far as to point out that she has been "praised in the past for being one of a handful of Hollywood stars who manage to maintain their looks without cosmetic surgery", thereby sealing her fate as a vain hypocrite.

The problem is, it's quite clear from the photos that the film-makers have simply fallen back on the easiest way to shave 20-plus years off anyone's appearance - using a combination of face tape and wigs. And since the Daily Mail already ran pictures of Davis appearing in the flashback scenes, they know exactly why she looks younger than usual.

In the end, it's easy to understand why the Daily Mail has such an obsession with Botox - after all, they're both just regular injections of poison designed to make people ever-more fearful of getting old.

Girls just wanna claw each other's eyes out

If the papers are to be believed (note to self: never believe the papers), there's trouble brewing on the set of Iron Man 2. According to reports, which amount to little more than tip-offs from anonymous sources keen to make a quick buck, Gwyneth Paltrow hasn't exactly rolled out the yoga mat for franchise newcomer Scarlett Johansson.

Having played improbably-named love interest Pepper Potts in the first film, Paltrow was probably expecting a beefed-up role in the sequel. Instead, it seems that Gwyneth is seeing red about Scarlett, who's onboard to play Black Widow, a Russian spy, in the big-budget follow-up.

Speculative stories have been hitting the web for a couple of months now, suggesting that Paltrow and Johansson are at loggerheads. Strangely, one report even went so far as to suggest that Gwyneth was trying to physically 'deflate' Scarlett by sharing her personal trainer and doing daily workouts together. Sharing and togetherness - hardly the first signs of a woman gripped with insane jealousy.

In typically nonsensical style, the Daily Mail once again manages to state 'fact' and then negate it within a couple of paragraphs, by saying that Gwyneth is planning to boycott a promotion in San Diego later this month, only to then quote a spokesman who rubbishes the entire story.

But there's no smoke without fire, or so says conventional wisdom. The problem is, stories like this tend to emerge whenever successful women come together.

There was the rivalry between Sharon Osbourne and Dannii Minogue on The X-Factor, and then, when the Wicked Witch of the West (coast) left, the rivalry passed on to new judge Cheryl Cole. The Sex and the City movie was almost a no-go due to the supposed in-fighting between Kim Catrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, and even when the movie was finished the rumours persisted, over ridiculous details like who stood where on a photoshoot. And who can forget the time when All Saints broke up over a jacket that Shaznay and Natalie both wanted to wear at a Capital FM Christmas concert?

The funny thing is, these exposés never seem to surface about male stars. Were the papers full of made-up stories about George Clooney and Brad Pitt battling over who stood where on the Ocean's 11 poster, or punch-ups between Shane and Kian in Westlife?

There's a fundamental misogyny at the heart of all this, that weakens the position of every one of these women each time these rumours are presented as fact. And once again, it means that they have to work twice as hard, and keep their noses twice as clean, just to be treated as equals.

Weirdly enough, Gwyneth herself may have put her finger on it when talking about the clash between Pepper Potts and the Black Widow in the plot of Iron Man 2: "The men want it to be, like, 'Ooh, the girls are fighting over Tony,' but it's not as standard as that. There's a weird male catfight fantasy."