Early in the week, in the Daily Beast, King penned a love letter to the sequel he wrote, produced and directed, titled “Can a Straight Man Love ‘Sex and the City’?” In it, he claimed, “In the past several weeks, a few male reporters have boldly told me they enjoyed the sequel, a break away from the herd mentality.” Couldn’t have been our own Andrew O’Hehir, who called the movie a “ghastly, gassy, undead franchise-extender.” Or A.O. Scott, who said, “The ugly smell of unexamined privilege hangs over this film like the smoke from cheap incense.” Or Roger Ebert, who said the characters made his skin crawl? In fact, if there’s one thing seemingly universally agreed upon among men, women, gays and straights, it’s that trying to bring back to life things better left dead is almost always a disastrous, ugly, brain-eating enterprise. Which makes you, sir, lord of the zombies.

King, the man behind some of the original series’ best episodes — I still use the phrase “emotionally slutty” on a regular basis — now stands equally culpable for the franchise’s utter decline. The “girls,” who were always flawed but earnest and even earthy, have now become nothing more than shrieking mannequins. In the cruelly two-and-a-half-hour-long sequel, they flounce not just around Manhattan, where at least that sort of thing is ubiquitous enough to get a free pass, but also bring their increasingly shallow values to the Middle East. Great, just what the world needs: another bunch of American liberators.

Speaking to Hitflix this week, King said, “When we were lucky enough, because of the love that was thrown our way by the box office of the first movie, to do a sequel, the first thing I knew was, I wanted it to be a continuation of the party for the audience.” Yes, fans, this is all your fault. You couldn’t just let it go naturally, could you? You just kept right on loving those cosmo-swilling shoe hoarders until King went and turned the whole thing into this vile, remarkably sexless celebration of boredom and shopping. Well, I hope you’re happy now. Because King didn’t just trash four characters who once could do more than make dumb jokes about “Lawrence of My Labia.” Nope, he had to take married men, Middle Easterners, gays, and even Liza Minnelli down in a blaze of awfulness. If, however, King was looking to combine everything the rest of America — nay, the world — hates about us in New York, mission accomplished. Because if this high-heeled, forty-something Manhattanite woman thinks you’ve lost your shit, you’re not going to get much sympathy anywhere else.

Sure, “Sex and the City” was only a series about a bunch of privileged white chicks. It’s not like King peed on Guernica here. But he’s now shown us he has either a tragic disconnect with his characters and his audience or a mercenary contempt for both. In an interview with the Advocate last week, King said, “‘Sex and the City’ reflects the world as I see it.” Shallow? Bitter? A hollow shell of its once likable self? Botoxed up the yin-yang? That’s a weird worldview in itself. But to take something you helped build and make its own biggest fans hate you for it, well, that’s more than lame. It’s stake-through-your-heart crazy.

Part of what made the original HBO show so important was its ability to keep its finger on the pulse: From its relationship dilemmas to its frank sexual talk, the show prided itself on being hip and edgy. The movies, by contrast, are a testament to what happens when people lose touch. They feel insincere, overblown, transparently commercial — and in the case of the recent sequel, brutally culturally insensitive. But most surprising of all, given the fact that both movies were written and directed by the openly gay Michael Patrick King, is how retrograde they are in their treatment of gayness.

The two main gay characters, Carrie’s chubby pal Stanford (Willie Garson) and Charlotte’s sassy BFF Anthony Marantino (played by Mario Cantone), are tragically asexual helpmates whose main role has always been to provide relationship advice to the show’s straight female characters, fling bitchy quips, or let their flamboyant outfits serve as a visual punch line. Anthony, in particular, is the worst kind of shallow, fashion-grubbing gay minstrel. In the sequel, however, the pair finally get the dignity of their own storyline: They marry each other.

“Her best gay friend is marrying my best gay friend!” exclaims Charlotte, in the sequel’s first scene, before Carrie adds, “Just when you thought everyone was too old to get married, here come the gays.”

It’s the clichéd, condescending hetero fantasy, the one in which you introduce the only two gay men you know, and magically, the sparks fly. If I had a dollar every time I met a woman who said, “Oh, you’re gay? You should meet my gay friend,” I could probably buy a plane ticket to Abu Dhabi (or, at the very least, Buffalo). And yet, in a movie that feigns to tackle the complexities of modern romance, all a gay man needs to do to find love is be placed in the general vicinity of another gay person — even if he’s as repellent as Mario Cantone.

Admittedly, when “Sex and the City” went on the air in 1998, the gay television landscape was vastly different. Characters like Will and Jack on NBC’s “Will & Grace” had to be sexless and underdeveloped to make them palatable to nervous American audiences still getting used to the idea of two homos smack dab in the middle of must-see TV. Both those men existed primarily in the context of their female friendships, and, like Stanford and Anthony, had little to no romantic life, instead spending most of their screen time helping women untangle theirs.

But over the past decade, television portrayals of gay men have cracked open into something far more nuanced. Starting with “Queer as Folk” (with its near-explicit gay sex scenes) followed by “Six Feet Under” (with Michael C. Hall’s troubled gay funeral home director) and “The Wire” (which dared to make its brilliant antihero, Omar, a gay man) and “Brothers and Sisters” (with troubled gay family member, Kevin Walker) and “Modern Family” (with its gay male adoptive family), gay men in television have become something much closer to flesh and blood — with sex lives, personal dilemmas and, in some cases, children. (Though kissing is still verboten on “Modern Family.”)

It’s a change that parallels the way gay people have, in real life, become less and less troubled and defined by their sexuality (and has a precedent in the way black people stopped merely being the “hired help” of the films of the 1940s and ’50s and took on complex personalities in film). But much like the female heroines’ designer fetishes, the gay characters in “Sex and the City” are still trapped in some very glittery late-’90s amber.

Consider Stanford and Anthony’s gay wedding. Held at a Connecticut country estate, the entire affair is more kitsched out than Liberace at a tinsel convention. There are swans, crystal-adorned everything, a chorus of gay men wearing sparkly, sparkly hats. The SATC girls say things like, “Could this wedding get any gayer?” Cue Liza Minnelli, who appears to perform a ceremony during which Stanford and Anthony call each other “broom” (a combination of “bride” and “groom”). Liza follows this up with her much-buzzed about Beyoncé “Single Ladies” cover, which perfectly encapsulates the mixture of misguided camp and pathos that plagues most of the film.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a glitzy, kitschy wedding, or a gay man who loves fashion, but the problem is the fact that, in the “Sex and the City” universe, that’s the only form of gayness that exists. The characters are stuck with a neutered marginality, a world bathed in sparkles and camp in which the term “broom” isn’t considered offensive or infantilizing and Liza Minnelli still rules the discos. It’s a culture, unbeknownst to many straight Americans, that has long since disappeared from the life of the vast majority of gay men. For people my age, who came of age in the ’90s, the mainstreaming of gay culture meant pushing away from those clichéd ideas of gayness and finding new icons. Not Liza but Ellen. Not show tunes but indie rock.

During the early, taboo-shredding seasons of “Sex and the City,” a common critique of the show was that the characters were really just gay men in drag, with their constant talk of casual promiscuity, rim jobs and “spunk.” Openly gay creator Darren Star launched the show in the late ’90s, pre-”Queer as Folk,” when the idea of a premium cable show about the lives of gay men was still unthinkable, and it’s perhaps inevitable that he would map his own experiences onto the stories of four candid women. Even today, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte make far more convincing gay men than Stanford and Anthony ever have. When Michael Patrick King joined the franchise, he, along with a staff of largely female writers, took care to make those four protagonists convincing visions of modern womanhood rather than mere cartoons — but, ironically, that character shading was never afforded to the token gays who buzzed around the sidelines.

Sure, “Sex and the City 2″ is an escapist romp not meant to be taken seriously. It’s filled with pretty landscapes, extravagant fashion and lighthearted problems. But it’s also poised to make massive bank on a holiday weekend (estimates have it overtaking its previous blockbuster box office). It’s depressing to see such an antiquated vision of gay culture and relationships get such massive play. I know, I know — a large number of the viewers will likely be gay men. For them, I offer a humble suggestion: If you’re looking for a gay old time on Memorial Day weekend, Jake Gyllenhaal will be just a few theaters over, flexing his muscles in “Prince of Persia.”

This isn’t breaking news, but there’s no necessary connection between big-time critical hatred and a film’s commercial fate: Sometimes bad publicity can destroy a movie at the box office (“Gigli,” “Glitter,” “Howard the Duck”), but just as often a picture loathed by the literati is a huge hit anyway (“Battlefield Earth” or “Cocktail”). And then there’s “Showgirls,” and to a lesser degree “Hudson Hawk” — movies that wear their bad reviews like medals into a glorious afterlife. Herewith, at least arguably, the 10 most-trashed big movies of recent decades.

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Big yearns to lie on the $12,000 leather couch, get fat on takeout food and watch the Weather Channel on his new flat-screen TV — the character seems to have bypassed his 50s and gone straight to supper-at-Denny’s age since the first SATC film — but through various forms of time-honored feminine coercion Carrie extorts diamond jewelry out of him and drags him to restaurants and red-carpet premieres night after night. Oh, the suffering! They’re like the wounded couple in Bergman’s “Scenes From a Marriage,” except with millions and millions of dollars and no souls. When Carrie asks Big, “Am I just a bitch wife who nags you?” I could hear all the straight men in the theater — all four of us — being physically prevented from responding.

Just in case you think the recession had no effect on Big and Carrie’s lifestyle, au contraire! They were forced to sell their fabulous rooftop penthouse and now must make do with just two enormous Manhattan apartments, only one of which has a walk-in closet larger than my living room. Carrie’s nearly done decorating the place and has written a new book, leaving her alone with the annoying collection of tics and mannerisms — head cocked at a 45-degree angle, lips pursed expectantly, eyebrows raised in a nonspecific interrogative — that have come to dominate Parker’s performances.

King isn’t one-third as interested in his two mom characters, Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), but their various versions of overprivileged parenthood also look like living hell. Something to do with the Problems of Today’s Women, which include workplace sexism, fingerpaint on vintage Valentino dresses and Irish nannies with huge tits. I guess that leaves single-white-femaleness, the existential condition on which this empire was built. But this film’s only representative of singlehood is 52-year-old über-cougar Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who’s involved in a desperately cheerful attempt to turn back the hands of time. She ingests more high-grade pharmaceutical hormones than the entire 2002 Tour de France. She rubs ointment on her vulva while taking a business call. She tells her girlfriends she’s tricked her body into thinking it’s younger: “By the time you ladies are 50, I’ll be 35!”

Even more unforgivably, we see Samantha wearing the same appalling but expensive dress as Miley Cyrus, playing herself in a scene that’s supposed to be comic and affirmative but is just witheringly sad. Granted, over the television life of “Sex and the City,” Samantha was brought closer and closer to clowning, with Cattrall’s game but overcooked performance walking a hysterical knife-edge between actual sexiness and a terrifying last-call-on-skid-row simulacrum thereof. But she began as one of the coolest, most liberated TV characters since Mary Richards, and now she’s begging for red-carpet sisterly solidarity with Hannah fucking Montana.

It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the “Saw” franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks. Instead of that, we get something that’s truly sadistic: the SATC girls as haggard specters, haunted by their freewheeling ’90s past and stupefied by the demands of work, marriage and/or motherhood. This bloated, incoherent movie mimics an SATC episode in structure — vague social relevance at the beginning and the end, conspicuous consumption in the middle — with virtually none of the wit or panache, and seems devoted to destroying our affection for these characters.

Our central foursome, with various partners and offspring in tow, reunite at the beginning of “Sex and the City 2″ for the Connecticut wedding of ol’ pals Anthony (Mario Cantone) and Stanford (Willie Garson). As Carrie tells a Bergdorf clerk, “Just when you think your friends are too old to get married, here come the gays!” In staging this long and often mind-boggling wedding sequence as a combination of Broadway musical and teenage-girl ballet fantasia, and dressing his extras in caricatured Fire Island get-ups, King seems to be posing the rhetorical question: Can a gay-wedding scene staged by a gay director still be homophobic and offensive? I think I’m voting for yes, especially since Stanford and Anthony disappear from the movie right after their nuptials and play no role in what happens later. (Spoiler alert! Liza Minnelli dance number Liza Minnelli dance number Liza Minnelli dance number! OMG scary!)

Do you really want me to reconstruct how this movie gets from a gay wedding in Connecticut through the lugubrious scenes of Carrie and Big’s vampire-like existence and onward somehow to a girls-only, all-expenses-paid luxury getaway to Abu Dhabi? Because I can’t. King’s storytelling operates on the premise that the viewer zones out every few minutes, and when she swims back up to the surface again, something new should be happening. Preferably involving camels. Yes, there is a scene involving camels in which the term “camel-toe” is verbally and visually invoked, and that might be even more embarrassing than the moment when Samantha refers to a manly desert-adventurer type as “Lawrence of my labia.”

In perhaps the movie’s most telling moment, Samantha responds to the Abu Dhabi invitation by exclaiming: “Two years of bad business and this bullshit economy — I’m done! I need to go somewhere rich!” “Sex and the City” and its women are artifacts of the gone-but-not-forgotten economic boom, and the fictional Abu Dhabi of “SATC2″ — which is either Morocco or a studio soundstage — has nothing to do with the real Middle East and everything to do with a consumerist-masturbation fantasy where the ’90s never ended.

I half-expected Monica Lewinsky to show up in a cameo, except that presumes A) a sense of humor and B) a depth of historical knowledge that King does not possess. This movie might as well be set in Czarist Russia or on the Ice-Diamond Planet of K’Znorg, for all the realism it provides. Abu Dhabi is just the answer to King’s narrative question: How can I get these 40-something gals out of their miserable, disgustingly-rich-but-ordinary lives, into a succession of frightful high-fashion outfits and into some version of the single-woman Manhattan playland they used to inhabit?

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. This is doubly frustrating because there’s the germ of an interesting idea here — ultra-randy Samantha, going head-to-head with Islamic sexism and Puritanism — which is handled too clumsily to be either funny or dramatically effective.

Indeed, this movie’s offensive on many levels, but Arabs and Muslims don’t get to feel special. It relies on stupid stereotypes because it’s a stupid movie that’s offensive to virtually everyone. It’s offensive to the demographic it claims to adore — straight women and gay men — who are depicted, more than ever, as hopelessly obsessed with the surface of things, to the point where they forget there’s anything below that. The only reason it isn’t offensive to straight men is that there aren’t any; Big is something else, a shambling, half-dead ghoul enslaved to a demonic harridan. (One of Carrie’s old boyfriends makes a token reappearance and livens up the movie briefly, but he’s a purely perfunctory complication.)

It’s offensive to an entire audience who came of age with these women and who remain breathtakingly loyal, and out of nostalgic affection may not have the heart to turn away from them. It’s offensive to King’s own creations, toward whom he now seems to feel nothing but contempt. It’s offensive because it keeps cattle-driving a franchise once based on sparkle and economy toward new heights of painful, frantic emptiness. I kept telling myself, over and over, that Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte — the real, flawed, funny, recognizably human ones, not these lobotomized zombie replacements — would never do anything so dumb.

Michael Patrick King’s exquisitely tone-deaf movie is cinematic Viagra for Western cultural imperialists who still ignorantly and inaccurately paint the entire Middle East (and Iran) as a Shangri La in desperate need of liberation from ignorant, backward natives. Historian Bernard Lewis, the 93-year-old Hall of Fame Orientalist and author of such nuanced gems as “The Arabs in History” and “Islam and the West,” would probably die of priapism if he saw this movie. It’s like the cinematic progeny of “Not Without My Daughter” and “Arabian Nights” with a makeover by Valentino. Forget the oppressed women of Abu Dhabi. Let’s buy more bling for the burqa!

Our four female cultural avatars, like imperialistic Barbies, milk Abu Dhabi for leisure and hedonism without making any discernible, concrete efforts to learn about her people and their daily lives. An exception is Miranda, whose IQ drops about 100 points as she dilutes the vast complexities of a diverse culture into sound bites like this: “‘Hanh Gee’ means ‘yes’ in Arabic!”

Only it doesn’t — it’s Hindi and Punjabi, which is spoken by South Asians.

She also incorrectly tells the audience that all women in the Middle East have to cover themselves. And, yes, nearly every single Middle Eastern female character in “SATC 2′s” imaginative rendition of “Abu Dhabi,” is veiled, silent or subdued by aggressive men.

Like curious visitors staring at an exotic animal in the zoo with equal doses of horror and fascination, the four “girls” observe a niqabi female eating French fries by carefully lifting her veil for each consumed fry. After witnessing this “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” event, Samantha declares, “It’s like they don’t want [women] to have a voice.”

If our cultural ambassadors truly cared about saving Muslim women, they surely would try to help them during the film’s interminable two and half hour running time, no? Sadly, instead, these incredibly shallow mock-feminists can’t even bother to have one decent conversation with a Muslim woman, because they’re too immersed in picnics on the desert and singing Arab disco karaoke renditions of “I Am Woman.” In fact, Abu Dhabi is just peachy when it’s a fantasy land where they ride around in limos and get comped an extravagantly vulgar $22,000 hotel suite. However, only when that materialism is taken away do they worry, in only the most superficial way, about sexual hypocrisy and women’s oppression.

Meanwhile, the perpetually self-absorbed Carrie finds enlightenment in the simple, wise words of her Indian manservant Gaurav, who functions as the movie’s life-changing, magical minority. And Samantha, our “Western” avatar of freedom and liberation, offers a juxtaposition to the silent, oppressed Muslim women by making immature puns like “Lawrence of my Labia” and performing fellatio on a sheesha pipe in public.

The movie uses only two broad colors to paint the Middle East: One depicting an opulent Eden for our blissfully ignorant protagonists to selfishly use as a temporary escape, and the other showing an oppressive dungeon populated by intolerant men that cannot comprehend cleavage or bare shoulders.

Consider the film’s painful climax, in which Samantha, now wearing shorts and a low-cut top, spills dozens of condoms from her purse in the middle of a crowded market. Right before the condom explosion, the Islamic call to prayer, the Adhan, is conveniently heard for no discernible reason. The angry, hairy men, overwhelmed by anger and shock, decide to abandon their daily activities and busy life to encircle Samantha and condemn her as a harlot and slut, but not before Samantha proudly holds the condoms up high and dry humps the air telling the men she uses them to have sex. Because they cannot tolerate a sassy, back-talking, condom-using female baring her legs, they decide en masse to spontaneously chase all four women. Appearing like an oasis in the desert, two mysterious women in a burqa silently nod to the four girls, who subsequently follow the women into a secret room revealing the existence of a secret book club attended by a dozen niqabi women, who disrobe to reveal their hidden designer clothes, fashionable shoes and makeup.

OK, a bubble gum approach to reality is to be expected from “SATC2.” And one could imagine a scenario in which the frothy light comedy could be used to erase mutual misunderstandings. After all, Muslim women around the world, who religiously watched the show, would love a strong, empowered Muslim female “SATC” character who could enlighten Western audiences about the complex, and at times oppressive, reality of Middle Eastern women while simultaneously rocking Ferragamos. Instead, the film exists in a wacky cultural vacuum blissfully unaware of its own arrogance and prejudices. 

Apparently, we’re meant to believe Muslim women in the Middle East are equally self-absorbed, vain and materialistic. After completely dissing the Middle East, its people, its religion and its culture, it’s “Sex and the City” that truly insults the Muslim women, by silencing them entirely.

Wajahat Ali is the author of “The Domestic Crusaders,” a play about Muslim Pakistani Americans that will be published by McSweeney’s in the Fall 2010. He blogs at Goatmilk.