Guys will need a MacGruber dirt bath to survive the estrogen explosion that is Sex and the City 2. But the makers of this follow-up to the 2008 box-office hit ($158 million) and the 94 episodes of the HBO series that preceded it know their audience. Sex 2 defines the pleasures of a Ladies Movie-Night Out (gay friends welcome). Talk of men, motherhood and menopause is powered by the worship of shoes, fashion, spending and anything with a chichi label.

Whatever goodwill the film generates comes from celebrating friendship among women. After a promising start with Carrie (the sparkling, scrappy Sarah Jessica Parker) and Big (Chris Noth) enduring the "terrible twos" of their marriage, sex-crazed Samantha (Kim Cattrall) packs off the girls, including newly unemployed lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and harried mother of two Charlotte (Kristin Davis), for a freebie week in beautiful, buttoned-down Abu Dhabi. Temptations abound as the free-spirited women clash with tradition. Their bond survives, but the verdict is still out on the nation of Islam. Luckily, writer-director Michael Patrick King shot the film in Morocco. Abu Dhabi and the other United Arab Emirates might have issued a fatwa against the R-rated carnality and Samantha's thoughts about the desert as "Lawrence and my labia."

At two and a half hours, Sex 2 — like its predecessor — is a long sit in the shallows, the equivalent of five half-hour episodes strung together. Only two episodes, both before the stupefying Abu Dhabi jaunt and the painful karaoke of "I Am Woman," are really worth your time. Sex 1 had three. Prepare to come up short.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”