Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis in Sex & the City 2SEX & THE CITY 2

Sex & the City 2 begins with a multi-million-dollar gay wedding at which Liza Minnelli serves as officiator and headliner, and somehow manages to grow even more over-the-top, garish, and belief-defying over its next two hours and 20 minutes. It should be said that writer/director Michael Patrick King's follow-up is only rarely dull, mainly because the act of repeatedly lifting your jaw up off the floor can't help but keep you awake. Yet S&TC2 is still an obscene and desperately unfunny ordeal, even if - maybe especially if - you derived occasional or continual pleasure from its six-season HBO forbear or King's 2008 big-screen offshoot.

Disney's A Christmas CarolDISNEY'S A CHRISTMAS CAROL

For the most part, Disney's A Christmas Carol - the third of director Robert Zemeckis' features to employ the process of performance-capture animation - is a strong, serious, stunningly well-designed piece of work, and an unexpectedly resonant take on Charles Dickens' holiday classic. But I do feel compelled to ask Mr. Zemeckis a question: Must everything be transformed into a Hollywood thrill ride?

Gary Jules

Despite being an internationally known singer and songwriter, Gary Jules -- performing on Sunday at Huckleberry's in a Daytrotter.com show -- has neither a manager nor a publicist.

He did at one time, riding his and Michael Andrews' version of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" to the top of the UK pop charts in late 2003.

But the success, he said in a phone interview last week, led to "a lot of stuff I considered to be, I don't know, pork-barrel spending, fat that needed to be trimmed. ...

"I ended up in a lot of situations that I wasn't comfortable with. ... This is not what I started doing music for. A lot of those things were generated either through the people I had hired or the miscommunication between me and them."

By uncomfortable situations, Jules doesn't mean hookers and drugs. ("I'm totally fine with hookers and drugs," he joked.) But managers and publicists would try to get him in Rolling Stone and Spin and other major music magazines, while Jules felt his audience was more likely to read Dwell.

"You can spend a whole lot of money on traditional music-publicity stuff without ever really getting anything done ... ," he said. "There are a lot more interesting ways to do publicity and to have a career these days."

Jules would know. He had the happy accident of "Mad World," used at the emotional climax of Richard Kelly's 2001 cult-classic film Donnie Darko, other successes in film and television licensing, and the on-air support of influential radio hosts Nic Harcourt (of KCRW in Santa Monica, California) and Bruce Warren (of WXPN in Philadelphia).