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Sex and the City
Opinion is divided on Sex and the City, and not just by the male-female divide that you might expect.
Sex and the City will appeal more to casual fans of the series than to died-in-the-wool devotees. If you can't wait to see it, you might be disappointed - but if you're only mildly interested then your experience is likely to be more positive. In the end, does Carrie finally marry Big and live happily ever after? After two and a half hours, I'm not sure any of you will care very much. I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: - Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte all have nude scenes (i.e. all but SJP) but only Miranda (the pointy ginger one) actually shows anything. There is a short glimpse of willy for the ladies. The language is rather reined-in compared to the series, for the benefit of the US ratings system. To enjoy this film you should be: familiar with the series without being a hardcore fan.
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Have you ever seen the UK TV series Men Behaving Badly? Sex and the City is like that, but for women. Allow me to explain.
Men Behaving Badly appeals to men because it takes the core boorishness and slobbishness that lurks in the soul of every man
and makes it the centre of the characters' personalities, who become shallow and one-dimensional as a result.
Men recognise themselves in the characters, even though they don't actually behave like that.
Sex and the City is the same - the self-absorption that hides away within every woman is magnified into the four New Yorkers.
Again, women recognise themselves even though, thank heavens, they don't act like that. So it's no surprise that City is
far more popular with women than men. Unfortunately though, this is not a patch on Men Behaving Badly.
The problem is that they've tried to give it weight. In each episode of the series, Carrie would learn something supposedly
insightful about herself and her cronies and would give a painfully trite Jerry Springer-type summation at the end -
I never did figure out whether that was supposed to be ironic or was in fact written by someone with the emotional
intelligence of a cabbage. By the next episode, they'd forgotten all the lessons learned and had gone back to being
vacuous bints again, but it was fun doing it that way and was a key to its success. In the movie, there's far less
witty banter (yes, some of the dialogue in the series was actually pretty clever) and oh-so-much wailing and gnashing of
freshly whitened molars. It's not fun any more.
Performance-wise, none of the four leads give their best - there's a certain weariness in the demeanour of all of them.
Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)
shows sparks of the talent that won her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, but she's burdened with some appalling dialogue
that she can't conquer - but she still gives the most memorable turn. More worthy of note are the outfits - how
anyone can think they look good in clown clobber is beyond me, but then that's probably the point. They can weed out
commoners like me from my reaction to their ludicrous regalia that cost more than my car. I'm serious, I've genuinely
spent more on a car than their HANDBAG costs. And I can drive the same car twice to the same place without feeling people
are judging me. Playing supporting roles to the fashion product placement are the token men who, as always, are woman
fodder, reminiscent of those old school fetes where the PE teacher puts himself in the stocks and lets people throw sodden
sponges at him. It never seems to occur to the scriptwriter that in real life these men would run over broken glass to
get away from such harpies. That's where Men Behaving Badly scores - it points out that the blokes' core qualities are
hugely crap and laughs at them. Here, they're still crap but no-one seems to notice.
