[SPOILER ALERT] on a decade old movie.
I have friends who worship Sex and the City. As a TV show, it deserves all sorts of credit for pioneering the concept of women that don’t define themselves by a man, and doing so with style. For me, the TV show is about two things: independent women and living with style. The movie could have found a nice healthy balance of the two of them, but instead, it basically abandons the independent women part and embraces vapid, narcissistic style. Worst of all, Sex and the City carries itself with a condescending tone that openly mocks people not like them. How dare you…
The movie picks up where the TV show left off. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is madly in love with Mr. Big (Chris Noth). Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has moved to LA to manage her actor boy toy (Jason Lewis). And Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) are happily married living in the burbs. Carrie, worried about her possessions, decides to get married to Big, but complications ensue as a result of a designer dress, postponing the wedding and leaving Carrie crestfallen, with her friends trying to take her out of her funk.
So the first hour of this movie is not for me, and I get it: it’s straight up fan service. I do get a thrill where a movie opens on 4 badass women dictating their own lives; so I amusingly watched the clothes obsessions (they do look pretty fabulous) and self-importance from everyone, especially Carrie. Movies like this are dumb but harmless, so my score would be somewhere in the 2-2.5 range if it were just that. But then bad things start happening. Carrie LOVES all these labels but wants to wear a simple dress? 100% not in character, but ok. Carrie gets a stellar designer gown that leads to her ignoring her husband despite his VOCAL repudiation of a big wedding?? At least it’s in character, but it’s effing cruel to her supposed love in favor of personal vanity. Jumping ahead to the day before the wedding??? Wait, I thought this movie was about planning the big day, but apparently it wants us to think Big has kept quiet until the night before the wedding to express doubts. Now I’m getting pretty insulted, but whatever, I mean the movie is ending with a big wedding blowout which will be fun! But wait, Carrie gets pissed at Big because he freaked out for 5-10 minutes after she IGNORED HIM ALL DAY and calls off the wedding, leaving her friends to clean up the mess for her, forgetting that Big bought her a condo and built her a huge closet after she bitched about it??? That’s a level of callous narcissism that made me pretty pissed off.
At this point, the movie score has fallen to at best 1 out of 5 stars. So I checked the time left on the film, hoping for maybe a quick reconciliation then the blowout wedding. But wait! We’ve got another 90 EFFING MINUTES of film left to go! Any hope I had of something interesting happening in that 90 minutes was quickly dashed by a reprehensible sojourn of the 4 women to Mexico on Carrie’s honeymoon. During this session, we learn that the other 3 really don’t give a shit about their families, careers, or whatever because Carrie is hurting (noble, I guess, but bad from a movie point of view), make some out of left field prejudiced jokes against Mexico in service of a dumb poop joke, and that these women don’t even like each other that much because Miranda keeps wanting to reveal a secret about Big to Carrie but everyone keeps telling her not to, because the plot isn’t ready for her to reveal that information. At this point, the movie flirted with 0 stars for the rest of its excessive running time. You’re all probably wondering: well, at that length what about the other 3’s story lines. Um, what story lines? Samantha’s storyline adds a little porn porn to the female porn we are watching otherwise. Charlotte has NO storyline, a feat that is equally impressive and infuriating. The saving grace for a perfect 0 score is the Miranda story, which at least is emotionally honest and a mostly realistic depiction of difficulties of marriage from a woman’s point of view. As much as I appreciated Miranda’s story, she is also involved in the movie’s low point where she lets Carrie’s introspection and growth off the hook because that secret she holds cruelly finally comes out, returning Carrie to her belief that none of this situation is of her own making.
I imagine if you like glamour, clothes, New York, hot men, Sex and the City will be exactly like porn to you. For anyone looking for an enchanting moviegoing experience, I couldn’t recommend this movie less. It is impressive though, that the creators thought releasing this movie at the height of the recession was a great decision. They must be living in the same self-absorbed, shallow, haughty mindset of Carrie Bradshaw. Shame on you guys, for ruining the TV show for me.