Cards on the table. I have seen maybe five episodes of Sex and the City with my wife when it has come on and I've been too lazy to complain.
The only instalment that stayed in my head was the "funky spunk" episode -- because I couldn't believe I was actually seeing a TV show where the plot revolved around the taste of ... well it got my attention.
I didn't mind the series, it was loose, light and short (and by necessity fast-moving).
Sometimes when the designer names started flying by like air-traffic control jargon ("Yes, we have a Prada vector with Manolo Blahnik crosswinds. Suggest you purchase a Christian Dior on sale niner-four-niner. It's fabulous. Over.") I'd briefly feel like one of those guys sitting in the chairs at women's wear stores waiting "just a minute." But otherwise I could see the appeal to women and found levels on which it appealed to me too (mainly the sex part).
To me, Sex and the City: The Movie is everything the TV series was not.
It is long.
It is overly heavy -- at least an hour-and-a-half of its two-and-a-half-hour running time is spent with its heroine in abject heartbreak and depression, and that's when her friends aren't experiencing same.
It may be a case of the producers getting four years to over-think, since we've been told that the original plan was to send Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) on a girly Hope & Crosby-type spa vacation and build a movie around it.
That would have been more fun than this -- although fans would have missed out on the half-hour of Bridezilla-style "wedding porn" that opens Sex and the City: The Movie -- with a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress as the money-shot.
Will-they-or-won't-they is the central question in Sex and the City: The Movie.
As it opens, we find Carrie and Big (Chris Noth) finally transcending the his-place/my-place relationship they've had since the Clinton administration to jointly rent a giant penthouse. Which leads to the where-is-this-going conversation that backs itself into a half-hearted I-do-if-you-do marriage proposal that is all the editor of Vogue (Candace Bergen) needs to hear before dedicating an entire issue to the wedding of the city's most eligible bachelorette. Already, there's more pressure than Charles and Di.
That would be enough drama for one movie, but writer/director Michael Patrick King seems bound by a blood oath to give each of the foursome drama of their own.
Miranda and Steve have a crisis.
Samantha and her boytoy have one too (embodied by an orgy-throwing hardbody who moves in next door -- did I mention there are a few racy scenes in this movie?).
Charlotte gets pregnant.
Almost identical themes of offence, redemption and forgiveness tie all the plots together like cables on the George Washington Bridge. And oh yeah, Jennifer Hudson is along to play Carrie's magical assistant.
The busyness comes at the expense of wit. There's a great throwaway line at a frantic moment in which Carrie can't use an iPhone, and the most self-conscious gag in the movie is a poop joke.
Otherwise, it would have been better to let the bitchy gay characters (such as Mario Cantone's wedding designer Anthony) out of the closet more.
They got all the best lines in the series anyway.
(This film is rated 18A)
More Movie Reviews
