Sex and the City: The Movie

[Sylph]

So what do you think about it?

[JackPeyton]

amazing.

flawless.

perfection.

evberything iw anted and then some?

the best movie of the year?

shall i go on?

it really was all of the above. it was so great because it stuck to how the tv show worked. the show was about these 4 woman living in NYC dealing with life love and eachother. The movie picked that up and all the relationships with the men came in second as they should. i was worried it would be a big and carrie movie... but it wasnt and i was happy.

[EricMontreal22]

I felt it was like if a beloved soap opera of yours came to the big screen under a writer who didn't understand what made the soap beloved. I know King wrote most of the series and wrote this movie but they truly missed the appeal for me--it was a typical chick flick.

My good friend Marie actually emailed me back after seeing it and said it WAY better than I could so I'll just post her email (with her ok of course)

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""I agree 100% with the review you sent me and your thoughts. From the get-go I was having issues with it but kept sort of "looking away" so to speak. Such as:

The opener about women coming to New York for "labels and love." Oh, really? I wondered. Where do the women interested in making a big career for themselves go? Duluth?

Big suddenly deciding not to go through with the wedding. You could see that coming from a mile away.

The moment Big realizes what he's done--which comes just a second after he's told Carrie he's driving away. Am I forgetting something or did he not even TRY to call her back at the number she called him from? HE didn't know that she dropped the phone on the floor; wouldn't he have pressed "Received Calls" and called her back?

The whole premise that Big has been writing her love letters to get her back. Funny, I seem to recall at the end of the series that he still called her at home. Does carrie suddenly not have a home #? Also, did he think carrie was homeless? He couldn't just pop in or send one of his letters to her house? Only via e-mail (conveniently set up with a rule to move his e-mails to another inbox.)

The women all becoming typical chick flick characters where the happy ending is a wedding.

Charlotte somehow getting pregnant when the series spent whole SEASONS clarifying that as part of her character's challenge.

Samantha living in LA. It was pointless and required too many scenes with the women screaming whenever she showed up in a scene. She could have been living in NYC just as believably with Smith. They DO, after all, have actors in NYC, too, I believe.

But worst of all, for me, is the whole set-up: I could see those Manolos becoming Cinderella's glass slipper the moment she put them in the closet. I knew something was gonna happen. And when Carrie was reading Cinderella to Charlotte's girl, it just sealed my dread. But to make Carrie, who was supposed to be so "single and fabulous" reduced to typical chick flick stupidity was just too much/. Plus, didn't this show relish in "teaching us" girls (and gay men I assume) that a wedding is NOT the necesary happy ending--and now we're being told "well eventually it, after all, is"? Blah. And, that personal note aside, who did the writers think they were appeasing? Didn't most fans of the show see themselves in these characters? Therefore, if most of those people are single, how do they think thatb audience feels being pandered to,. yet again, by yet another movie that says, "You're nothing til you're married." Wasn't SATC ultimately about friends, with romance as a side dish, only?

And that's why I had so many issues at the end. (I saw it AGAIN at a friend's urging--I know Eric--and could barely sit through it.) Yet I can turn on a DVD from any season and think, "How could they produce so many 30-minute teleplays iwth such good writing, yet not write one movie script that felt like anything but a typical chick-flick?" I seriously want to hear what they were thinking, because it's such a disappointment as a long term fan--the theatre we saw it in was not too busy and a group of girls were crying at the end, which made (rather cruelly I admit) me and my friend just start to laugh."

[JackPeyton]

^I could not disagree more.

I thou8ght it was perfect, just like the tv show yet with a movie feel. I didnt find it any more chcikflick than the tv show was.

I also didnt get the you are nothing until you are married thing. Miranda and Steve and Charlotte and harry were married by the end of the show. In the movie of course Carrie married big because if she hadnt i wouldhad been pissed. i was pissed enough she didnt marry him in the finale but i thought 'oh, movie!'

besides, Samantha goes from pretty damn unhappy in a realtionship to being sooo happy and single, very samantha.

It was much more mature than the movie, but in a good way that it needed to be. No longer are they in the 30's and looking for love. They have found love and are dealing with life after it. Turns out its no fairy tale.

[EricMontreal22]

Well I did think ending the series on a note with everyone paired up betrayed the show as well--it was an audience pleasing ending in a show that often defied the easy audience pleasing route--shame. And you're right this continued from there. Shame.

If it turns out its no fairy tale why did they base the ending on Cinderella? what a HORRIBLE metaphor for the show! lol Almsot insultingly or satirically wrong.

This is a movie made for the fans the show has found since it's been airing in a watered down edited TBS version--and they'll lap it up.

Found a good article:

Globe&Mail's Sunday opinion piece:

FAME GAME: FILM: SEX AND THE CITY

Brace yourselves sisters, this movie betrays us all

JOHANNA SCHNELLER

[email protected]

E-mail Johanna Schneller | Read Bio | Latest Columns

May 31, 2008

When I saw the Sex and the City movie this week, I couldn't help but wonder: What were they thinking?

I loved the TV series for a lot of reasons, but mainly because it always, fundamentally, gave the characters their due. The presumption was that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Samantha (Kim Cattrall) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) were complicated human beings - neurotic, narcissistic, sarcastic and obsessive, but also intelligent, witty, loyal, good at their jobs. They were like an adult slumber party: They painted each other's nails, then got down to stuff that mattered.

Here at last were women who talked to each other the way women talk (fast, furious, filthy) and - this was important to me - fought with each other the way women fight. Not like the pseudo-friends, the frenemies, you see in countless films and TV shows, where the subtext is that women only relate until some guy comes along, or that we secretly hate each other. The Sex and the City women fought for good reasons: They called out Samantha about using sex as a distraction; Carrie about her masochism over Mr. Big (Chris Noth); Charlotte about abandoning her career. But they didn't fight to crap on each other, they fought to protect each other. And they were pained by it, and palpably relieved to make up.

For this honesty (which remains so rare in our entertainments), Sex and the City inspired a devotion that was almost scary to behold. About a year after the show ended on HBO, I was interviewing Parker in a café in Greenwich Village. A thirtysomething brunette came out of the bathroom, saw Parker, and screamed. Really screamed, hands to her mouth, and dropped to her knees as if shot. She stayed on the ground for long seconds, sobbing and shaking. It turned out that she was an Australian who'd travelled to Manhattan expressly to take a Sex and the City tour on her birthday. Multiply that woman by several million, and you have an audience that's panting to see the film.

MovieTickets.com reports that as of 1 p.m. on May 28, more than 85 per cent of this weekend's advance tickets were sold for Sex and the City. Many of these tickets are being bought in groups of six or eight - which happens a lot for kids' movies, but almost never for adults' - so that gangs of women can see it together. They're planning brunches and martini parties around it.

Well, brace yourselves, sisters. You're going to have a lot to talk about, but your conversation will be different than you thought. (Spoiler alert: I'm telling details.) The movie is dreadful. Not because it goes to, as the advance word attests, "dark places." I'm all for dark places, especially since the characters are in their 40s, and the 40s are a decade of reckoning. No, the movie is dreadful because it goes to fake dark places. It betrays its characters. It forgets who they are.

The series evolved like a relationship. It started out superficial, all stilettos and blow-job advice. It grabbed our attention with froth and held it with frankness. But soon they went deeper, serving up ideas with their cocktails: about sexual politics, hypocrisy, balancing work and life, and the dangers of judging each other's choices or obsessing unduly over men. The question they asked, over and over, was whether they really wanted the fairy-tale ending of marriage and babies, or whether they'd just internalized the mythology enough to think they did.

To me, the show's authenticity can be boiled down to one scene, mid-season four, when Miranda goes for an abortion. (Blessedly, there's no histrionics: It's presented as her right, and two of the four admit to having had one.) Carrie accompanies Miranda to the clinic, where they discuss her ambivalence. Then the nurse calls Miranda's name. She stands up, looks at Carrie, and mutters, "[!@#$%^&*]." It is a perfect moment, perfectly true to the character, the situation - that's just what Miranda would be feeling, that's just what she would say.

But if you saw the show on regular TV instead of DVD or HBO, you didn't get that moment. That "[!@#$%^&*]" was edited out. And there, to me, is where the movie goes so wrong. In its desire to grab as vast an audience as possible, it gives us the edited version of the show. It doesn't give us the NC-17 women in their full complexity, it gives us only the PG clichés.

Worse, it dials them back to the beginning of the series - all of a sudden, Miranda is again just a cold bitch, Samantha just a randy cougar, Carrie just in thrall to Big.

It's wrong from moment one, when Carrie says in voice-over, "Women come to Manhattan for labels and love." Umm, no. Women go to Manhattan for work. They go for a bigger life than the one they'd get elsewhere. The series knew that. Its labels were window dressing; the film mistakes them for the point.

To add insult to injury, the characters look terrible, like drag queens. Real fortysomething women know that simpler is better. They don't pile on the accessories, they pare them down. The show was campy, but the film is kitsch. It's middle-America's idea of what chic New Yorkers look like, Sex and St. Louis.

More unconscionably, the film seems to have no idea of what concerns midlife women. In my observation, it's the decade in which women claim who they are. The crisis isn't about not knowing what one wants, it's about how much one is willing to compromise. There's drama in that, which I'd like to see explored.

Instead, the film has the foursome dithering in ways they didn't even do in their 30s. It's a terrible missed opportunity, because all the suits in Hollywood are going to watch the grosses on this thing, see how they fall off in the second weekend, and use that to "prove" that movies about fortysomething women don't sell.

Most tragically, the film betrays the show's central premise, that being married is not "better" than being single. In the series, Charlotte's faith in marriage was a foil to set off the other women's point of view. In the film, Charlotte wins - the only married, stay-at-home mom is the only happy woman. The plot rewards her further by making her - poof! - magically pregnant, an appalling reversal of the series, which treated her reproductive challenges honestly. She's not even tired, which every stay-at-home mom is, at least on the planet I live on.

I could go on and on about what's wrong with this movie - about how Carrie, Miranda and Samantha simply would not do what they do in it. I can say this because I know them, because the series succeeded in letting us know them. So see the film - I know you will - and then forget it. Forget the butchered reruns, too. Rent the real thing, and revel in the rare pleasure of a show about women that, for six seasons, got so many things so right.

[JackPeyton]

well i want them to be happy. is it cheesy? sure.

but its the way it should be. i dont wanna think of miranda divorced, single mother, and unhappy. or carrie as forever single.

for samantha it works tho. shes happy when single.

[Sylph]

Has anyone noticed the bizarre way the colours in the movie are so coordinated? Miranda's yellow with the yellow of the park, Carrie's "naval" top with that toy...

The big problem here is Big. I mean, no matter what he does to her, she always gets back to him...

And there are already talks about the sequel. Go figure.

[JackPeyton]

IMHO he didnt do anything to her, she did somethign to him this time around. and im a big hater (aiden 4 life!!). I mean, they had this simple wedding planned, and then she went all wedding crazed and it didnt become about them. It became about her and her wedding day and all that and he started to freak out. Had she just kept herself cool and collected they woulda got married the first time.

And please god let there be a part 2!

[Sylph]

10 Years Later, Carrie Coordinated

By ERIC WILSON

TEN years of watching “Sex and the City,” including the sanitized reruns on TBS, has trained a generation of label- and love-addled romantics not to raise an eyebrow, presuming Botox hasn’t yet made that impossible, when Carrie Bradshaw dons a black Burberry coat and a trilby to go shopping, film noir style, at Duane Reade. Or when Carrie wears a four-figure Nina Ricci sweater trimmed with hundreds of feathers while typing on a laptop in the privacy of her own home. Or when Carrie crawls into Big’s big bed, wearing makeup and a single strand of pearls.

With fashion, as with sex, fantasy is far more aesthetically pleasurable than the reality of, say, Alex McCord in “The Real Housewives of New York City.” As far as fantasies go, “Sex and the City,” as a series on HBO, was to fashion what “Hotel Erotica,” on Cinemax, was to sex: unbelievably plastic porn, without all the messy bits or the credit card bills.

In the film version of “Sex and the City,” which opened on Friday, the fashion is jaw-droppingly fantastic, Herbal Essences good. In two recent screenings in New York, the audience reacted most vocally — there literally was moaning — when Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, discovers that Mr. Big, her noncommittal boyfriend, played by Chris Noth, has built her a walk-in closet with carpeting and flattering lighting. She hangs a single pair of $525 Manolo Blahnik shoes there as a dog would mark its territory. (Oddly, this was not Mr. Blahnik’s best effort, unless he was inspired by a foot fetish that involves blue leprechauns.)

In the television series, broadcast from 1998 to 2004, fashion — the industry, the designers, the clothes — was a regular character, cleverly manipulated by the stylist Patricia Field to refine the personalities of Carrie (whimsical, eclectic), Miranda (independent, biting), Samantha (racy, sensational) and Charlotte (preppy, endearing).

Each character was bestowed with an individual style so distinct that women could identify with one of them. They could then buy a $39.99 T-shirt at the HBO gift shop to announce, “I’m a Carrie!” (for lovelorn philosophers) or “I’m a Samantha!” (for narcissistic man-eaters).

But in the film the characters are now four years older and, in a disappointing way, their styles appear to have changed into one: the offbeat, orgiastic, do-it-yourself madness of Carrie, the dominant female. It is not only that they now dress alike. In every scene the women are practically coordinated by both color and style, as if they had received a morning memo detailing the day’s dress code. Let’s all wear primary colors to a jewelry auction! Let’s all wear psychedelic hippie dresses on a trip to Mexico! Let’s all wear smart black-and-white ensembles and fur coats to a fashion show!

Sometimes the clothes even match the scenery, as when Miranda wears a droopy yellow turtleneck keyed to the blossoms in Central Park, or when Carrie, reading a copy of “Cinderella,” wears a sailor’s top with red stripes, which echo the dangling legs of a stuffed toy bug on a shelf behind her.

Now middle-aged, the women seem to be mellowing. As Carrie says, their 20s were for having fun, their 30s for learning from their mistakes and their 40s for buying the drinks. They are still enthusiastic cheerleaders for fashion, but they don’t seem so overcome by a dress.

Instead, they struggle with losing their identities, as they transition to coupled lives, to single lives and back again, to life on the Left Coast or to life as a mother. Fashion is the metaphor for the struggle. In Samantha’s case, this is represented by a fancy diamond ring that she wanted to buy as a symbol of her success, but it takes on new meaning when it is given to her by a man. Miranda, meanwhile, seems desperate to establish any sort of personal flair by wearing grossly oversize earrings, one pair dangling like ninja stars, another like serving spoons.

It’s easy to bash the show’s over-the-top materialism, but “Sex and the City” has never bothered to rationalize it, no matter how absurd or overpriced an item may be. (Nor has the show explained how a freelance writer could afford all those clothes.) It simply accepts that fashion is good and assumes the audience, just like Carrie, so badly wants to be a part of Vogue.

Yet, to the credit of Ms. Field and Ms. Parker, the film rarely bothers to identify the labels worn by the actors during the never-ending fashion parade, never once mentioning Manolo’s surname (as if that were necessary). There are exceptions, as when Carrie wears several designer wedding gowns for a Vogue photo shoot and credits each during a voiceover, and in some painfully unfunny banter between Carrie and her assistant (Jennifer Hudson), a woman named Louise from St. Louis who loves Louis Vuitton.

For her big wedding scene, Carrie characteristically bucks convention and champions a dress by Vivienne Westwood, one of the most original and radical designers of the 20th century, and not one of the darlings — not Dior, nor Ricci, nor Balenciaga — of today’s fashion elite. The gown is a showstopper, a frock so bubbly it looks like an overflowing glass of Champagne; in her hair, Carrie has affixed a turquoise-feathered bird. After this film, Westwood will surely be the new Blahnik.

Of course, labels appear every time a closet door or a Mercedes trunk opens, revealing an improbably neat display of shoe boxes and shopping bags from Dior, Gucci, Versace and, um, Bluefly. But part of the fantasy of the Manhattan high life is that women keep all the packaging because it’s so pretty. (O.K., O.K., so I store my tax returns in a box from Hermès.)

Whether these were product placements, a result of cross-marketing deals or just type-casting, the labels become as distracting as a lover with a tic — a lip biter or a navel licker. Wait. What? Did Charlotte just say she was pregnant while I was staring at the Gucci I ♥ New York bag sitting on the credenza?

The mention of a brand on the show has led to the success of several designers over the last decade, as Carrie Bradshaw represents the ultimate endorsement of a luxury system that is built on the aspiration to look rich or famous. Buying $1,000 handbags brings fulfillment. Buying knockoffs brings emotional impotence. Carrie can justify the extravagance of a wide leather belt with gold studs because, like Viagra, she can get a lot of mileage out of it, wearing the belt with a pink sheath dress one day and over the Burberry coat the next.

Nevertheless, “Sex and the City,” the movie, tries to undermine that message when Carrie hauls out a churchy, label-less skirt suit and declares, at one point, that this is going to be her wedding dress.

“Simple and classic,” she says. “When I saw it, I said, ‘That is what I should marry Big in.’ ”

The only label that never goes out of style, Carrie tells us, is love.

Oh, but she looked just awful.

Read the whole article here

[Sylph]

What I think her story with Aidan was is just one of those great love stories about people who are so made one for the other yet because of something they will never be together. Their first break-up, penned by Cindy Chupack, was possibly one of the best break-ups ever written. So simple, yet so powerful. "Can I be like the wood...?"

[Sylph]

CARRIE: Could you hold this for a second? MIRANDA: Sure. CARRIE: Hey, you. AIDAN: I walked around for about an hour. Couldn't bring myself to go in. CARRIE: I'm so sorry, Aidan. AIDAN: I know that. CARRIE: I never meant to hurt you. AIDAN: I know. CARRIE: But I did. I'm sorry. Couldn't it be like the wood? That's my flaw, and... ...and you're the other wood, and that makes us stronger. AIDAN: It's not that simple, Carrie. I wish I didn't know about this. CARRIE: I just wanted to be honest with you. People make mistakes. AIDAN: I just know myself. This is not the kind of thing I can get over. I just need to be on my own for a while. Me on my own. I really loved you. MIRANDA: Carrie, they need us for photos. CARRIE: OK. I told him. CARRIE: (V.O.) It's hard to find people who will love you no matter what. I was lucky enough to find three of them. EDIT: Blah, I tried to do something with HTML, it didn't work. So now it's even worse than before...

[Sylph]

Eric, where is the review (your review) you sent to your friend?

[EricMontreal22]

I'm not sure I saved it--I'll check my emails. It was just lotsa random thoughts though about why I was largely disappointed

[JackPeyton]

i went seen it today for the 3rd time.

[Sylph]

I think you're up for record-breaking! Sort of.

BTW, why isn't anyone else commenting? You can say the film is cr*p, just write something!