The girls are back, this time in a big screen version of Sex and the City. This is the kind of movies Hollywood does best: entertaining, beautiful to watch yet somehow quite vacuous.
The movie picks up where the TV series ended. You don’t have to be a fan in order to follow the movie. Although I have not seen a single episode of the TV series, I had no trouble understanding all the relationships in the film. The film is quite long, clocking at 148 minutes. In fact, it feels like two different movies put in one with a major event happening right in the middle of the film.
Carrie (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) is finally going to marry Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth) and of course, things go awry. Her three best friends, Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall), Charlotte (played by Kristin Davis) and Miranda (played by Cynthia Nixon) are always by her side whenever she needs a shoulder to lean on. The story is, honestly, quite dopey. The conflicts in the script are those that easily frustrate any half-intelligent audience. The tones in the movie switch from cheery and light-hearted to nostalgia and sentimental at the mid-point. The first half of the film deals with all the chaos associated with a society wedding in Manhattan while the second half is mainly about the usual woes women complain about – lack of good men. We as the audience can see plainly where these good men are, but it takes our heroines quite some time to figure it all out so that, I guess, they can stretch the film into feature length. Considering the running time of 148 minutes, they certainly have succeeded in that regard.
The star of the movie is fashion. Parker and her gang certainly give us an eyeful to look at. Parker has 81 outfit changes in Sex and the City while the movie’s three other stars also have 200 wardrobe changes among them. In my opinion, the big attraction about Sex and the City has always been people’s curiosity about how the elite in Manhattan live their lives. There may be richer people elsewhere in the country, but nobody acts more like American aristocrats than the elites in Manhattan. Their life style is always a fascination for other parts of the country. Face it, we may never live that life style, but it is sure easy to enjoy them on screen.
I have to admit this movie is my first exposure to the Sex and the City enterprise created by the hugely popular TV series. I did read the book by Candace Bushnell based on her newspaper columns and found the book extremely boring. Bridget Jones’s Diary attacks single womanhood far better and more realistically than the four glamorous gals in this movie. However, I do find the four actresses likeable and endearing. Seeing Parker in her teenage roles, it is hard for me to imagine her as a fashion icon, but she has really reinvented herself since her early years. She looks and feels like a chic Manhattanite.
The whole movie has a sense of fantasy to the story and the most serious issue the filmmakers deal with is unfaithfulness. As I said before, it is a fun movie to watch for a little over two hours, but afterwards, it is also very easy to forget. After all, with so many people in this world with no food to eat and no shelter, who cares if some spoiled Manhattan woman cannot find a perfect apartment.
