Sex and the City: the Movie Review
The Summer's All-Female Blockbuster Starring Sarah Jessica Parker
Jun 28, 2008
Let’s be honest: Michael Patrick King’s Sex and the City summer blockbuster won’t exactly go down in the history of great cinema. The plot is weak at best. Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is finally marrying Mr. Big (Chris Noth), but a stray comment from Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) on the difficulties of marriage leads Big (John) to leave Carrie at the alter.
It seems that the writer didn’t know quite what to do with the characters of the other girls. Charlotte (played by Krisitn Davis) becomes a caricature of her former self, obsessively fretting over everything from contaminated water in Mexico to Carrie’s relationship. She also provides the pinnacle of slapstick comedy in the movie when she soils herself while on vacation with the girls.
Samantha, meanwhile, is pursuing an unhappy relationship with her television star boyfriend in California. Shipping Samantha to another coast seems to have no purpose in the movie other than to provide for an overabundance of “the girls are together again!” moments whenever she returns to New York.
Movie Review: the Good
That said, all those “the girls are together again!” moments are sure to tug at the heartstrings of all long-time Sex fans. It may not be great cinema, but Sex and the City is downright fun moviegoing. If you are not already a fan of the series, skip it. However, if you have felt a little hole in your life ever since Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte moved to reruns, this is one bad movie that will make you feel really good.
Sex and the City: The Movie versus the Series
The concept of Candace Bushnell’s book worked great as a TV series, but the translation into film is a little rocky. In the series (especially in the earlier seasons) an episode might focus around one small question. How to thirty-something women relate to twenty-something women? Why do we ditch our ex-boyfriends but hang on to shoes that we haven’t worn in years? Is honesty the best policy in bed?
The movie format requires a larger scope. The small questions are ditched in favor of larger issues like the nature of marriage and commitment. The TV series explored these concepts throughout the seasons, but the episodic questions created a format that held the mini-plots together. The movie, lacking this plot devise, falls apart.
Society, Sex and the City
When the first episodes of Sex and the City aired on HBO, its frank exploration of sex and empowerment in the lives of modern women was fresh and controversial. In recent years, Sex and the City became mainstream and even began showing on TBS (with more explicit scenes and language cut). The movie version fails to push our culture’s boundaries in the way that the early series did. It caters to its now-mainstream audience.
However, just the fact that the audience of Sex is mainstream is evidence of the way that the series contributed to a major shift in our culture. It is truly impressive that a movie starring a sexually empowered, all-female cast can be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters. Despite its flaws, this is a movie that should be enjoyed and respected for the large step forward it represents for women.
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