I just got home from (finally) seeing the
Sex and the City movie.
Like every fan of the show, I was excited to catch up on the TV->film lives of Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha. The audience was treated to two and a half hours of marriage woes and Manolos, cocktails and cocks, designer labels and designer apartments, and the whole time
I couldn't help but wonder... what the fuck?!
Who lives like these women, and how did I ever relate to this show?
Samantha's pushing 50 living in an oceanfront mansion with her loving, hot, younger boyfriend - but life's just not exciting enough for her, so she jets back and forth between LA and NY like she's crossing the street instead of a continent; Charlotte lives in a Park Avenue fairytale complete with a rich adoring husband, an adorable and well-behaved toddler, a couple of pups and Oh My God, miracle... she's pregnant!; Carrie's getting courted for a photo shoot in Vogue and is moving her stockpile of $500 shoes into a 5th Ave penthouse with a walk-in-closet bigger than most Manhattan studios (literally, I'm not saying that as a figure of speech) -- all paid for by Big, of course; and Miranda decides she has to take a break from Brooklyn where she is 'slumming it' in a Park Slope brownstone so Steve can reaffirm his utter inferiority by groveling to her until she is satisfied with him again.
Love, marriage, heartbreak, friendship, loyalty, trust, family -- these are all real life issues that at one time SATC dealt with in an honest, relatable way. But too often, the movie made them take a backseat to bullshit fashion shows, shoes, handbags and ridiculous headwear.
Case in point:
Maybe SATC was always like this and I could enjoy it as pure entertainment when I was a suburban college kid. Maybe after a few years of century-old walk-ups and twice-daily subway rides, I have become a little too jaded to thoroughly enjoy watching a version of NYC that is so alien to my own.
Not to say I didn't enjoy it entirely... there were some shades of the old, humorous glory days and there was a particularly poignant scene on the Brooklyn Bridge that was
fabulous. I'm going to miss the gals and their glamorous travails through life, but the movie does a good j0b of leaving the audience feeling that they're all going to be alright: Carrie and Big; Charlotte and Harry; Miranda and Steve; Samantha and sex. At the end of the day, that's all the fans were hoping for.
http://sexandthecitymovie.org/
