Review: by Jette Kernion

Review: Sex and the City

by Jette Kernion May 29th 2008

"Sometimes I feel like my cultural literacy is shamefully limited. I watch a lot of movies but somehow I rarely watch many television shows. I only have the most basic cable, so I could tell you all about the most fascinating shows on Austin community access but nothing about, say, Sex and the City. I saw the movie Sex and the City without ever having watched an episode, with an unfortunate tendency to refer to it as Sex in the City, and with such an ignorance of pop culture that I kept mixing up Carrie Bradshaw with Carrie Underwood. I brought a friend to the screening who was well acquainted with the TV show, in case I needed help, and whispered things like "Is that the theme song?" and "What's the joke?"

Fortunately, for those of us who are encountering Sex and the City for the first time, the movie's opening sequence provides compressed backstories about the four characters so we don't feel lost and confused. But even if we didn't know who had done what and whom and where, the storyline -- set five years after the TV show's end -- is not difficult to follow.

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), a novelist whose material is stolen wholesale from herself and her friends, is marrying her longtime sweetheart, the rich investment banker known as Mr. Big (Chris Noth). She still relies on her three friends for advice: Samantha (Kim Cattrall), who is now living in Malibu with her movie-star boyfriend but jets out to Manhattan the way I would drive out to the farmers market; Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who totes around a sweet little girl she's adopted from China; and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), who makes ominous comments about marriage since her own is on the rocks. The more they plan, the more lavish Carrie's wedding becomes. Complications ensue, but of course the four women stick together and support each other and buy lots of shoes just like they've always done.

As my friend pointed out, the plot of the film doesn't resemble a movie as much as it does an entire season of Sex and the City, compressed down into a mere 145 minutes. It's episodic and therefore, if you're not familiar with these characters, can take awhile to grab your interest. The charm of this movie for longtime fans of the show is in the characters themselves, not in the details of the plot, but my first impression of these women was not positive -- they appeared shallow, boring, and did nothing but shop and brag and babble on the phone. Fortunately, as the movie progresses, the characters gain more emotional depth and become more interesting and even likeable at times. However, Parker's occasional voiceover (is this a holdover from the TV show?) is irritating and unnecessary. I assume Parker is meant to be a stand-in for Candace Bushnell, whose "Sex and the City" columns and book were the inspiration for the TV show, and perhaps the voiceover was meant to symbolize her reading the stories she's written, but it contributes nothing meaningful to the film.

I can understand the fantasy aspects of a movie where no one hurts for money (even Carrie's assistant, played by Jennifer Hudson, is happy to rent the accoutrements of the rich if she can't afford them), where everyone has a successful career but never spends much time doing actual work, a world of big closets and loads of shoes and scrumptious sex talk. I was reminded a little of Depression-era films that focused on rich women in mansions with gorgeous fur coats, giving viewers a chance to live vicariously through them, but always with a little neurosis or emptiness of emotion that allowed the audience to feel superior. Sex and the City even has a fashion show right in the middle, a throwback to older movies geared toward female audiences like The Women and How to Marry a Millionaire.

Sex and the City has some good comic moments that I enjoyed -- a scene in which Charlotte's daughter is present so the women have to devise a euphemism f