Sex and the City
Skymovies.com's Rich Phippen takes a lads' look at the chick-flick all the girls are talking about. Four years after leaving the small screen, New York's famous foursome, (Carrie Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda), appear in a big screen outing to talk shoes, shopping, cell phones and, of course, sex. By no means an artistic masterstroke of modern movie making, it's bound to please the ready-made audience such adaptations promise...Having ended after six sex-fuelled seasons, the clamour for more Sex and the City has rarely abated.
Following newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw (the former pen name/alter-ego of real-life writer Candace Bushell), whose take on the world of women fills her column inches, and the show's weekly premises, this has the kind of enduring fan-base that attracted the attention of New Line Cinema.
So four years after it all ended, writer/ director Michael Patrick King had the unenviable task of untying the loose ends he'd so ably fastened during the show's finale.
For lead character (and occasional narrator) Carrie had found her soul mate and settled down, which is pretty much what happened to her trio of best friends.
Fortunately, for the studio bods at least, life is a never ending story, and so not everything has remained rosy in the foursome's gardens.
Carrie wants to get married, Miranda's marriage is falling apart, Samantha's first true love and relocation to LA hasn't reduced her appetite for sex and Charlotte, well, they didn't seem to get as far as a motive for Charlotte's return.
Still, thanks to the voiceover device it doesn't take long to convince the audience that it's worth spending another couple of hours with the girls, who clearly relish the opportunity to take their act up to the next level.
Ultimately, whether or not one cares about the will-they, won't-they nature of Carrie's proposed marriage to Mr Big is a direct reflection on how much one will enjoy the movie, and telling a fan that Charlotte's storyline about having kids after getting married is pointless.
For those who came to see Gucci, Vuitton, Westwood and Manolo Blahnik alongside Parker, Davis, Nixon and Cattrall, will not care for such criticisms.
The themes seem to ring true - taking a cue from Sly 'Rocky 6' Stallone, King recognises the aging of the characters and uses this to his advantage.
Carrie (as her Vogue shoot leads her to realise) really ought to tie the knot before her 40th, while Samantha begins to realise the futility of a 50-year-old leopard changing her spots.
King's script is overlong and occasionally nonsensical (Samantha 'returns' from LA in almost every scene, and sometimes in the same scene) but it is witty, full of well placed pay-offs and, most importantly, crowd pleasing references (although the less female and American you are, the less likely you are to get them).
Fortunately, the writer somehow manages to untangle and re-tangle the web of plots - which goes someway to explaining the excessive running time - sufficiently enough to avoid this becoming an overblown mess.
Which will keep anybody who even knows who Manolo Blahnik is very happy indeed.
Rich Phippen
