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Carrie, Miranda, Samatha and Charlotte return with HBO gang to catch us up, build on solid foundation
By Rich Heldenfels
Beacon Journal pop culture writer
POSTED: 11:25 a.m. EDT, May 29, 2008
The big-screen continuation of Sex and the City is a glossy but thoughtful concoction of all the elements that made the HBO series a success.
It should satisfy all the show's fans — or at least those who still spend evenings watching marathons of the old telecasts. At about two hours and 20 minutes long, the Sex and the City movie is roughly equivalent to a five-episode sitdown.
And making the switch from the small screen to movie theaters is jarring at times.
While the TV series loved gorgeous locations and high fashion, it still had the relatively intimate feel that comes with watching something up close in your living room. The movie version at times feels overstuffed, the screen crowded with glittering images which overwhelm the characters and story.
Fortunately, the latest events in the characters' lives come to dominate the settings. Their emotions — joy, sadness and some powerful rage — are well expressed, their relationships cutting close to real-life bone.
That's not to say the movie is at all necessary — certainly no more than a pair of $525 Manolo Blahniks when your feet are content in $35 Payless pumps.
The series, after all, ended at a point where the four main characters — Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte — had all reached satisfying places in their lives, tidily bringing down the curtain.
But as the movie picks up about four years after the end of the TV series (which wrapped in 2004), lives have not ended and satisfaction is not permanent.
As written by SATC TV veteran Michael Patrick King (who also directed), the movie finds Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and John James ''Mr. Big'' Preston (Chris Noth) have stayed together and are looking for a new home. With a residential change looming — and with Carrie at work on a new book about love — the issue of marriage comes up. Wedding plans ensue, Carrie becomes the subject of a Vogue story, and there's a long sequence of her in various designer wedding gowns.
Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is still married to Steve (David Eigenberg) and trying to balance her working and family lives, without complete success. And things are about to get more difficult. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) are having a much better time as a couple and as loving parents of their adopted daughter. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has moved to Los Angeles and manages her actor boyfriend Smith (Jason Lewis), but there's no reason too slight to get her back to New York to see her friends.
Without getting into too many details, the movie then spins into breakups, men behaving badly, women unforgiving, a pregnancy, friends falling out, seemingly endless wardrobe changes, blunt conversations, sex of varying quality and a soundtrack that bounces in some places and in another reminds us of the healing power of Al Green.
It does so while keeping sharply focused on the main people from the TV series and TV's well populated world. Among the supporting TV players who get at least a movie moment: friends Anthony (Mario Cantone) and Stanford (Willie Garson), and a formidable Vogue editor (Candice Bergen).
The main new character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), Carrie's assistant, who provides another and younger point of view about love for the movie, especially as other characters wrestle with their own feelings.
While Hudson is fine, the movie's success rests on how well it recreates the tone and textures of the TV show, how much it respects the characters. And in most cases it does that very well. Parker, for one, has shed some of the mannerisms that made her performance so annoying in the latter stages of the TV series. She also lets the camera see that she is no longer the youthful romantic of a decade ago; time, life and love have taken their toll.
Davis, Nixon and Cattrall also ably revive their old characters even when the movie is less than plausible about them. Samantha returns to New York so often, I'd think that her friends wouldn't shriek quite so loud each time they see her. And the movie still has a couple of those moments where its message of self-fulfillment is at odds with a fixation on physical perfection.
Still, the TV series could be contradictory. As oversized as the movie can sometimes look, its foundation is what worked on TV. And a pretty solid foundation it proves to be.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 and rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
The big-screen continuation of Sex and the City is a glossy but thoughtful concoction of all the elements that made the HBO series a success.
It should satisfy all the show's fans — or at least those who still spend evenings watching marathons of the old telecasts. At about two hours and 20 minutes long, the Sex and the City movie is roughly equivalent to a five-episode sitdown.
And making the switch from the small screen to movie theaters is jarring at times.
While the TV series loved gorgeous locations and high fashion, it still had the relatively intimate feel that comes with watching something up close in your living room. The movie version at times feels overstuffed, the screen crowded with glittering images which overwhelm the characters and story.
Fortunately, the latest events in the characters' lives come to dominate the settings. Their emotions — joy, sadness and some powerful rage — are well expressed, their relationships cutting close to real-life bone.
That's not to say the movie is at all necessary — certainly no more than a pair of $525 Manolo Blahniks when your feet are content in $35 Payless pumps.
The series, after all, ended at a point where the four main characters — Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte — had all reached satisfying places in their lives, tidily bringing down the curtain.
But as the movie picks up about four years after the end of the TV series (which wrapped in 2004), lives have not ended and satisfaction is not permanent.
As written by SATC TV veteran Michael Patrick King (who also directed), the movie finds Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and John James ''Mr. Big'' Preston (Chris Noth) have stayed together and are looking for a new home. With a residential change looming — and with Carrie at work on a new book about love — the issue of marriage comes up. Wedding plans ensue, Carrie becomes the subject of a Vogue story, and there's a long sequence of her in various designer wedding gowns.
Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is still married to Steve (David Eigenberg) and trying to balance her working and family lives, without complete success. And things are about to get more difficult. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) are having a much better time as a couple and as loving parents of their adopted daughter. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has moved to Los Angeles and manages her actor boyfriend Smith (Jason Lewis), but there's no reason too slight to get her back to New York to see her friends.
Without getting into too many details, the movie then spins into breakups, men behaving badly, women unforgiving, a pregnancy, friends falling out, seemingly endless wardrobe changes, blunt conversations, sex of varying quality and a soundtrack that bounces in some places and in another reminds us of the healing power of Al Green.
It does so while keeping sharply focused on the main people from the TV series and TV's well populated world. Among the supporting TV players who get at least a movie moment: friends Anthony (Mario Cantone) and Stanford (Willie Garson), and a formidable Vogue editor (Candice Bergen).
The main new character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), Carrie's assistant, who provides another and younger point of view about love for the movie, especially as other characters wrestle with their own feelings.
While Hudson is fine, the movie's success rests on how well it recreates the tone and textures of the TV show, how much it respects the characters. And in most cases it does that very well. Parker, for one, has shed some of the mannerisms that made her performance so annoying in the latter stages of the TV series. She also lets the camera see that she is no longer the youthful romantic of a decade ago; time, life and love have taken their toll.
Davis, Nixon and Cattrall also ably revive their old characters even when the movie is less than plausible about them. Samantha returns to New York so often, I'd think that her friends wouldn't shriek quite so loud each time they see her. And the movie still has a couple of those moments where its message of self-fulfillment is at odds with a fixation on physical perfection.
Still, the TV series could be contradictory. As oversized as the movie can sometimes look, its foundation is what worked on TV. And a pretty solid foundation it proves to be.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. He can be reached at 330-996-3582 and rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
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