The makers of the hit television programme Sex and the City sat in a bright, air conditioned room in a high rise office block, sipping mineral water (still), and discussing their next move.
‘Right – we’ve got twenty six minutes of material: Carrie’s getting married, the other girls are having relationship difficulties as usual (I assume), and it’s in New York- the Big City’. ‘Don’t forget the Sex’. ‘Oh yeah. Lots of sex.’ ‘Soooooo… we need another two hours. What shall we do?’ ‘Dresses. Big ones, little ones, ones with straps, ones without. Give each one a five minute close up, and we’re there.’
And so, one rather boring idea was stretched into a very long catwalk of a film. A flat catwalk, with no undulations, no troughs and no peaks, across which Carrie and her gal-pals were invited to parade up and down. They didn’t even trip, Naomi style.
There were some lovely shoes on show: Manolos, Jimmis, Vuittons, Chanels – all of which were slipped on and paraded before our footwear hungry eyes. Mmm. If you don’t like shoes so much, there are always the bags; and the restaurants, and the cocktails look divine. And New York, Oh! New York – ‘A place a girl goes to find two things: labels and love.’
These are the reasons to watch this film. Stroll in, sit down, and allow material beauty to diffuse through your eyes, activating the sexiness centre in the brain (the amygdala).
For the full aesthetic experience, you could even bring earplugs: there shouldn’t be much else to distract you. You’d do well to ignore the music. This film concentrates on the visual, at the expense of everything else: there were at least three (long) scenes that focused entirely on the trying-on and strutting-around-in designer costumes.
If watching a gaggle of quatrogenerians guzzle champagne and spying on Sarah Jessica-Parker crawl tiger-like across the floor is your glass of margarita, you’ll lap up Sex and The City like a spinster in a singles bar, much as the ‘girls’ did at the low points of their lives.
I would describe the plot, but I lost it about fifteen minutes into the film. There was something about a marriage, some other stuff about a cheating husband, and I think someone mentioned a baby at some point, but couldn’t tell you for sure. Every twenty minutes a sex-scene was shoved in: this was a reverse porn film – nudity taking the place of any actual characterisation or storyline.
There’s very little in this film to recommend. The storyline is predictable and facile, as are the jokes. Even if you’re a hardcore fan, wait for the DVD. It has a great fast-forward function.
One star
