Sex and the City: MOVIE REVIEW

SPOILER ALERT! CLICK AWAY NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW ANY PLOT DETAILS FROM THE SEX AND THE CITY MOVIE! As a Darren Star series on HBO, Sex and the City may have come in tidy half hours, but what those sparkling and fizzy episodes added up to, in spirit, was the great chick flick of our time. The show was that rare thing, a fairy tale you could believe in. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), the lovelorn single-girl newspaper columnist, and her devoted trio of BFFs — randy Samantha (Kim Cattrall), wide-eyed Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and neurotic taskmaster Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) — all took the fruits of feminism for granted: independence, equality, the right to sleep around, etc. Yet what they found was a new kind of liberation. High on their pink drinks and showpiece handbags, literally high on their designer heels (and on the prospect of turning the search for a mate into another form of shopping), they embraced the holy right to be cosmetic, acquisitive, and — yes! — superficial. If Carrie's desire for love had an element that was undeniably...aspirational, what of it? Wasn't that true of Jane Austen's heroines? The glory of Sex and the City is that it turned the cosmopolitan high life of girls who just want to have fun into a new feminine mystique. The movie version of Sex and the City, written and directed by Michael Patrick King (always the show's savviest writer), is 2 hours and 22 minutes of love, tears, fashion, depression, lavish vacation, good sex, bad sex, and supreme tenderness. It's as long as five series episodes, a big sweet tasty layer cake stuffed with zingers and soul and dirty-down verve (it's not above having one of the girls poop her pants). Given the running time, though, not that much happens, and what does has several shades more gravitas. That's as it should be. We want Sex and the City on the big screen to be true to the show yet to feel more like a movie. And it does. Now that Carrie and her crew have left the bittersweet college of cosmo hedonism, the film treats them, shrewdly, as cynical wised-up fortysomethings facing life on the other side of the adult divide. The movie is about the situations Carrie can't just write off with a quip. SOURCE:EW.COM