Sex and the City

'Sex and the City,' based on the hilarious, poignant HBO comedy series of the same name, is grossly insulting. In a strong divorce from the series, the movie picks up five years after the series finale - where we find out that each one of the characters have become vapid, soulless versions of their former selves. Now, writer Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), and her friends Miranda Hobbes (Cynthia Nixon), Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), and Charlotte Goldenblatt (Kristen Davis) walk around New York obsessing over shoes, handbags, and love.

Carrie Bradshaw was, at the end of the show, an independent woman - not the needy girl she started out as. The movie turns it's back on Carrie's development as a character, shaping her into the stock romcom lead. Think Katherine Heigl with no charm. She is now painfully unfunny, shallow, and quite possibly retarded. She spends the first half the film setting herself up to have the man whom supposedly loves her jilt her - which he does. The second half of the film, Carrie spends complaining about literally everything, dying her hair brown, and discussing bags and love with a painfully useless, annoying Jennifer Hudson, as Carrie's new assistant Louise from Saint Louis.

CARRIE: "Louise from Saint Louis. Oh you brought me back to life." LOUISE: "And you gave me, Louise Vuitton."

Yes the writer of "The Real Me" and "A Woman's Right To Shoes" actually wrote this garbage.

Lawyer Miranda is now a frigid shrew who swats her deadbeat husband away like a fly every time he tries to get near her - and spends the entire 2.5 hours complaining about how marriage changed her, it made her move to Brooklyn. She is no longer likable, funny, or smart.

Meanwhile, housewife Charlotte spends the 2.5 hours prancing around like a little girl, screaming at the top of her lungs, and carrying her confused, Asian daughter around like a dog in a handbag. The problem with continuing Charlotte's storyline on the show is her storyline came to the only logical conclusion it could have had at the end of the show. Now, it' just a retread through old territory. Davis is ultimately given a thankless role in this film.

However, it is Samantha who is given the most honest adaptation. While certainly a cartoon version of her former self, Samantha's story revolves around her inability to maintain a monogamous relationship - despite being very much in love. However the payoff is ultimately ruined as Samantha is no longer human.

This incarnation of 'Sex' is so incredibly shallow - it basically acts a prop to advertise luxury goods. The most obvious scenes to illustrate this are when Carrie tries on designer wedding dresses for a Vogue shoot, which goes on for an excruciating 10 minutes, followed closely by Carrie and co. going through her closet trying to decide what to take to her new apartment with husband-to-be Big (Chris Noth). The scene is ultimately pointless as she is moving to a closet that is 10 times to the size - which, if you can imagine it - is actually a plot point in a film that will make you feel compelled to throw out every designer label you own. The show was about the importance of following your own trajectory, and self actualization. The film abandons this concept.

Let me preface this review by saying I have never seen any of the show or had any previous knowledge of this franchise. While this is not a film I would normally watch, my wife wanted to watch this and I was skeptical going in. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was easy to jump in, 10 years of storytelling missed, and still easily got invested in each character. With a simple love story plot, my only complaint is that it is dragged out and begins to feel like multiple TV episodes stitched together, rather than a full film. All of the actresses are very well into their character and the bond they have feels genuine and they make it a delightful time. Did it convince me to go back and catch up? No, but it was a fun 2 1/2 hours spent and can easily be enjoyed by fans and newbies.

I am a big fan of the show. I am one of those people who have seen every episode at least 4 times, and some of them around 10 times. Even so, I still watch the reruns, and I was really looking forward to the movie.

So, it is really upsetting that I have to give it such a bad review. I went to see it with the best of intentions. I really wanted to love it. Unfortunately the movie has nothing to do with the wittiness and character of the series. Even putting aside the wooden and/or exaggerated acting, you fail to recognize the characters who where transformed into caricatures, pathetic versions of themselves.

There were very very few lines that gave a glimpse of the old clever dialog, and they all got lost in a mass of cheesy lines about love and friendship that you even rarely anymore encounter in the corniest of Hollywood's chick flicks, and toiler humor that you only expect from movies like Harold and Kumar. OK, maybe the comparison to Harold and Kumar is a little unfair, but really I had never expected Sex and the City to rely on fart jokes for comic relief.

People comment that those who rate this movie badly are either men, or just not fans of the show. From my perspective the fans of the show should be the ones most disappointed by the travesty that was this film.

We grew to love the show because of its honesty towards sexual issues, its shocking but clever dialog, and its characters who, however unreal with their designer obsessions, uncontrollable spending and lack of real jobs, remained true to their personas regarding sex, relationships, commitment, independence.

The show was about sex. The movie is about love, and treats the subject from the weakest, corniest and most disappointing standpoint.

This movie is a fake Fendi. Dropping 15 designer names in one sentence, showing bulging men's underpants and orgasming at the sight of huge closets, Sex and the City does not make.

As for me, I will keep watching the reruns and pretend this movie never happened.

Girls love sex - especially when it comes packaged as, "big love of one's life." Who wouldn't? And 'The City' has nothing to do with stockbrokers. It's bright lights. Excitement. The girls' nights out. Successful, independent women. Expensive shoes. Designer label. Labels and love - the two big "l's". Big Apple. New York. City of Dreams. So is Sex and the City, the film version of an award-winning TV show, every girl's dream movie? The film – a short two and a half hours – successfully reprises the TV show format. A decade on in the lives of our characters and we follow them for another eventful year. Carrie now a successful book author - and sometimes contributor to Vogue. Says Kim Catrall (who plays Carrie's friend Samantha), "It was about women joining together as the new family, girlfriends sticking together through thick and thin." As a girl-bonding movie, it certainly works. On the way home, several hundred dresses to discuss, Manolo strappy sandals, and moral dilemmas like, if you have a secret that would hurt your best friend to know, should you 'fess up? Says, writer-producer-director Michael Patrick King, "Miranda's the sarcastic, sort of angry, one. Charlotte's the sweeter, sort of preppy one, the more traditional one. Samantha's the sexy, sort of power-hungry one. And then, there's Carrie, the indefinable one." Their TV personas are already developed and, unlike many TV-shows-made-into-movies, Sex and the City doesn't try to go overboard but develops existing characters and situations.

Although everything in the film is well-signposted, I don't want to give anything away. As with genre films, it's the small variations of plot that make it satisfying. A couple of scenes stand out for me. One is where Samantha covers her naked body with hand-made sushi as a Valentine's gift. Beautifully shot, it illustrates her outrageous sexual appetite in a moment that is genuinely artistic and more memorable than a bedroom full of dildos wrapped in cling-film. More clichéd, is the man next door having a slow-motion outdoor shower, but even that didn't seem out of place given Samantha's showy temperament and transfixed gaze.

The plot development where Miranda makes an unguarded comment which she is afraid to tell Carrie is well-handled. The restaurant scene where Miranda finally screws up the courage is believable and dramatic while still retaining its humour.

But I felt it would be unfair to review this film from a male-only point of view, so duly took my partner along. I tried to set the mood with Shiraz and Spanish tapas, casually asking what she thought of the TV series. "It's the ultimate sell-out!" she says. I was taken aback. I thought it was about strong, liberated women of today? "Yes, but their lives revolve around getting a man." Seen from that perspective, it is hardly the feminist frolic of fashion and feisty friendship. And of course, our whole film is obsessed with the idea of marriage. In a neat tables-turn – what Scarlett O'Hara might call giving men some of their own medicine – men are casually dehumanised. Either as sex-objects (for Samantha), or as provider (for Carrie, remarkably). The other two males (those stabled by Miranda and Charlotte) are insignificant and weak. Carrie's man is famously not given a name (recall how Célestine was reduced to an object in Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid by the old man who simply called her 'what he called all the maids'). Carrie is a successful author yet, when contemplating a new flat with her man, she lets him pick up the bill, "like he was picking up the check for coffee." The romantic dénouement is based on what would, without the happy Hollywood coincidences, be deemed stalking in real life.

The best part for me was seeing Jennifer Hudson, who plays Carrie's assistant Louise. Hudson also contributes a fine song for the film which adequately expresses the theme of, "Good men are like designer labels and it's hard to spot the knock-offs." Hudson is a fine actress in her own right, not just a one hit wonder who got an Oscar for Dreamgirls after failing to win American Idol. She exudes screen charisma. Every expression, every intonation, was a joy to behold. Although the clip from Meet Me in St Louis rather reminded me of what a really good movie looks like, Sex and the City, however enjoyable, isn't one. It's a remarkably pleasant way of spending two and a half hours, but the performances are largely pedestrian. Unlike Devil Wears Prada, it's about labels, not an appreciation of the design behind them. By being successfully chic and delightfully superficial, the characters distract us from the wedding bells goal and the way their lives really stereotype them. We never learn much about their work, or about them as people independent of a man's penis. It provides the dual fantasy of apparently liberated woman while retaining the old penchant for ball and chain.

"I want people leaving the movie theater feeling, 'all right, great, that was a lot!'" King says. "That was drinks, appetizer, main course, and dessert, dessert, dessert!" And, like most desserts, Sex and the City is ninety per cent sugar.

Since any opinion on this movie has to be tempered by sex and viewing history let me just make it clear up front that I am a man and, while I don't dislike the series, I didn't ever get into it beyond watching (and enjoying) the odd episode that someone else was watching in the same room as I was sitting. Please feel free to dismiss/accept my opinions accordingly in light of this information. My first proper reaction to the Sex & the City movie was to baulk at the running time, which struck me as pretty excessive for what it was. I was right on this as the film is longer than it probably deserves to be but at the same time it never dragged as badly as I expected. The characters are older now and, after the series ended, all partnered up to a certain degree and "happy" in their relationships. Carrie and Big have settled into a new flat and this has made Carrie think about commitment and legal connections – a path that leads to them deciding to get married. While Big gets nervous, Carrie goes planning crazy, Miranda sows the seeds of problems in her own marriage, Charlotte plays happy families and Samantha has it all except one thing.

This plot setup creates the focus of the film – less on the free-wheeling sex and modern relationships of the series and more on the pitfalls of a mature relationship. This offered more substance to carry the film from my point of view but unfortunately this was not to be the case here. For too much of the film the material is superficial and sentimental with "love" not ever being all that real and instead smacking of easy steps in the writing that focused on events rather than the characters. Fans may say that the show was never about great depths and, in my limited experience, I agree – it was witty, light and bubbly. The problem is that, the occasional moment aside, the film just isn't that way – understandably perhaps given the narrative demands of the platform and the running time. Problem is, without the witty swiftness of the series, something else is required and this is why the substance was important – and why the film is damaged by the lack of depth on this occasion.

This doesn't make a bad film but it does severely limit it to being "average" in the main content. What doesn't help at this time of recession (and the film was released during this period) is just how endlessly capitalist the whole thing. The audience needs to care for these characters and that is a little difficult when money is no object for them, retail therapy solves everything and so much dialogue is about expensive items. To top all that, given how easy it is to get product placement into a film about shopping why on earth did we have to have such clumsy and obvious product placement (the iPhone being the worst example). The cast do their usual shtick and all look good and play comfortably with their characters. Some reviews have criticised the four actresses but the material is to blame rather than them. The male cast are mainly just narrative devices and, with the exception of Eigenberg and possibly Noth.

The Sex and the City film is an average film with lots of problems. Generally this opinion is dismissed if it comes from a male non-fan but I cannot imagine that fans of the series are totally happy with this either. It doesn't manage to capture the spirit of the series but nor does it manage to replace it with anything else of note in regards depth or substance. It is glossy and professional enough to distract but if the plan was to continue the series through the occasional film then this is a pretty poor way to start off.