Sex and the City

Never thought I'd watch this as I'd never seen the series that inspired but, here I am watching the Sex in the City movie. The movie finds Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda four years after the hit HBO series ended, as they continue to juggle jobs, friendships and relationships and start to navigate motherhood, marriage and Manhattan real estate. Most importantly, the main plot of the film finds Carrie and Mr. Big decide to get married. The film then races through various themes of love, commitment, individuality, forgiveness, friendship, loss, loneliness and just about every other human condition you can think of.

I'm surprised that I really liked this movie. The film was funny. Pure and simple it did the one thing I didn’t really expect it to be able to do: It made me laugh. A lot. The humor was more “male” than I expected it to be, and a little more crude at times. There were several solid laugh out loud moments and the rest was quite entertaining. In most movies, you have characters that make their way through the story. But Sex and the City didn’t really have a story. The characters WERE the story, and in this context it really worked because of the diversity in the 4 main characters and their legitimate charm and likability (aside from the Miranda character)… but most importantly because of the long tested chemistry between them all. The chemistry of that on screen friendship was palpable and carried the movie.

Although sometimes a bit forced, I found the emotional and touching scenes worked. Each of the main characters go through significant challenges in the movie and at times it is communicated quite well. As good as the film's drama is...there was simply too much going on. For some reason the producers felt the need to give each and every one of the 4 main characters a significant story line sub-plot instead of one central story or without tying them together. 4 full stories takes screen time, each one interrupting the other and causing far to many themes to be brought into it. It’s not that any of the stories weren’t good, nor that any of the themes introduced weren’t worthy ones to be explored, it's just that Sex and the City had too many things going at the same time, and as such it hindered my ability to savor or appreciate any single one of them. In spite of that I loved this movie and while I may not check out the series anytime soon, but I'll be watching this movie every now and then.