Okay.
This is going to be
interesting.
WARNING: (And I'm entirely serious about this...)
DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DO NOT WANT TOTAL, COMPLETE, ABSOLUTE, UNASHAMED SPOILERS...
I'm not just talking about divulging plot points - I'm fucking just givin' away end points as well... Imma ruin it, RIGHT NOW...
So, AVERT YOUR GAZE/GAYS RIGHT NOW LEST THE S&TC MOVIE EXPERIENCE BE COMPLETELY SPOIL'D!!!!!!
Last chance...
I'm not kidding...
Don't read any further, as tempting as it sounds...
This is actually going to be kind of a depressing post...
Alright...
Here we go...
FINAL FINAL FINAL chance to steer away...
Okay...
So Thursday night I had the opportunity to attend an advance screening of Sex & The City: The Movie with a gaggle of friends, old and new, at the Varsity Cinemas, right here in Toronto. We had been drinking cosmos for nigh on 2 hours before heading down, so we were in a pretty festive mood (some of us more than others... you know who you are [and it's not who you think. Yeah.]). Beforehand, I was remarking to some of my acquaintances that I think S&TC is so fond for us is because it really was the timely zeitgeist of our University years - the final episode aired my final semester - a fact that was very clearly represented in the crowd... allllll 20-something gals and gays...
After 18 million previews for stone-cold chick flicks a-la "He's Just Not Into The Sisterhood of the Travelling Secret Bees", the movie finally started... A misleadingly brusque recap of where we left off with the four girls and where they are/what they're doing now right off the top... the entire cinema practically cums their pants... it's a sensory overload... like dumping blood in shark infested waters - HOLY FUCK!
The movie opens up with Big and Carrie cooking in the kitchen... Carrie discussing that she needs to get things in order, that nothings certain, she can't predict her and Big's future, and I guess all this non-committal-ness gives Big a boner because then he very uneventfully proposes to her... the audience cums their pants yet again... THIS IS THE MONEY SHOT THAT WE'D BEEN WAITING FOR BUT NEVER GOT!!! YES! And promising, off the bat.
More blood into the shark infested waters: We get our first shot of the girls coming together and trotting down the streets of Manhattan. At first, it's just Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda strolling along, Carrie mentioning that Big's buying them a penthouse and it's going to be fabulousity... then they meet up with Samantha, who's apparently just flown in from LA and boy are her arms tired. Y'see, Samantha's now LA-based, running a management company that revolves around her boy-toy, Smith Jerrod.
Suddenly, we're back at the gals' favourite brunch hutch - ANOTHER COLLECTIVE AUDIENCE BONER - only this time, there's a fifth at the table... Charlotte's adopted Chinese daughter, Lily, who's just about as cute as a pony fucking a kitten... times have changed, and now they have to code talk about 'fucking' into talk about 'colouring'... Samantha's not getting laid, as Smith is very busy shooting long hours on the apparent 'hit TV show' he's on... Miranda - who loathes her Brooklynite existence with every fibre of her being - also has no time for 'colouring'... and point made crystal clear in a scene in which her and Steve are 'colouring' and she abruptly asks "okay... can we wrap this up?"... yeah... SNAP! This obviously doesn't sit well for Steve...
Anyballs... the next 'collective audience boner' scene I can remember has Carrie packing up her apartment and deciding what stays and what goes - culminating in the hardest department of her hoarding: the clothes. We're then treated to a fashion show of her past outfits and Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte holding up signs that say "take" or "toss". Some hilarious, hilarious 80's outfits that obviously go, and then, the last outfit she trots out - the tank top and the tutu from the original S&TC opening!!! AHHHH!!! I lost it. LOST it. Obviously, that one stayed.
I'm sure more shit happens, but the next thing that happens that I remember is an entirely different fashion show - Carrie modelling her potential wedding dress for Charlotte and her main gay, the scarcely used Anthony Marantino played by the ever-irascible Mario Cantone. The dress is fugly. It's a vintage suit with some sort of embossed floral motif smack dab in the centre. They're decidedly against it, but Carrie insists that it's perfect because this wedding will be a small affair and speak about the simplicity and definitiveness of Carrie and Big's love. Whatever.
Then she's summoned to Vogue... by her editor, Enid Frick, played by a downright SHOCKINGLY busted Candice Bergen. Time hath not been kind to Ms. Bergen. Nevertheless... Enid says that Vogue wants to feature her in a shoot of crazy haute wedding garb in a piece called "getting married at 40" or something. Carrie
reluctantly agrees.
If part of your S&TC viewing enjoyment was spotting labels, the next sequence would have induced a seizure that might have killed you - a montage of her wearing a wedding dress by every designer under the sun. It was extravagance that would have made a scene of Marie Antoinette feasting on pastries look like the Paper Bag Princess mackin' on apple sauce, yo.
After the spread comes out, Carrie receives a gift from one Ms. Vivienne Westwood saying she saw her in the layout, and that the Westwood dress Carrie modelled was 'made for her'. Suddenly, a small wedding no longer seems fit.
All of a sudden, Carrie turns bride-zilla-esque - the wedding party swells from 75 to a whopping 200+, it's going to be held at the New York Public Library, covered by Page Six, blah blah blah - IT'S GOING TO BE A BIG FUCKING DEAL. Guess who's not cool with this? Big. He's all "this is my third time getting married" and he doesn't want all this attention paid to it, but Carrie's insatiable.
Sometime before all of this, Miranda's in the kitchen of her Brooklyn brownstone, going through the motions of some wifely/motherly duty and Steve blurts out: "I slept with someone else". Just like that. Although it's never revealed who, I've narrowed it down to A.) Magda, B.) his ex, Debbie, or C.) Nina Katz. Anyballs - I don't really feel the need to draw this out - Miranda's super pissed and moves out.
Cut to: the rehearsal dinner. This is where - if you're SUPER attentive - you can spot a bunch of former S&TC bit characters who are given 0.0 lines... I spotted the irrepressible Bitsy Von Muffling-Fine, and I'm sure there are more to be found... it's here when Steve - who was apparently shunned from the wedding after this - shows up because he knew that Miranda would be there and she hasn't been returning his calls... it's actually a really cool scene - Big, Smith and Harry are all outside having a cigar and then Steve shows up and it's like "Ahhh all the men are together!! Quick - someone get Jack Berger, Aidan, Dr. Robert Leeds, Trey MacDougall, Richard Wright and Mitch 'Mr. Pussy' Sayler for a group shot!!!" - but no...
Anyway - he tries to talk to Miranda in the rain, she outrightly rejects it, leaving him with these parting words: "I changed who I was for you!"
Very dramatic. Miranda marches back in, Big tries to talk to her and she imparts this pivotal plot-altering statement: "Don't get married. It all goes to shit" or something. Well, this is very impressive to Big, because:
Next Day. The big day. Bells are ringing. Bridesmaids are bridesmaiding. Carrie's getting dressed. Yadda yadda yadda. Big's trying to call her. He's trepidatious, but not completely going to pull out - he just needs to talk to her, they'd reaffirm their feelings for each other, and things would go off without a hitch. Well, not if Charlotte's mischevious adopted Chinese daughter has anything to do with it... she hides Carrie's cell phone. Big can't get a hold of her. He panics. Doesn't show.
Carrie's left at the altar. Ohhhhh fuck. This isn't good. Everyone's stomach is churning. If only he could have talked to her. Carrie and the girls speed off in a cab and at some sort of intersection, come face to face with Big in the car. Shit hits the fan - the girls get out and pummel him with the wedding flowers... "I knew it! I knew you would do this! It's OVER!" shouts Carrie. It's all very heartbreaking. It also kind of makes 0.0 sense, a recurring theme of this movie, but meh - whatever.
Because S&TC wouldn't be S&TC without unrealistic, needless jet-setting to fabulous places on a whim, Samantha manages to broker Carrie & Big's honeymoon into a group vacay for the gals within a split second. So they go. To Mexico. Carrie refuses to get out of bed. She's beyond heart-broken. It's here when Kristin Davis' Charlotte shines - she keeps on being overly cautious with everything she touches, justifying it under her breath by saying "
It's Mexico!", then eventually swallows a mouthful of water in the shower and poops her pants... HILARIOUS! Hilarity rivalled only by the shot of Miranda's downright feral unkempt bush...
The gals return from Mexico and back to life, back to reality. Carrie manages to score her old apartment back (possibly the
most unrealistic occurrence in this movie) and decides it's time to hire an assistant to do her bidding. Requisite burnout and borderline-retard montage not unlike the one in
Mrs. Doubtfire when Robin Williams calls Sally Field as a bunch of crazy characters before he scores with Mrs. Doubtfire. Anyway - at this point, enter one Jennifer "Louise" Hudson. She's perfect! And she rents bags - can you do that?
Rent bags? Wow.
Anyballs - she helps get Carrie's life in order, one of her duties is manning Carrie's mail etc... it's here when Carrie tells Louise to definitively block Big from her e-mail. Yep. That's it.
Some more shit happens that I can' remember - Well, I
assume that shit happened, this movie was 2 and a half hours long after all... - including a montage of what all the ladies are doing on New Years set to this crazily poignant version of "Auld Lang Syne" sung by this real, old-tymey Scottish bitch... I can't get it out of my head. Charlotte celebrates it with Harry and her little home wrecker Lilly, Samantha and Smith are intertwined in a hot tub out in LA, Carrie watches "Meet Me In St. Louis" (a gift from Louise, who's from St. Louis, and becomes known as "St. Louise") then goes to bed, and Miranda - having just passed Brady off to Steve - sits at home drinking alone. Miranda calls Carrie and is all like "what are you up to?" and Carrie's all "I'm sleeping" and it's all terribly, terribly depressing. Then Carrie bolts down to Miranda's new place in "little Ukraine-town" and they end up spending it together and it's all lovely...
OH!!! One more couple is paid mind to in this montage - STANFORD AND ANTHONY! Yes. They're at the same party, and, upon finding each other at it, say "thank God you're here". Then they kiss at midnight! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?! What the fuck happened to Marcus?! And their searing hatred of each other? Could we not have devoted 40 seconds of this monster to explaining
that shit? And of COURSE the two gay characters had to end up together... of course... fuck, even
Will & Grace didn't pander to that gentrified expectation... and they pandered to a lot... whatever... I'll save the editorializing for later...
Flash forward a little bit: Charlotte becomes pregnant. Charlotte doesn't want to do anything to jeopardize this - like running. But "running is a part of who you are". And, slowly but surely, Charlotte lets go and let's destiny be destiny. Yes. And THIS is Charlotte's big storyline in this movie. Yep. That's it. I'm not kidding - Charlotte was outrageously underused in this. I think Jennifer Hudson's character got more to work with than her. Wow.
Suddenly, it's Valentines' Day: I assume Charlotte spends it with her loving-yet-unconventional family bathed in eternal happiness in her Park Avenue apartment. Samantha, in gesture both romantic and hilarious, adorns her naked middle-aged beav in sushi and waits for Smith to come home. And waits. And waits. And waits. He's waylaid. She finally says "F" it and sheds the sushi - however, not before noticing her attractive neighbors fucking like there's no tomorrow in their bay window that apparently looks right into Samantha's.
Smith comes home and boy is there hell to pay. To the surprise of no one, he's tired after a long day on set and doesn't want to do anything. Samantha then unleashes an unholy barrage of sushi at him and the whole thing is just too funny.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Carrie and Miranda decide to ring in Valentine's Day by having a good-old-fashioned spinster's night out at some restaurant that's overzealously decorated with balloons. It's here that Miranda drops the bomb: she told Big not to get married. Carrie's crazily pissed and storms out of there.
Maybe it was my 17th cosmo-in-a-water bottle or maybe it was the fact that this movie just went on and on and on but quite possibly it was both - I can't, for the life of me, give you a blow by blow anymore. But I can tell you how everything ends...
Somehow, it's convinced that Miranda and Steve go to a couple's councillor in attempts to reconcile - something
he's heartily in favour of, something
she's decidedly leaning against. It's then decided that they both make a list of pros and cons and set a date to show up somewhere and make the call. The site is the Brooklyn bridge - get it? The thing that
bridges Manhattan and Brooklyn? Miranda's past and future life? yeah - and upon seeing each other, fall back madly in love and all is right in the world again. Cut to: a scene of them furiously humping, featuring a full, furious frontal by Cynthia Nixon. "Yikes" doesn't begin to describe how I felt about this.
Speaking of frontal action - albeit not full - Samantha is out for a stroll on the beach one day sporting a ridiculously high-wasted two-piece bathing suit (bitch might as well been wearing a set of olde-tymey swimming trunks) with her new dog (yes... Samantha got a dog...) when the pup wanders up the stairs of Samantha's zexxxy next-door-neighbor, Dante, only to find him naked as the day is long enjoying an outdoor shower. Samantha, who hasn't bounced up and down on anything in a coon's age, is flabbergasted. He says she's welcome to join him any time. She runs away in befuddlement.
Some time later, during one of her many, many, MANY visits to New York (I honestly remarked out loud to myself, "She certainly visits
a lot"), the girls notice that she's put some weight on. Apparently, Sam's been eating her feelings - filling the void she once filled with a cock with food. This won't do - sooooo, SHE BREAKS UP WITH SMITH!!! YEP!!! Ha. She ends it. He comes home one day and she says "we need to talk" and he's all like "what now?" and she's all "see ya NEVER, asshole". No. What she actually says is "I love you, but I love me more" - the exact same thing she said to Richard Wright when she broke it off with him, which I can't decide is an homage to a past episode or just a case of the creative 'well' running dry and them just not remembering that they used that line before.
NEVERTHELESS - back in NYC, a very pregnant Charlotte is sitting down for some brunch when who should she see across the restaurant but Mr. John James Preston/BIG. She bolts, he bolts after her. Out on the street, Charlotte becomes hysterical telling Big, "I always fought for you!" and he tries to explain himself - then, POOF. Or rather, GUSH. - Charlotte's water breaks. Because, y'see, in the Sex & The City world, no one's water ever breaks in a non-eventful context. Big whisks Charlotte to the hospital. Some time later, Carrie arrives to meet and greet the new baby, named "Rose" ("Now I have a Lily and a Rose"). Harry tells Carrie that Big was the one who took Charlotte to the hospital and that he was waiting around for her, saying "he really wanted to see you and he's been trying to get in contact with you incessantly". Carrie's all "NO HE HASN'T!!! AHHH!!!" and goes home.
With this thought still lingering in her head, Carrie checks all her mail to see if there's any from Big she hasn't received. Oh yeah - I should mention, Carrie's assistant Jennifer "Louise" Hudson has moved back from whence she came as she re-fell in love with an old flame at a New Years party back in St. Louis, so Carrie's on her own now to do all her remedial day-to-day bullshit herself. Anyballs - still curious as to where this incessant correspondence from Big is, she rifles through her e-mail and remembers that she told Louise to block all of Big's e-mail. Those e-mails are in a folder, but there's a password blocking them. She telephones Louise, but she don't answer. Then she takes a wild stab at the password, and it's "love". Of course it is.
It's here that she's deluged by e-mails from Big, each one more romantic than the last. Quoting all these great lovers and shit, culminating in one that says simply: "No matter what happens - I will always love you." Yep. Re-stating that makes me misty... up here and down there... holy crap -
THAT was the proverbial money shot that S&TC fans yearned for but never thought they'd get. At this point, Louise telephones Carrie and she's all "Girrrrrl I miss ya call! What's happenin'?" and Carrie explains the situation from her. For some reason, Louise reminds Carrie to go and get the pair of shoes that Carrie put in the closet of the penthouse that her and Big were to live happily ever after in until things fell through. Yeah - I forgot to mention that... at the beginning, Carrie does that - sort of christens the closet - by putting a pair of Manolos in there.
So Carrie goes to pick them up. Who should she find there, standing alone in the penthouse's barren ball room but BIG. They run into each others arms, have sex on the bare floor and badda bing, badda boom, cut to: City Hall. They have the modest, uneventful wedding that they were initially supposed to have.
Final scene of the movie: the girls, all four of them, sitting around, sipping on Cosmos - "these are delicious! Why did we stop drinking these?"/"Because everybody else
started to!" - celebrating Samantha's big 5-0. They toast to another 50 years, Jennifer Hudson's wildly addictive song "
All Dressed Up In Love" plays while the credits roll and the stage is quaintly set for a sequel.
FIN.
Now...
Thoughts....
To say that I felt and still feel ambivalent about this whole she-bang would be apt. APT!
If I could say but one thing to definitively sum up my thoughts and feelings about the Sex & The City movie, it would be this: "It was terrible, but not at all disappointing".
And that's the God's truth. It was good-old-fashioned pandering to the show's fanbase and that's all there is to it. Part of me wishes it could have actually been
good - that it actually could have been something that pleased the show's rabid fan base, but also stood on its own as being good.
For real - more happened in the two-part finale of the series than did in the movie. And I mean it - more cohesive and comprehensive storylines, more emotional depth, just more substance period! I went in expecting 5 episodes back-to-back-to-back, a mini-season as it were. Not a very far-fetched expectation seeing as they actually did this regularly when the series was on. Maybe it was just a case of rustiness, but it seemed like they
barely had the time to accomplish anything - and bitches had over 2 hours!
That said, it sure was nice seeing them again. I don't care how sub-par the actual meat of it was, if you're granted the opportunity to see four of your most beloved acquaintances whom you thought had passed on, however brief and however on their terms, you'll fucking take it. And LOVE it.
So although it was like having a 5 course meal of Mexican food - savoury and enjoyable at the time, but virtually non-existent in two hours time after you're done - I'll see it again. And likely again after that.
The ladies have all held up - I didn't really think any of them were worse for the wear. SJP is still as spritely and toothsome as ever. Kirstin Davis hasn't aged a day. Even Kim Cattrall is holdin' up - and she's at an age where things rapidly go to shit, so kudos to KC. Cynthia Nixon, m'afraid, is rockin' some jowls and that's all there is to it. I assume because she just
inhales pussy night after night c/o her lover, the intriguing Christine Marinoni (pictured, to the left, to the left).
I didn't think Jennifer Hudson was terrible at all - I thought she did quite nicely with what she had to work with! Sorry she didn't have an 11th hour showstopper a-la "And I'm Telling You" to deliver, but
sheesh, give her a break!
My main gripes deal with the oversimplification of things - Charlotte not having a storyline, Stanford and Anthony uneventfully paired up - but all this can and will be remedied by the sequel! So huzzah for that!
Anyway... this post has been biblical...
Both in length and in its sacred properties...
Peace out,
--- Aj
His name is Chris. Chris Jarosz. He's a contestant on the current season of the most belligerently-titled series of all time, So You Think You Can Dance?
Well, hopefully he does really well on the show and perhaps at some point I can hook up with a crooked party promoter who'll advertize parties hosted by him - only it's totally not him, it's me, wearing shades, skulking in the corner, not talking to anyone... a-la that chick who was claiming to be Kim Kardashian and doing the exact same shit...
Is that what that is? Really? An oppressive, terrorist vestment? I thought it was just one of those hipster scarves that all the kids (and not-so-kids) are wearin' nowadays.
This is what it's come to. Before this you could always say: "Well... the bitch sure is a mess, but at least she's not defecating all over herself." Those days are now past. Oh dear.
- What a coincidence! Number 9 and number 5 on my list of all-time Plus-Sized Sistahs, Cammy Manheim and Marissy JW respectively, rockin' the red carpet...
- And, prepare yourself for this onset of dream-boat winners... Holy fuck... there's so much failure comin' at ya here, you'll be recoilled in the fetal position by the time it's done...
You can't stop the beat...
There's more...
Wowza. Those 9 should start some sort of cougar-specific all-male burlesque revue or production of The Pirates of Penzance or something... I can't believe all that washed-up boy beav was congregated together in one place at one time...
