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The Bridal Review: Sex and the City
by Ali
The DVD for Sex and the City movie is now out, and as you may have heard, it’s a little bit wedding-focused. Kind of in the same way that the Hubble telescope is a little bit space-focused.
I’ll go ahead and admit that when it came to the show… I thought it was OK. I wasn’t one of the people who took a violent hatred to it, but I was never in danger of buying one of those “I’m the Samantha” T-shirts. It was a reasonably amusing show about very well off New Yorkers having improbable amounts of casual sex. OK. No real problem with that, but not much resonance with me either. I saw the movie for the same reason I saw a few episodes of the show: It’s what my friends were doing that night.
So anyway, if you looooooved the show, it’s possible that you may have enjoyed the movie way more than I did. At least a few women in the theater spent a lot of the movie crying about the Very Sad Thing that happens. I was… unmoved, but then again I am widely known to be a horrible, coldhearted person.
Anyway, the plot mostly revolves around Carrie, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, getting engaged to Mr. Big, her longtime love interest on the show.
Aces! A show that was as clothes! Shoes! Bags! as Sex and the City was should be pretty good wedding porn, right?
Well, no. It is true that you will get to see 13,000 crazily high-end designer wedding dresses, at least one of which was so beautiful it actually made me gasp. But it gets a little icky. There’s so much blatant product placement that I actually got ashamed on the producers’ behalf. The film’s designers clearly had a great time slathering this stuff all over the set, but then all of it gets name-checked. There’s so much wedding-industry product placement (and that’s in addition to the fashion industry product placement) that I wouldn’t be surprised if the flick made a profit before it even hit the theaters. And then the movie tries to have it both ways: There’s a moral tacked on at the end about how the wedding is not about all the stuff, and focusing on the stuff was wrong, wrong, wrong. Which I absolutely agree with, but given the extensive, luxuriously filmed Carrie Tries on Incredible Dresses and Then Has Luxurious Photoshoots montage, it rings a little false.
So the movie shoves wedding porn in your face and demands that you drool, then scolds you for doing so. No, thank you. That’s a classic buzzkill, not to mention irritatingly hypocritical.
Can I recommend the rest of the movie as Fun Girly Time or as a way to blow off pre-wedding steam? Well, not really. There are some very pretty dresses, and one very naked man who may be worth the price of a rental. None of the storylines were handled satisfyingly, and the movie is neither particularly daring nor especially witty. One of the “comic” sequences involves something so childishly gross that I just ended up feeling sorry for the actress involved.
And it’s really not a marriage-positive movie, or even a relationship-positive movie. My friends and I all came out sort of bummed. It’s definitely not something I’d put on the must-see list for a bride in the final couple of months before her wedding.
If you’re a die-hard fan, you may be appreciating things I’m missing, in which case buy it and have a blast.
But otherwise, if you and the girls are going to watch something that’s a relationship downer and can’t possibly feed your soul, for heaven’s sake rent Showgirls and make a ridiculous, trashy evening of it. At least it doesn’t pretend to teach you anything.
Sex and the City
Overall Rating:
Blowing off Bridal Steam Rating:
Fun with the Girls Rating:
Degree of Wedding Porn: (with a sharp slap on the wrist at the end)
Makes You Want to Get Married Right This Minute:
Fair Trade for Making Your Fiancé See It: Nothing. Nothing in the whole wide world. Don’t do this to him.
