I am sure you would say that I am not entitled to an opinion, since I have no intention of going to see the movie and really I have only seen one or two episodes of the series, but I just think that this new “Sex in the City” film is just absurd. How old are these gals now, anyway? Sixty? Seventy five? Ten thousand and five? Why are the characters tromping about in their short skirts and push up bustiers when they should be holding onto walkers and swigging Geritol from the flask instead of Appletinis?
A waggish queen I know of joked that he thought he was watching an episode of The Golden Girls when he saw the movie, but I disagreed: Betty White, who is now so hip after that TV commercial and her appearance on Saturday Night Live, is far more sexy and hip then those four caterwauling hags on SITC, as its fans call it. These days, when the lunching foursome get together, the ladies need to hire the valet to park their broomsticks. The thing is, Sex in the City is a period piece. It’s the 1990s! Trying to go to the well once again in an attempt to recreate the magic of that pre-9/11, pre-recession age really is not going to work well.
Many years ago, I was working at a megalithic movie studio somewhere in the LA area. And one of the things they did regularly was bring in trend analysts to talk to us about where they thought the movie biz was heading in the next years. Most of the other Readers in the department sniggered and didn’t take the meetings seriously. They would ridicule and sneer at them, believing that it was the sort of dopey naïve silliness that gives the movie business a bad name. However, I have to admit that I found them intriguing.
Anyway, what the analyst said at the time, was that movie audiences love “growing old” with the performers they see in the movies. They love how, say, over the decades, John Travolta ages from a hot young stud in Saturday Night Fever to a doughy Jabba the Hutt-like jello mold with glaring eyes and sharp white teeth, which is how he appears in almost every movie he’s in nowadays. Or we love how Clint Eastwood gets more and more wrinkles, in his latest movies he essentially turns into a dehydrated piece of beef jerky with eyeballs.
I daresay, my point is, we are pleased to grow old with the stars we watch. It’s probably because we feel they are “our” stars from “our” particular crystallized moment in time. And, yet, the problem with this “Sex In The City” movie is that the women have grown older, but their characters have not. Can you imagine how much more appealing the movie would be if the writers had decided to address the various issues of what it’s like to be an unabashedly middle aged lady living in Manhattan? There are plenty of them, to be sure.
The writers could have described the characters’ menopause, the abrupt discovery that men are finding them less desirable, their realization that the spotlight of men’s attentions are just starting to pass them by. There’s a lot of potential drama to be had – and it would be peculiarly realistic and, yet, sympathetic, because the characters arrive with all the familiarity and affection of the years on TV. Instead, though, I expect they decided to portray the four friends basically as dolls, doing the exact same things they did on the series, even though the people playing them were now a decade older. It strikes me as unsuitable – and also rather sad and debasing. But, then again, since I am not really in the movie business any more – and I certainly am not going to watch the darn thing – I should probably just fall silent at this point.
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