Sex and The City Movie

ChewChew

irishbird wrote: »

nope, i hate it too. its is so horribly sterotypical and what is it with all the sex scenes and the drama queen issues. seriously, does anyone actually know wimmins like these?

Oh thank the lord!!! I dont know no wimmins like these. The sex scenes are fine, they happen, but the drama??? oh get a grip gurlies.

Clare Bear

Blasphemy!! :eek:

Sam Kade

lizann wrote: »

new movie trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfrT0nzRTmw

Its released in May 08

anyone else excited?

Do people actually watch that ****e? I wouldn't mind if they put some decent looking women in it it might be watchable. That carrie one is one ugly bitch she's lanky, craggy, old how could anyone relate her with sex?

Clare Bear

Sam Kade wrote: »

Do people actually watch that ****e? I wouldn't mind if they put some decent looking women in it it might be watchable. That carrie one is one ugly bitch she's lanky, craggy, old how could anyone relate her with sex?

:eek: Off with your head!

Cazlou

Remember back around January Jules suggested an LL Meetup to go see it?! Is that still gonna go ahead???:D

John Mason

ChewChew wrote: »

Oh thank the lord!!! I dont know no wimmins like these. The sex scenes are fine, they happen, but the drama??? oh get a grip gurlies.

i know the sex happens but i really dont want to see it on my television. and what is the story with SJP hands? i feel sick every time is see them

ChewChew

irishbird wrote: »

i know the sex happens but i really dont want to see it on my television. and what is the story with SJP hands? i feel sick every time is see them

OMG thats totally what I was thinkin. I fink we were separated at birth. hahaha. all the SATC woman any me. they are frikkin eejits.

b3t4

lizann, I'm afraid i won't be clicking on your link as I'm refusing to look at anything that might dimish my enjoyment of the movie. I find trailers often give away all the best bits of a film and prefer to head along to them without any knowledge of what might happen in them.

I'm very excited and nervous about seeing the movie as I loved/adored the series. I've watched it many, many times at this stage. This movie could make the series or it could break it. I hope it lives up to my expectations.

Here's a link my partner sent me on this morning. It's an interesting read.

Can a feminist really love Sex and the City?
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/women/story/0,,2273785,00.html

A

Quality

I heard yesterday that Cynthia Nixon who plays Miranda underwent treatment for breast cancer throughout the filming of the film. She had recently "Come Out" as well. Fair play to her for being so brave to continue working through out making the film.

I cant wait to see it... I will definetly be making a girls night out of it!!

Clare Bear

Cazlou wrote: »

Remember back around January Jules suggested an LL Meetup to go see it?! Is that still gonna go ahead???:D

I hope so! Would be fab!

Sephiroth_dude

oh jesus,looks like I'll be getting dragged to this :-/.

Babette08

Aww - what's with all the SATC bashing? It's TV - of course it's slightly over dramatic!! Well it's certainly the closest thing I've ever seen on TV in terms of being able to relate to

Our plan is something along the lines of getting dolled up to-the-nines, going to see it, then out for cocktails...roll on May!!

ChewChew

I shall attend for coctails. . . I'll have to miss the movie. teeheehee

Nevyn

Just tought I'd share.

Can a feminist really love Sex and the City?


For some, Sex and the City was a refreshing story of friendship and sexual freedom. For others, it was an orgy of consumerism and triviality. With the film version set to open, Alice Wignall asks if the series was good or bad for women

Wednesday April 16, 2008
The Guardian

Sex and the City
Four's company ... Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis in the film version of Sex and the City. Photograph: Allstar/NEW LINE CINEMA


If you are even remotely au fait with the motifs of Sex and the City, the scene will be instantly familiar. A female journalist, at work in her city apartment, ponders the blank screen of her laptop. Her fingers hover, the cursor winks invitingly and this week's pressing question is tapped out. But the person at the computer is me rather than Carrie Bradshaw, there is not a strappy shoe in sight and my question would never have appeared on the show, namely: is it really possible to call yourself a feminist and still like Sex and the City?

Article continues
I only ask because, next month, the series that launched a thousand "Which SATC character are you?" quizzes is back, this time on our cinema screens. And yet I'm still no closer to working out if the SATC gals could do with a few remedial consciousness raising classes, or if they are, in fact, le dernier cri in empowered womanhood.

The original show, which ran for 94 half-hour episodes between 1998 and 2004, is unashamedly - and, yes, unusually - a show about women, for women (though, significantly, not completely by women. It was adapted from a newspaper column and book of the same name by Candace Bushnell, but the producer and a good chunk of the writers and directors were men). The four main characters even represent a slightly self-conscious stab at representing four different archetypes of womanhood. Charlotte, the conservative, romantic, naive upper-east-side princess with sights firmly set (at least at the start of the show's run) on the right marriage to the right man. Samantha, the successful, hardworking, inviolably independent PR executive who is a believer in sex rather than love and just as tirelessly devoted to that last cause as Charlotte is to hers. Miranda, the smart, corporate, high-flying lawyer. And, at the centre of it all, attempting to navigate a path between the options offered by her unlikely group of girlfriends, is Carrie: in her own way just as idealistic as Charlotte, as glamorous as Samantha and as dry as Miranda. The themes and plot of each episode are framed by the questions Carrie asks in her weekly columns for the fictional New York Star newspaper (a reflection of Bushnell's own writing for the real life New York Observer) and include everything from experimental lesbianism to breast cancer and the challenges of combining career and motherhood.

And yet, despite the awards and enviable viewing figures, and despite the fact that SATC really did bring something new to mainstream television when it started, it was not immediately embraced by the sisterhood as must-see feminist TV.

That is partly because, for a show about women, it displays a singular obsession with men. As Miranda, the character most likely to consider herself a feminist, points out in one episode: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?"

Since the primary purpose of SATC is to explore what it was like for thirtysomething heterosexual single women negotiating sex and love in a late 20th-century urban setting, it would be hard to do that without mentioning men. But that makes it, at its heart, a protracted romantic comedy, and SATC suffers from being bound by the still-pretty-conventional constraints of the genre.

Janet McCabe, research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-editor, with her colleague Kim Akass, of Reading Sex and the City, a collection of essays about the programme, says, "The women are still caught in fairytale narratives. The 'right' couple were signalled in the first episode [in which Carrie first meets her on-off lover known only as Mr Big] and in some ways the entire show has just been about them getting together - which, of course, has to be endlessly delayed or you don't have the driving force behind the story." But this central relationship is clearly problematic. Mr Big is arrogant, egocentric and apparently unable to see a good thing when she is standing in front of him in four-inch heels. Carrie's own inability to wake up and realise what a terrible cliche she is dating renders her, at best, pretty dumb and, at worst, passive and weak. (At the conclusion of the TV series, she is rescued from Paris - and another unsatisfactory relationship with another alpha male - by Mr Big, her knight on a Boeing 777.)

"It does make for quite uncomfortable viewing," says Professor Imelda Whelehan of De Montfort University, author of The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City. "How do we respect her? And Mr Big is such an interesting element. Even his name is masculine. He is like this phallus at the centre of it all."

The most significant story arcs are about the characters' search for relationships. And at the conclusion of the television show, all four characters - even Samantha, whose avowed aim for most of the series was emotion-free sex - are happily paired up.

"It does seem that, in the end, it had to come back to a traditional view," says Whelehan. "That the future for most women means marriage and children."

And despite the shared understanding between the show's creators and its fans and analysts that every woman is one of the SATC ladies, it has always been crushingly obvious that hardly any of us actually is. The characters are, to a woman, white, rich, straight and apparently unencumbered by any strong emotional or practical ties to anyone or anything beyond their friendship group and, of course, the men they engage with. On one level, this is simply a piece of scene setting - it is a show about wealthy New Yorkers, not about all women everywhere. Akass points out that because there are so few television programmes purely about women, "Sex and the City bears the burden of representation. No one expects The Sopranos to encompass the experience of all middle-aged Italian-American men." The lack of drama in any other aspect of the women's lives except their relationships - the fact that they don't generally have to deal with issues arising from, for example, financial burdens or family ties - clears the field for their sex lives to become their first priority. "They do exist in this kind of vacuum," says Whelehan. "The chaotic element in their lives is their partners. Everything else is ultimately fine, mainly because they have the money to fix most problems." Which also explains why SATC is often dismissed as being simply a show about shoes. With no real battles to fight, excessive screen time can be devoted to tales of trivial consumption.

But that can also be easily rebutted. You may not applaud the way that the show tackles more serious issues, sandwiched, as they are, between dates and dinners, sex and shopping, but SATC is never just froth and froth alone. Illness, infertility, bereavement, ageing, single motherhood, sexual discrimination and divorce all play their part in the show's storylines. Glossily packaged and swiftly dispatched they may be, but you can confidently say that there is more to the programme than footwear.

And is the endless head-scratching over men really a betrayal of women? Or could it actually be an acknowledgement of the problems that plenty of women still experience in reconciling the protection and preservation of their own identities while engaging with men at work, at play, and in bed? As Akass asks, "Is it the case that a strong women can't desire a husband?" The success of SATC showed that, at the very least, there's still plenty of mileage in the tension between independence and the desire for sex, love and partnership; and especially for all those things with men.

These questions are not dealt with in an unintelligent way; the chorus of different female voices is a useful device for discussing them; that it fails to offer any novel answers is a function of the fact that it is, after all, just a TV fairy story. It also seems churlish to be bitter about the fact that Carrie et al do not offer a fail-safe model for emancipated womanhood when nor, frankly, has real-life feminism.

And to dismiss the programme entirely on the basis of its shortcomings as a feminist text would also be to lose out on what it does deliver. Just to take the most headline-grabbing example, that includes some pretty frank discussion of sex, in which female sexual pleasure and agency is obviously considered a fundamental right, rather than a privilege. McCabe says, "The way they spoke, and the things they talked about, were revolutionary. And it was also a great study of female friendship.

Ultimately, you just feel that it started with the four of them and they will always be together." Not only is it a programme about women, but one about women who like each other. They identify as each other's soul mates and provide emotional, practical and moral support. They don't compete with each other for male attention. They make each other laugh. It is probably the best depiction of the genuine nature and importance of female friendship ever to win an Emmy.

And so while it is probably about as much use as the Beano as a manual for life, you can be a feminist and like Sex and the City. Not least because if you're about to start letting political doctrine arbitrarily dictate which bits of the culture you respond to you may as well give up now and submit to the patriarchy. But mainly because the programme is funny and clever and it thinks women are important

· Sex and the City: the Movie is released on May 28

b3t4

Ya missed my link Thaedydal I'm sure the way you've posted it will have more people reading it.

I really enjoyed that article. The line "But mainly because the programme is funny and clever and it thinks women are important" pretty much sums up why I love SATC.

Also, due to not developing very good female relationships growing up it really got me to appreciate how much women can and do care about/support each other. Alot of the times women can be so harsh on each other but in SATC it showed me another side.

A

orestes

All it's missing is Colin Firth and it will be the end of manliness for all time

*heads to BGRH where the men are real men*

SheRa

Im so annoyed. I went to see a movie on Sunday and they showed the SATC trailer. I was doing my best to avoid any mention of the film at all:(. The trailer seemed to give away the whole feckin plot as well:eek:. But Cmol assures me that SJP has said that the trailer is really misleading, so Im hoping thats true:) *crosses fingers*.

Cazlou I do remember us saying that we would all go to see it. It would be brilliant if we could hire out a small cinema and get all dressed up to go see it. I'd say that it'd be great craic. I'll look into that tomorrow. If anyone has any suggestions for private cinemas let me know.

nomorebadtown

for me satc was the worst thing to happen to women in a long time.
so cringe worthy and degrading...full of pop psychology and other bull...and now, from a purely shallow point of view, they've all aged badly...not even good for the eye candy no more.

jellie

why analyse it so much? i see it as a tv show (or movie in this case!), there for entertainment, & i dont take any hidden meanings or wonder if its about feminists or really think much about it.. i watch it cause it entertains me & i like it

Sam Kade wrote:

I wouldn't mind if they put some decent looking women in it it might be watchable. That carrie one is one ugly bitch she's lanky, craggy, old how could anyone relate her with sex?

My bf would agree. he thinks theyre all absolutely awful looking except for charlotte. SJP was named unsexiest woman in some poll recently. i dont think shes THAT bad, but i wouldnt think her stunning either.

Clare Bear

Exactly, why take it so serious?

And I'm glad they're not all amazing lookers, wouldn't be very realistic if they were. I do think that SJP is a lot better looking than she's given credit for though, she can look great sometimes. Plus has the best clothes ever!

Nevyn

Clare Bear wrote: »

. I do think that SJP is a lot better looking than she's given credit for though, she can look great sometimes. Plus has the best clothes ever!

Gods no, some of the stuff she wore in the serious was horrendous, great to rip the piss out of mind.

Clare Bear

Thaedydal wrote: »

Gods no, some of the stuff she wore in the serious was horrendous, great to rip the piss out of mind.

I'm talking about her own clothing range. Very affordable too. Big thumbs up.

Babette08

I always thought that Carrie was completely charming – her looks alone not where the appeal lies. I’m not a bloke but never thought that the amount of guys who fall for her in the series ever unrealistic.

Perfect package of intelligence, quirky beauty, wit, style, strength, class, goofiness, fun, independence and vulnerability – complex - the reason why so many girls can relate to her. Show me a guy who wouldn’t fall for that? Yet all we hear is she’s not the best looking is she? Missing the point!! And the wardrobe – don’t get me started..I can count the number of times she’s put a foot wrong on one hand!