"Sex and the City: The Movie" : A Nation Braces Itself

Chicago columnist John Kass offers his male readers a a "Get Out of Watching the Sex and the City Movie Card, or Kass' SATC Absolvo Carta for short. The movie recently premiered in England, and Kass points to the comment that "a regular guy named Phil" left at the Times Online, as evidence of why such a thing is necessary: "I don't think SATC is just for girls. I am a reasonably well-adjusted bloke and I am looking forward to seeing the film with my girlfriend. I am then looking forward to poking my eyes out with red-hot pokers, burning my skin off, and rolling around in salt for a while." Kass, who seems confused about his role as an opinion journalist, writes that "It is the never-ending question to the never-ending story, why men would rather chop their toes off with a rusty hoe than walk across the street to see Sex and the City. Why? Tell me why." If I do, do I get your salary? Kass himself establishes that it has nothing to do with the desire to avoid seeing something awful, since he himself boasts of his ability to watch Random Harvest, a movie that I am confident is worse than Sex and the City will be, given that a scientific study once confirmed that it was worse than leprosy and the Bush administration's response to Hurrican Katrina. He also never brings up what's really hard to take about the TV series and what is probably too deeply engrained as an irreplaceable part of the franchise to have been dumped from the movie: that goddamn narration. Someone who once watched half an episode during the Clinton administration and was surprised to learn that I was a faithful viewer up until the show's death rattle, when Mikhail Baryshnikov was brought on to demonstrate the shallow attractions and ultimately the deal-breaking downside of a dating an aging Russian roue', could only think to ask me if the narration had gotten any better. I immediately told him ye, which is what we in the critical studies department call a lie. The truth is, if you got into the show, the narration was just something you learned to make your peace with, like Gil Grissom's pre-credits one-liners on CSI. (In that particular case, "making one's peace" is of course defined as "putting one's hands over one's ears and going, 'La la la la, I can't hear you!'")

Since need to stand up and declare that the thought of seeing the Sex and the City is shared even by people who'd rather watch Random Harvest than eat lead paint, its roots causes must be less aesthetic than sociological. It probably has something to do with what people who claim to be nostalgic for bear attacks would call the feminization of our culture. Once upon a time, a man knew he was a man because he had savages to fight and untamed lands to conquer; now he has a soft life and a 401K, so he has to prove he's a man by shrieking in horror at the prospect of seeing Sarah Jessica Parker talk about shoes. (I myself am immune to this sort of thing, being the result of a way-failed experiment to attempt to raise the perfect man. My mother used to hit me with an electric cattle prod whenever I'd leave the toilet seat up.) The movie, which went over well with its target audience at the premiere and which has been dodging rumors of a death in the family--and let me just mention that if Charlotte and Harry aren't both alive and still married at the end, I will personally torch the theater--appears set to steamroller on, so people disinclined to share a planet with it might be forced to just suck it up and adapt. The real question may turn out to be, is the movie too much of an okay thing? In her last interview, the film critic Pauline Kael said that she kinda liked the show because it took material that was too played out to power a feature film anymore and showed that it could still be used to power an entertaining half-hour time killer on TV. The movie runs two hours and fifteen minutes and was made on a budget of 65 million dollars. That's killing time with a bazooka!