New York Dolls
PODHORETZ, JOHN
New York Dolls Four gals in Manhattan, plus men, shoes, and important lessons. BY JOHN PODHORETZ T he movie version of Sex and the City has almost every failing, and hardly a single virtue,...
...Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent without a thought...
...The series had a bright, fi zzy quality equivalent to a sip of a Cosmopolitan, the sweet cocktail it introduced to the world...
...Hard-shelled lawyer Miranda fell in mutual love with the sweet and schleppy bartender she had thought was not good enough for her...
...in which love objects, of both the human or accessorizing variety, instantly materialized whenever needed and were procured without diffi culty...
...That’s fi ne...
...And in any case, we’ve been through all of this before with them, and I think most viewers were happy and relieved to have it all wrapped up...
...When last we saw the Four Horsewomen of the Metropolis, they were basking in the domestic contentment that had continually eluded them during the six seasons of the show’s run...
...And yet, at the end of every episode, they picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and went to brunch all over again...
...This sweet, naive notion is the guiding principle behind the movie, and writer-director Michael Patrick King stretches it beyond the breaking point...
...The movie is rueful and anxious...
...When Samantha Jones turns from Id to Superego, it’s time to head for the exits...
...For six years, they had made mistakes, were betrayed and betrayed others, had their hearts broken and broke the hearts of others...
...And Carrie, our narrator-heroine, was at last reunited with the love of her life, the sly tycoon Mr...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ T he movie version of Sex and the City has almost every failing, and hardly a single virtue, of the long-running HBO television series about four female friends on the loose in Manhattan...
...Where’s the fun in that...
...The fantasy at the heart of Sex and the City was that, no matter how bitter a turn life might take, there will always be a friend or three there to offer moral support when you need to buy a very expensive pair of shoes...
...it was the notion, rather, that while romance may be fl eeting, female friendship will ever endure...
...The women of Sex and the City lived in a universe in which people never worry about money, or employment, or fear for a child’s health...
...ber-WASP Charlotte found marital bliss, adoptive motherhood, and the ancient faith of the Hebrews with the bald Jewish divorce lawyer who liberated her from impotent Trey and his overbearing mother...
...People procure fi rst-class plane tickets and sign up for long stays at fi ve-star resorts...
...To demonstrate its importance, he takes a hatchet to all but one of the successful romantic relationships to which he guided the Sex and the City women when he was producing the show in its fi nal years...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...For Miranda and Steve to hit rocky shoals when most of their relationship during the series consisted of them not having a relationship...
...it’s more gin and bitters than Cosmo...
...A valuable lesson, to be sure—except that this is Sex and the City we’re talking about, not Anna Karenina...
...Apartments are bought and sold and repurchased, and no one breaks a sweat...
...Big go through yet another breakup when we had seen it twice already...
...His message is that there are no happilyeverafters...
...Was anybody clamoring to see Carrie Bradshaw and Mr...
...But those happy endings were crucial to creating a satisfying arc for the characters that would fi nally reward them (and the audience) for the pain and suffering through which they had put themselves over the years...
...who wants to spend $11.75 at the box offi ce visiting a world of unromantic reality...
...It was, in other words, the world of romantic fantasy, and the movie retains that quality...
...It appears that Michael Patrick King wants us to...
...Their pain and suffering were as fl uffy as everything else on display...
...Sex and the City didn’t capture the hearts of American women because of its depiction of Manhattan glitz...
...There isn’t much fun in that, and there’s almost no fun to be had in Sex and the City: The Movie...
...Promiscuous public-relations executive Samantha settled down with the decades-younger boy toy who took care of her during a bout of breast cancer...
...Worse still is the spectacle of Samantha craving her former promiscuity and then refusing to act on her craving out of principle...
...Where most of the show’s episodes hurtled through their 27-minute running times with four separate plotlines—so that if one of those stories was boring or annoying you merely had to wait a minute until you got to a more pleasing one—the movie drags itself across two hours and 25 minutes with all the energy and enthusiasm America once beheld during a Scott McClellan press briefi ng...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 37
