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“Sex and the City”: Friends are family

Last Friday, the full-length Sex and the City movie trailer was leaked online.

   

I’ll admit it: I’m excited about this movie. And I say that as someone who took quite a long time to become a fan of the show. When it first premiered in 1998, the glossy-looking previews got me to tune in, expecting a New York—based comedy along the lines of Friends. What I got seemed a lot more along the lines of soft porn to me – plus a seemingly endless run of terrible puns and vacuous-sounding questions from sex columnist Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) – and I just as quickly tuned out. When friends talked about the show to me, I told them in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t stand it. Yet somehow, around the time of the fifth or sixth season, I found myself taking another look. And whether it was just because I had gotten older, or because the show had gotten a lot better, I unexpectedly found myself being drawn into it. Carrie seemed less brittle, self-obsessed and neurotic to me, and I found myself noticing what a good friend she was. Prissy Charlotte (Kristin Davis) had met her perfect match in the short, bald, fat Harry (Evan Handler) and had loosened up a bit. Slutty Samantha (Kim Cattrall) was no longer shagging everything that moved, but seemed on the verge of settling into an actually rather touching relationship with Smith (Jason Lewis) – plus I admired the tough, steely way she was handling breast cancer.

And then there was Miranda.

Even before I knew that Cynthia Nixon played for our team (and even before she handled being outed in such a classy, fuss-free way), Miranda was always my favorite of the four women. Like Dana on The L Word, she seemed the most normal, the most relatable, and the most down-to-earth of the show’s glamorous, high-earning female characters.

Even if they are straight, I also really liked her relationship with Steve (David Eigenberg). Defensive, unromantic Miranda’s unwillingness to admit that she liked him made total sense to me – plus there was the fact that Nixon is such a good actress (she won an Emmy for her role in 2004). While I can’t find a clip of my favorite moment between them – where Miranda thinks she has lost Steve and finally admits she loves him – this one is pretty funny:

   

The center of the show, of course, is the friendship between the four women – and, as you might expect, this is the aspect of it that I most enjoyed. Yes, all the women are straight. But watching Miranda call after Carrie after they have had a fight – “Carrie I love you, come back” – or watching the girls’ supportive reactions to Samantha’s news that she has breast cancer, it feels like you are watching women who are life partners emotionally, even if not sexually.

Trying to explain to her boyfriend Aleks how she feels about Samantha’s illness, Carrie tells him that: “Samantha is my friend. She’s my family. My insides. She will be fine because she has to be fine. That’s how important she is to me.” And as Mr. Big tells Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda in the show’s penultimate episode: “You’re the loves of [Carrie’s] life, and a guy’s just lucky to come in fourth.” If all that’s not enough of an incentive for you to see the movie, then there’s the fact that it also features Jennifer Hudson (though how big a role she’ll play isn’t totally clear from the trailer … and what I really want to know is, is she going to sing?) Anyway, to put you in a musical mood, I’ll leave you with this Sex and the City—inspired video for the Destiny’s Child song “Girl.” Anything that involves

Beyoncé holding hands with girls works for me:

   

Are you looking forward to the movie? Did you love or hate or “eh” the show when it was on TV? Let me know below.

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