Candace Bushnell Week Special Filmbook: "Sex and the City" (2008)

The four women we follow in the new movie "Sex and the City" would be almost unrecognizable to the girls in the book of the same name. The first major change was to clarify all the escapades into four women for the television show; gradually, stakes were introduced that put Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda into positions closer to the women of LIPSTICK JUNGLE than to early Bushnell with the coke and the partying and the... well, singleness. The friends all end the series paired up, and they begin the movie that way, and any fan who believed their men friends would magically disappear probably weren't paying attention.

Still, in their transformation from single and dating to committed or married, they preserved that sense of sisterhood which informed the TV series but not the book. Women sit around talking about sex in SEX AND THE CITY, but it's not central, the men are. The HBO series' thesis which it kept returning to was, Men come and go, but your friends are forever -- something with which viewers like me clearly identified with. (Although to be fair, when I watched the series there were no men coming or going for me.)

Thus I underestimated how moved I would be by this movie, which in essence recycles some very common "women's plots" we've all seen before. Two women are trying to put the spark back into their relationships, one faces a major change to her family and a fourth, Carrie, popularly regarded as a star, is finally marrying Mr. Big, the man she's been with on and off for 10 years. (I'm pro-Big, for the record; he is still a topic of argument.) In a way it was, as other television-shows-turned-movies have not been, strangely comforting to drop back in on these characters' lives and meet them again, for better or for worse. Probably because the film was written and directed by a writer and producer for the show, there was no sense of scrapping the original series ending to make room for unnecessary crisis.

I'm being vague because so much of this movie was not spoiled for me, and I'm hesitant to spoil it for anyone else. Suffice to say, if this is the direction Bushnell's work has wandered, then it ought to stay there; there was a sense of real emotion that drove the characters in this movie to support each other which I never felt from any of her books.

Filmbook verdict: See the movie (if you like the show). Read the book (if you REALLY like the show).