Sex and the City: The Movie

If you watch some TV especially morning TV, or our own TV3 and its gaggle of Expose girls then you will undoubtedly know that Sex and the City was a successful TV series and that it has just been made into a feature length movie.

There are people who were fans of the TV series and they will go to this out of curiosity and fandom.

There there are those who need a bit of background.

The big stars of Sex and the City are the clothes and their accessories - glamour, fame, wealth, lunches, in fact all the commodities that one woman might use to beat the head of another woman in the way that a six foot beefcake brute might use a baseball bat.

Money has a key role to play and the trade it can provide.

Four 'girls' beyond the age of hopeful innocence (does that exist anymore) fall around the place indulging in banter about love, friendship, sex, the way you might do at breakfast, etc... etc.

Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a successful columnist and frequenter of classy joints; she has a thing about shoes and fashion.

Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is big in public relations and likes all varieties.

Charlotte (Kristin Davis) works in an art gallery and is a bit conservative, and also a bit of a true romantic.

Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is a career driven lawyer with a cynical outlook on men and what relationships might do.

And finally, there is Mr Big (Chris Noth) a cigar chomping successful businessman who might be the right man for Carrie if only he would realise it.

Through a combination of effective TV writing and risky or raunchy subject matter, the series proved appealing to a female audience which in turn brought in TV advertising.

A bit of the same type of thing that Indiana Jones might have done for boys, or any number of cartoons of an afternoon might have done for giggliing four year olds.

Sex and the City is really glammed up Mills and Boon with a bit of oompah oompah.

The movie takes up where the series more or less left off.

But time of course has moved on from those exciting thirty something days.

Slutty Samantha is now living in Malibu and working on Smith (Jason Lewis) a hunky TV doctor.

Lawyer Miranda is working too hard and putting her marriage to bartender Steve at risk.

Charlotte has changed husbands and adopted an Asian daughter.

Will Carrie get to manacle Mr Big into the throes of marriage? Well what would you think?

However, it is tough to hide the aging. But the movie tries to do it with plenty of product placement, and plenty of frocks and jewellery, which if you are interested in that kind of thing is nice, but if you are not is a bit obvious.

Candice Bergen (remember her?) plays a Vogue editor who gets Carrie to model wedding dresses.

Things go wrong as they might in romantic fiction. The girls end up in Mexico sipping Margheritas and checking out the Mariachis.

Miranda dumps her fella. Charlotte gets the runs. In Malibu, Samantha covers her privates in sushi.

Its a present for hunky TV doc Smith.

Now the question for this movie really is, 'where is the audience'. These days most people going to the movies are not 40-something women.

Do 40-something women share these problems?

Is this a cash in on the Sex and the City series? How much did the marketeers pay the movie makers to put their products in the movie?

And it's not the kind of movie that would attract both sexes. And it certainly is not aiming at the American Pie generation.

However, this movie might turn into a cultural phenomenon, and bring back a lost generation to the cinema dome

Imagine the coffee mornings and the post movie discussions that might get started about the benefits of sushi.

Who knows we might see herds of Prada carrying mothers of Leaving Certs negotiating the car parks of New Letterkenny on the way to a morning showing.

And heck, can you imagine Dunnes and TK Maxx at weekends over the next few weeks.

If it pushes your button, go for it. I'm sure there will be an extended DVD edition. And of course a sequel. Maybe they might come to meet Mickey in Donegal instead of Mexico next time.

Now where is my g-spot?

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo

Once getting stoned was something that happened in the Bible or in Middle Eastern countries. Then along came weed, hash, pot, marijuana, cannabis rebellion, teens, rock and roll and TV. It will be funny in a few years time when all the pot that has been smoked on this island delivers the doldrums to male thirty or forty somethings. Now, there's an idea to market to 40 something males, Smoke in the City.

Here it's being sold to twenty to thirty somethings.

The initial outing for drug addled pot heads Harold (John Choo) and Kumar (Kai Penn) was in Harold and Kumar get the Munchies in 2004.

Then they smoked too much dope (hash, pot etc), got the food craving and ended up seeking a burger and getting rapped on the head for being both Asian Americans.

Here the same kind of thing happens. It's like the first film, which tried to be edgy and aimed at the market that likes Kevin Smith films, delivering tightly targeted political and social commentary while also aiming to do a bit of gross-out comedy (not quite the stature of the sushi variety mentioned previously).

Here Harold and Kumar make the pilgrimage to Amsterdam to get stoned on dope (hash, pot etc).

This time around the humour is pumped up more. Kumar takes a bong onto an aircraft (a bottle-like device for inhaling the drug, locatable in the window of your nearest head shop).

However, the authorities are on to the pair and decide that they are in fact bomb carrying terrorists.

From there is not long until they get shipped off to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where the US keeps its Al Qaeda terrorists.

But they escape and get back to the States where they try to get in touch with an old politically connected classmate.

In keeping with their previous adventure, they come up close to many of the cultural trends of the US - incestuous backwoodspeople, members of the Ku Klux Klan society, firearm carrying sex workers, lots of naked human parts, and George Bush

The ex classmate who plans to marry Kumar's ex girlfriend turns them in but being enlightened pot heads they escape. It's a movie that likes fart humour, and most likely will not attract a crossover audience from Sex and the City.