Sex and the City: Forever Young?
Only in Hollywood, dahling. And only by the grace of state-of-the-art technology.
The soon-to-be-released and long-awaited Sex and the City flick catches up on the lives of the four main characters. Hopefully, the passage of time has made the gallivanting Manhattan gals wiser — but they won’t be older, that’s for sure. Thanks to digital air-brushing, Carrie and Samantha and Miranda and Charlotte will look like they fell head-first into the Fountain of Youth.
Ironically, the cinematic rejuvenation process was personally supervised by Sarah Jessica Parker, who is on record as saying she won’t resort to cosmetic surgery to eradicate the realities of aging. Apparently, she thinks her wrinkles are fine in real life but not on the screen — and not for a character who is verging on menopause.
The popularity of the SATC series resulted from its willingness to take risks in being honest about the life of 30-something single females. Forget the $400 Manolos and designer clothes and luxurious apartments — they were just eye-candy. The show was about loneliness, and the lies we tell ourselves to make it through another day, and the illusions we cling to in order to survive, and the desperate measures we go to in the pursuit of happiness. The four characters, no matter how fabulous they looked, were psychological messes who made terrible mistakes and alternated between being endearing and annoying — but that’s why we loved them and identified with them. On a gut level, they were real.
Not so in the movie, it would seem. Too bad. After all the awful things these characters went through in 6 seasons on TV, they’ve earned the right to have wrinkles and sags and bags four years later. Just like the rest of us.
–phoebe kate