Sex and My City

How many Cosmopolitans will be drunk around the nation tonight?

I left work at 1 pm today, a summer Friday, to see "Sex and the City" on its opening day. I never see movies on opening day, or opening weekend, or rarely in the theater at all. For G and me, it's Netflix or nothing.

Exceptions: we saw 1998's "Man on the Moon" opening weekend. And I saw 1990's "Godfather III" on opening night. Burned by GFIII, I never again assumed I need to rush to see a movie because I loved its predecessor.

I rarely watched "Sex and the City" during its small screen run. I liked the show when I came across it, but not enough to remember when it was on. But I was a loyal reader of Candace Bushnell's column in The Observer when I first moved to New York.

The Price of Over-Hype

I saw "Sex and the City," without reading any reviews in advance, but knowing the reviews are mixed. Like many, I went with a girl-group but I skipped the post-movie Cosmos.

The movie was not nearly as bad as the New York Times says, nor as great as the Fox News reviewer thinks. (But remember, Fox can make the Iraq war sound good.)

The movie did not make me sentimental for Carrie and gang; it made me sentimental for New York. Or specifically, how New York felt when I first got here in 1992. Every location in the movie was dizzyingly fantastic. I'm certain I ate in every blurred restaurant they showed, walked on every one of the streets. And what could be better than reuniting on The Brooklyn Bridge, running toward each other, one from each side?

When I first moved to New York, I couldn't say a bad word about it for years. In the movie, Samantha longs to return to New York. Her LA is all about sitting on deck chairs. Miranda flees Brooklyn, for Manhattan. Jennifer Hudson, as Carrie's personal assistant, says she came to New York for Love. To find it, that is. Hudson has all the sparkle of the new New Yorker.

I wish I could get some of that sparkle back. But I felt it, in the theater this afternoon.