I Do-Not-Heart Sex & The City

Warning -- if you're planning on going to see the Sex & The City movie, don't read this.

Because I'm going to ruin it.

But I don't feel bad ruining it because IT ruined my Sunday evening. I left the theatre SO pissed off yesterday I can't even BEGIN to tell you. Like smoke-coming-out-of-my-ears pissed off.

The only good things that came out of that movie were that 1) I now know what color I want to paint the walls in my new apartment when I move in the fall (the blue that Carrie painted hers) and 2) I now have a picture to show my hairdresser the next time I go to get my hair colored (the reddish-brunette look she adopted during her mourning period).

I guess those two things are worth $11.25.

Maybe.

I went with my friend Michele -- who upon reading the blog has now asked for an entry expressly devoted to her, which I promise to do, but not today -- at 4:30 on a Sunday and it was a madhouse. I had read this scathing New York Times review, but went anyway because despite the fact that, as someone who's making a career out of rewriting fairy tales, I had a slight problem with the idea that Carrie ended up with Big at the end of the show, I still had a soft spot in my heart for it because it replaced Lifetime as my guilty pleasure-calorie-laden appointment television.

So the movie starts and the big secret is not that someone dies, but that Carrie is left at the altar by Big. Who, as evidenced by his incredibly dispassionate, ambivalent marriage proposal (which, by the way, came about because Carrie's friends put the fear of god in her after she told him that it would be his name on the mortgage of the new apartment they were moving into and she was afraid she'd be cast out and screwed over if they ever split up) -- not to mention his well-known fear of intimacy -- didn't want to get married in the first place.

That being said, I can understand how alarming it might be to see a 40something woman get so caught up in a wedding, what with the poufiest dress known to man and a 200 people guest list. (I thought that stuff was for girls in their 20s, but maybe that's just me...) But, yes, getting left at the altar would suck big time. That being said, she wasn't so upset about the fact that he didn't want to marry her -- it was more about how it would look to people, as evidenced by the fact that her parting line is "You humiliated me!"

That's when I started getting pissed.

I started getting even more pissed when I then had to sit through an hour and a half of her moping around...but THEN...when she sees him again...and he proposes again...she accepts. On the spot. Just like that. And she apologizes as if the WHOLE THING WERE HER FAULT because she had gotten so swept up in the wedding.

And then they go get married at City Hall and -- as far as we know -- go on to live happily ever after.

Why couldn't her happily-ever-after have been that she got over him and just went back to living her life, trusting that someone else would come along? Or maybe someone else wouldn't come along and it still would've been okay?

I vaguely remember some line about how the heart doesn't know from logic. And I totally get that -- believe me, do I get it -- but still...WHY?! One of the great things about the show was that, at times, it had presented the world with women who were unapologetic about who they were. Women who slept with guys and didn't feel guilty. Women who threw themselves un-wedding showers.

So why did they have to make a movie about a woman in a stupid poufy dress who falls into a deep depression when she's jilted and then takes him back because he emails her famous mens' love letters because he's so out of touch with his own feelings?

I know what it's like to fall for ambivalent, emotionally unavailable men. B-E-L-I-E-V-E M-E, I know. In fact, maybe part of why the movie got me so angry is precisely because of that very reason -- but the Women's Studies part of me is just fuming that there was a collective "Awwww" in the theatre when Big proposed at the end in the middle of the huge walk-in closet he had built for her and, because he didn't have a diamond on hand, instead presented her with a hideous Manolo Blahnik shoe.

That's why my princesses wear flip-flops.

And that's why, if and when I get married, I'm wearing a slinky red pouf-less dress.