On the one hand…

The film takes everything that was unsettling about the series — gratuitous materialism, deliberate elitism, cafeteria feminism — and re-serves it up in a grotesquely glittered confection, in which posh real-estate, $55,000-diamond-rings, and gaudy designer bags serve as unapologetic proxies for relationships, and even the main characters’ children are reduced to accessories. This visual orgy comes with fewer of the redeeming elements — the occasional recognition of hypocrisy, the chatty histrionics, the schmaltz — that swaddled and padded and helped us forgive the irritating unrealities of the series. And since so much of Sex and the City’s success was in its structure — episodic therapy, 30 minutes a week, over six long, tumultuous years — there’s a sense in which the filmic format (here dragged out to two hours and twenty minutes) betray the show’s stumbling essence.

On the other hand…

And yet, and yet — the delightfully confused, giddy-but-torn, no-but-yes feeling that washed over so many women as they took in the series is there in the film as well. Despite its annoyances, it’s often funny and almost always fun, and its length is a strength as well as a weakness, since it provides more of what makes women return to Sex and the City: Not the happy endings, but all the messy ambiguity beforehand. The willingness to wallow in the mess, rather than racing ahead to happily-ever-after, explains why the Sex phenomenon has provided more fodder for the post-feminist culture wars than any television series or movie before or since — and why it will be a long, long time before any other pop culture phenomenon usurps its role in those debates. So those wringing their hands over its legacy might as well take their cues from Carrie’s fictional Vogue editor, Enid: “Spare me a week of faux-soul searching, and just say yes.”

Talk about having it both ways.

I won’t be going, btw. My teenage daughter’s seen it and even she was underwhelmed.

… in 1944, the Allied landing at Normandy got under way. Wonderful, sobering account of it here.

… in 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded just after claiming victory in California’s Democratic presidential primary. It was one of the most depressing days of my life. The New York Times has asked three of his children to write short pieces about their father.

If, like me, you were puzzled by the ludicrous spectacle of the French President drooling over the British constitution on his first State Visit, then here is the explanation: he was crazed by sex, having taken up with his new wife, the delectable Carla Bruni. Confirmation of this is provided by a new book, Carla and Nicholas: The True Story, due out in France this week.

Excerpts in Le Point make the, er, point. “It was instant”, Carla told the book’s authors. “I didn’t expect anyone so funny, so lively. His physique, his charm and his intelligence seduced me. He has five or six brains.”

This startling neurological discovery was made at the fateful dinner where the couple first met. “The president had eyes only for [Bruni]”, one of the other guests told the authors. “Several times, Carla Bruni’s hair grazed the president… Not only is Nicholas Sarcozy subjugated by her, he’s absolutely crazy… He doesn’t stop flattering her all evening…They act as if they’re alone in the room. Nothing else and no one else matters to them. The dinner ends around 2am. Carla’s obviously tipsy; she’s really drunk and smoked a lot! At the end of the meal, she asks the president if he has a car”.

Thanks to today’s Irish Times for this important information.

Gorillapod wars. Seen in Ndiyo the other day.