11:47am Thursday 15th May 2008
By Emma Clayton
A friend of mine once went through a traumatic break-up with her boyfriend and at the time she kept telling herself that everything would be okay "because they’re making another Jurassic
Park movie."
She said clinging to the anticipation of a sequel to Jurassic Park was what saw her through the dark times.
I wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic about a dinosaur movie even though, as dinosaur movies go, the Jurassic Park ones were entertaining enough. But I understand about finding solace from the
real world in the big screen.
Long-awaited excitement at the prospect of Baz Lurhman’s Moulin Rouge got me through several weeks of a miserable spell at work. When I finally saw the film I ended up in floods of tears (and I
never cry at films, apart in The Sound of Music when the nuns help them escape). The tears were due partly to pure relief that Moulin Rouge was as fabulous as I’d hoped, and partly to the
courtesan dying of consumption, leaving poor Ewan McGregor beside himself. It got me.
Films have been and gone since then. I’ll generally go and watch anything, even tediously formulaic romantic comedies I know I’m going to hate, simply because I love being in a
cinema.
But since Moulin Rouge there hasn’t been a film I’ve put my life on hold for, until now. Having recently gone through one of those stressful "life is rubbish?" phases that we all
encounter from time to time, I’ve managed to keep my head above water by repeatedly telling myself "The Sex and the City movie is just a few weeks away." It has become a bit of a mantra.
I’m going to end up saying it out loud soon - in public, on my own.
There’s no point trying to begin to explain the show’s appeal to a man. Most men I know would rather go six months without football than watch an episode of Sex and the City - and
that’s fine by us girls. Who wants to watch it with a man anyway? In the glory days when a new SATC season would unfold on Channel 4 on Friday nights it meant a blissful half-hour of solitude,
unwinding with a glass of chilled wine, occasionally texting other interested parties to compare notes on Carrie’s clutch bags or Samantha’s retro batwing sleeves. It was water-cooler TV
for the Nineties and Noughties career girl.
For most women SATC is about the shoes, the clothes, the men and the one-liners. All that’s great, but for me it’s mainly about New York. For someone who has wanted to live in a
brownstone Manhattan apartment since the age of about nine (it was all down to watching episodes of Seventies US sitcom Rhoda), I have lived vicariously through Carrie Bradshaw, tapping away at her
newspaper columns in bohemian Greenwich Village.
That’s the life the nine-year-old me thought I’d have. Walking back from delis clutching brown paper shopping bags, making fresh coffee in an apartment filled with pot plants and scatter
cushions, a huge window looking down thirty floors to a 24-hour city. Maybe even a doorman like Rhoda’s keeping guard on my block. That kind of thing.
I've been to New York and it was everything I wanted it to be. I’ve even drunk Cosmopolitans in Greenwich Village, just like Carrie. But I’ll never be able to afford to live there and
I’ve just about come to terms with that.
Now, with this week’s UK premiere, the big screen version of Sex and the City has finally arrived. I haven’t been so excited since, well, Moulin Rouge. It’s like watching Rhoda all
over again - inside I’m that nine-year-old girl who first fell in love with New York
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