filmland / By Charlie Myers

Sex and the Charlie

Size matters in too-long film adaptation

(June 5, 2008) Previews

Happily, we are getting one film on Friday, June 6, that is not a summer blockbuster: Then She Found Me, directed by and starring the talented Helen Hunt. Based on the novel by popular writer Elinor Lipman, this directing debut features Hunt as a 39-year-old woman who hears her biological clock ticking very loudly and who becomes pregnant during breakup sex (with Matthew Broderick as the husband). Then she loses the mother who adopted her and meets another woman claiming to be the biological mom (Bette Midler). Then she has an affair with another man (Colin Firth as Frank). Some people really know how to approach 40. I’m a Helen Hunt fan and I’m looking forward to her performance. As an aside, the writer Salman Rushdie plays April’s obstetrician. Rated R for some language and sexual content. 100 m. At the Broadway.

GALLERY >

From Dreamworks comes the animated family comedy Kung Fu Panda, wherein the titular panda, Po, uses his ability at martial arts to become the unlikely hero in the Valley of Peace when enemies threaten his friends. Po is voiced by Jack Black with other voices being supplied by Jackie Chan, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu and Ian McShane. Rated PG for sequences of martial arts action. 88 m. At the Broadway, Fortuna and Mill Creek.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan stars Adam Sandler as a Mossad officer who fakes his death in order to pursue his dream of becoming a hairdresser in New York. Sandler co-wrote the screenplay with Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, and the film co-stars John Turturro. Did I mention it’s a comedy? Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language and nudity. 113 m. At the Broadway, Mill Creek, Fortuna and the Minor.

Reviews

SEX AND THE CITY: I am here to praise Sex and the City, not dis it. So I tried a couple episodes of the TV series and found it boring despite the attractive women. And maybe I never read a single one of Candace Bushnell’s columns, but I have been to Manhattan. Perhaps my designer outfits don’t include Dior or Louis Vuitton, but I proudly wear my Hustler Legendary Gold jeans and Asics athletic shoes. And sure, I’m not a 20-something (now 40-something) well-to-do professional woman hitting the pavements and drinking establishments in the city; I’m not young and I’m the wrong gender.

At any rate, as it turns out, most of the women who adore Sex and the City don’t wear clothes like Carrie Bradshaw does, and they don’t live in Manhattan, yet they still identify with the swinging quartet in search of love, sex and large clothes closets, perhaps not always in that order, in the city that appears to house mostly worthless members of the male species.

So, on to the eulogy. Let’s see, almost no one wears designer outfits as well as Sarah Jessica Parker, nor looks as good in them, despite the catty remark by my film companion that Parker is too skinny (she actually said her legs were ugly!). It’s not just that she looks good, though; she knows how to pose and move in the outfits to show them at their best.

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