Something is deeply wrong in the state of movie-dom.  Since the arrival of the blockbuster event movie – most people consider Jaws to be the first – one hard and fast rule has governed the world of the blockbuster. They must appeal to teenage boys. Sure, it helps if they appeal to other market sectors, too, and occasionally a non-teen-boy film will manage to rake in serious box office coin by hitting a few other markets simultaneously but the planned blockbuster? Teen boys. Always.

So you’ll have to excuse me if I giggled a bit when people started talking about Sex In The City as an event movie. Come on, people … Kim Cattrall came to Toronto and it made the front page of the papers and that’s just silly, right? She bares her breasts from time to time, true enough, but they’re a touch on the old side to be of much appeal to the teen boy sector and therefore this surely can’t qualify as a summer blockbuster, right? My thinking seemed solid. It’s the film version of a television show that went off the air four years ago, a television show that has nothing inherently cinematic about it. A show that will gain nothing by moving to the big screen at all, really. And most importantly, a show that not only has nothing to offer teen boys at all but a show that has no interest in the male gender whatsoever.  Sure, it might rack up points from longstanding fans of the show but having cut out such a huge part of the paying public it surely can’t challenge the big summer players, right?

Whoops. Seems I forgot one thing. Clothes are a woman’s porn, a porn that comes with the societal disapproval that comes with the male-preferred variety. And the marketing for this film was very clear on one point:three hundred costume changes over the course of the film, all of them of the high-end non-attainable clothing variety. Over the course of a two and a half hour movie that means that you have a full costume change roughly once every thirty seconds. To a man, this is stupid. I often go a week without changing my pants, if I were to change every thirty seconds I’d completely deplete my wardrobe in about ten minutes and be left standing naked. To women, however, all the costume changes are bliss and they have all collectively lost their minds. I know, I live with one.

My great fear, of course, is that the massive success of Sex In The City will prompt more producers to copy the formula and crank out more clothing porn for thirty-something women. God, that’s a scary thought. Somebody blow something up, quick!