Editor's Note

Will Sex Satisfy?

When I think about the Sex and the City movie, I don’t think about what I’d like to see happen to Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, I think about what better not.

I don’t want everyone to live happily ever after. I don’t want their romantic lives to be neatly wrapped up by the final credits. I don’t want them to leave New York. I don’t want aging to make them mellow. I don’t want their lives to be consumed by apple juice and little league soccer.

One of the things that was so appealing about the show was that it gave a voice to women who chose not to pursue off-the-rack Pottery Barn lives (well, except for Charlotte).

Another attraction was that the lead characters were always in flux. Sure, there were plotlines that peaked and concluded within the course of an episode, but the larger story arcs, particularly those about the ladies’ love lives, were completely unpredictable. Relationships stretched on unexpectedly (Samantha and Smith); went nowhere fast (Charlotte and Trey); came to abrupt halts (Carrie and Aidan); and circled back on themselves (Miranda and Steve, Carrie and Big).

Is it too cliché to say that such instability is also what made the series feel like real life? Yeah, it is. Especially since Sex and the City was nothing like real life. It was about lives defined by leisurely lunches, fabulous parties, an unlimited wardrobe budget, only a modicum of work (and usually glamorous work, at that) and a dramatic new relationship likely to spark the next time you walked out your front door.

In “The Dry Spell’s Over,” Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker (clearly feeling the pressure) says she’s proud of the long-awaited film but admits, “it will be for everyone else to say whether we fell short of the mark.”

The month’s other huuuuuge movie is also a long-awaited chapter in a popular series, but this series has always been on the big screen — and has used every square-inch of that screen and every decibel of its massive theatre sound to full advantage. In “Indy Movie,” Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stars Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett and Ray Winstone discuss jumping on board one of the most iconic film franchises of all time.

And check out “Keeping the Ladies Happy,” our interview with that dreamy Patrick Dempsey about his latest rom-com, Made of Honor.

— Marni Weisz, editor