Saw Sex and the City with my wife. I thought it was reasonably diverting, certainly colorful, and at many points airily preposterous. I went into the theater owning a glancing familiarity with the TV series, but not enough to know the names of the four major characters. I knew they struggled for fulfillment in love and fashion.

I have roughly the same level of familiarity with Sarah Jessica Parker. I can't remember much of her work that I have seen, but I know her to be an attractive woman. She is far from my notion of a sexpot, but when I've seen her on Letterman she has struck me as smart, bouyant, and engaging.

So the one aspect of the film that astounded me was the extraordinary level of effort, degree of skill, and absolute dedication to image destruction that must have been brought to the assignment of making her look absolutely awful. Lighting, photography, clothes, hair -- masters of all these arts and more were evidently hired on to wreck her glamor cred. From the absurd bird on her head in the wedding scene to the tightly drawn-back hair, from the starkly photographed haggard face to the slathered eyeliner, this was a supposedly over-privileged character made to look like a woman stressed by a calamitous life for decades.