KEY POINTS:
Now I ain't sayin' she a gold digger but she ain't messin' wit no broke niggas.
Trust Kanye to sum it up succinctly. There's a certain type of woman who will always be attracted to one particular quality in a man: solvency.
To borrow from another wordsmith, almost as well known as Mr West; it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in pursuit of a good fortune must be in want of a sugar daddy. But, avarice aside, does a woman always need a man?
Watching Sex and The City: The Movie, like Carrie Bradshaw, I got to thinking ... Actually I had time to get to thinkin' about a lot of things, the movie having failed entirely to be anything other than an irritating, uninspiring and entirely predictable gallop through the lives of a group of shallow, self-obsessed and unattractive women.
I found the characters in this film unattractive because of the vapidity and self-obsession which characterise their big-screen selves. I'm saddened and bemused at the ease with which the makers of this film have taken a quartet of funny, filthy, gorgeous, flawed, and above all complex women and turned them into caricatures.
I understand cinema demands broader brush strokes than TV, but director Michael Patrick King has sacrificed all of the shade and nuance that made his characterisation so enjoyable. The move to the big screen turns sassy Samantha into a neurotic nympho, freezes Miranda's intellect to a cold rigour, sees Charlotte's charm subsumed into a cardboard cut-out of wife and mother, and transforms Carrie Bradshaw, the life and soul and conscience of the series, into a self-obsessed prima donna.
I don't think I'm giving too much away when I reveal that the film revolves around a wedding. This is hardly surprising. Carrie was headed that way when we last saw her. Reviewers have long bemoaned the fact that the original series ended with all four protagonists happily shacked up with male partners of one flavour or another, from the foxy toyboy with a penchant for hand-holding (Samantha) to the devoted husband who promises a post-conversion life of Jewish married bliss (Charlotte). It is disappointing that such a finely drawn series would end in such a predictable way. Then again, it's good to see our girls settled. Right?
Well no. Not right. For a generation of women, Sex and the City changed how we saw ourselves and our relationships.
It was important, not in how it made us feel OK about having one-night stands (you do or you don't, that's your business and a TV show won't change it), but in how it neatly and naturally and enjoyably placed female relationships at the centre of the action every time. At the end of the TV series, Carrie Bradshaw says something like "the most important relationship is the one you have with yourself".
Nice enough sentiment, but if that show demonstrated anything, it was that the most important relationship she had was with her friends. Through a range of trials, those four women were a constant in each others' lives.
They fought, they laughed, they mortified Charlotte with filthy talk in diners. Sex and the City was about the sex, yes, but it was more about the four friends having it.
Of course using the sex to sell it was a savvy move - Buddies and the City doesn't have quite the same ring. To move to the cinema, though, and find the friendship of this foursome reduced to nothing more than a series of plot devices left me beyond disappointed, it left me bored. There's been screeds of touchy-feely rubbish written about the "secret lives of women".
But for a while Sex and the City nailed it. In spite of its corny voice-overs, and the crazy fabulous, what is Pat Field on outfits, Sex and the City was real. We could look at the four and relate to all of them. And how they related to each other.
Whether getting stoned to erase the ignominy of a break-up on a post-it, or standing shoulder to shoulder at the passing of a mother, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha put friendship front and centre.
To see them flattened into wallpaper for an invented love story was a pity.
Sex and the City ended up hammering home the idea that a woman's happiness lies with a man. Which is a shame. They deserved better, our girls. We did too.