‘Sex and the City’ review: Contagious fun

Frothy as a Margarita and just as salty, Sex and the City all but mambos its way onto the screen.

The one about the four friends who formerly sought the perfect man and now, more or less happily attached, seek the perfect apartment may well be the most effervescent film fantasy since Beauty and the Beast.

As almost everyone knows, the Sex's heroines are bosom buds who imbibe without getting tipsy, eat without gaining weight, enjoy sex without spreading STDs, shop without maxing out credit cards and offer mutual support without (intentional) sabotage. When one needs help - to mend a broken heart, to move out of a cluttered apartment - unfailingly the others are available, clad smartly in couture frocks and strappy heels that cost more than your monthly mortgage payment.

We should hate them for overconsumption. We don't, mostly because they're loving, loveable, witty and about as realistic as Barbie.

If they had a motto it would be: Label clothes, not people. (Product placement alert: From Chanel to Diane von Furstenberg, there are more labels here than at a winery.)

Three years or so have elapsed since Manhattan working gals Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha last clinked cocktail glasses. For those unfamiliar with them - and is that anyone watching this movie? - their back stories are telegraphed during a briskly-paced opening-credits sequence.

Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the urban anthropologist, has graduated from newspaper columnist to successful nonfiction author - "three books in three years!" - keeping company with financier "Mr. Big" (Chris Noth). As Carrie regards the arrangements of her friends, she and Big contemplate marriage.

Chirpy Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and moody Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) represent marital ying and yang, one a stay-at-home mom enjoying wedded bliss, the other a working mother enduring marital blitz. Saucy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) has moved to Malibu, where she manages the career of (and is faithful to) her much-younger beau, Smith (Jason Lewis).

The clothes, shoes and handbags, not to mention the baubles and bangles, are seductive eye candy, equivalent to the cars and gadgets in a James Bond movie. These amount to haute couture trimmings on writer/director Michael Patrick King's Cinderella reweave.