These, incidentally, are the top ten most trafficked posts of the year — not our favorites — and some of them, you'll notice are from last year. The winners in ascending order, and links to the original posts, directly below.


10. Animals and amore:
Adorable Dog Adopts Orphaned Baby Bunnies


9. Extreme breastfeeding:
At What Age Is A Kid Too Old To Breastfeed?


8. Bad fashion:
American Apparel Will Make You Look Like A Fat Hooker


7. Sex and the Shitty:
Extended Sex And The City Trailer: Carrie Gets Jilted! (LOL)


6. Online dating:
New Rule: When 'Dating' Online, Add 20 Years, 100 Lbs. To Your Partner's Profile


5. Reality television :
The Real Housewives Of Atlanta: We Think We Know Who Kim's "Big Papa" Is


4. Making Late-Night Comedy Out of Economic Tragedy:
Wanda Sykes Campaigns For Cabinet Position On Last Night's Leno


3. Ladymag Liars:
The Annotated Guide To Making Faith Hill 'Hot'


2. The election of Barack Obama:
Donna Brazile Is Not Going To The Back Of The Bus


1. Celebrity Photoshopping :
Here's Our Winner! 'Redbook' Shatters Our 'Faith' In Well, Not Publishing, But Maybe God

Wall Street Journal:

The production captures the way TV used to be — before cable, alas, and before the advent of groundbreaking shows, like SATC, that pushed, ripped and shredded the envelope of episodic entertainment. It's fitfully enjoyable, and maybe better than that for those who loved the series and have been waiting eagerly for more. But in contrast to the series, which was quick-witted, fast-paced and self-ironic — oh, and sexy — the movie is earnest, often aimless (couldn't anyone cook up a plot?), visually bland (except for the fashion shows) and, at two minutes short of 2½ hours, a decreasingly amiable meander. Here's one helping of more that manages to be less.

The New Yorker:

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”...I was never sure how funny the TV series was meant to be. It kept lapsing into a straight face, even a weepy one, as the characters’ contentment came under serious threat. This uncertainty survives into the movie, which made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show. You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Kim Cattrall’s come-ons wilt in the transition; but who would have guessed that Sarah Jessica Parker, a nimble performer who has had a career in movies aside from the TV show, should also seem diminished and ill at ease?

The New York Times:

There was something seductive about the bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels. That was a beautiful lie, as the show acknowledged in its gently melancholic return in the wake of Sept. 11. Back in Season 3 Carrie asked, “Are we getting wiser, or just older?” The ideal, of course, is to do both. There is something depressingly stunted about this movie; something desperate too. It isn’t that Carrie has grown older or overly familiar. It’s that awash in materialism and narcissism, a cloth flower pinned to her dress where cool chicks wear their Obama buttons, this It Girl has become totally Ick.

Slate:

The movie's initially brisk pacing slackens when the girls spend a holiday in Mexico that's long enough for them to cycle through an entire resort-wear collection. Samantha disappears entirely for stretches, and her story arc contains some of the movie's most painfully unfeminist jokes (in which we learn, for example, that vigilant pubic grooming and toned abs are essential to female self-esteem). And an attempt to address the series' endemic whiteness by adding a subaltern black character—Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's designer-bag-toting Girl Friday—is a major misfire that only underscores our heroine's oblivious entitlement. But if you bear even a grudging affection for the show's utopic vision of female bonding as the greatest love of all, you may get choked up when Carrie appears at Miranda's door one shitty New Year's Eve (clad only in pajamas, a sequined cloche, a full-length fur, and what appear to be patent-leather spats) and reassures her friend, "You're not alone."

Los Angeles Times:

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don't dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it's a movie for grown-ups of all ages. The press and industry screening I attended was uncharacteristically packed with women in their 20s, and my guess is that their interest had zero to do with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's personal assistant — though her character, Louise, is likable and allows the writer to expand the scope of the film from a story about four friends living in New York into a tale about the contemporary lives of urban women from early adulthood to maturity.

Salon:

Admittedly, it's harder to get away with lapses like that when you're dealing with characters that a large part of your potential audience feel they already know. Then again, why mangle perfectly good characters for the sake of your plot? The psychodrama between Carrie and Big, which looms over the movie like an oppressive mushroom cloud, does play out in a way that's true to both their characters. But King takes far too long to get to the point. What's more, the movie's second and third bananas — played by appealing actors like Willie Garson, Mario Cantone and the aforementioned Handler — have almost nothing to do. King rustles together a quickie romance for two of his minor characters, but the thing is so amateurly taped together (and so minor) that you wonder why he even bothered.

The Independent:

It certainly has its faults, from the superficial – Carrie looks like a witchy, old drag queen when she dyes her hair dark, and Samantha wears too much fur – to the serious. I seriously hated the ending. But this is not a real film, in the sense of Oscar-worthy performances or scriptwriters. It's just a big, blown-up, brash version of the show, like watching five of the soppier episodes back-to-back. But as anyone who has ever spent a day snuggled up on the sofa with a box set will know, that's no bad thing.

Daily Mail:

In years to come, I suspect - and hope - that people will watch this movie, laugh at the naivety of its faux sophistication, and find its assumptions as quaint, bigoted and unconsciously racist as those of Gone With The Wind. Horribly, but typically, the four leading women end up believing, I kid you not, that their biggest fault is not loving themselves enough. One of them actually leaves her lover with the gob- smacking line: 'I love you, but I love me more.'

The Guardian:

It is all very trivial and disposable, and yet for all its contrivances, its brand-name silliness and its amplified problems afflicting the comfortably-off metropolitan classes, I can't help thinking this is still a cut above the sinister romcom slush that we are fed, week in, week out. It is still unusual to see a film that features women as the leading characters of their own lives, and which attempts to imagine life after marriage. Like something glutinous from the pudding menu, Sex and the City isn't exactly wholesome, but it won't do you much harm this once.

Rolling Stone:

Some dudes say they'd rather light their dicks on fire than endure this movie version of the ultimate in TV chickcoms. Snap out of it, guys, you just might learn something. If the film didn't go on for a punishing two and a half hours, including two fashion shows and countless designer name-checks, I might call it must-viewing for men who are clueless about the female psyche. Come on, what men aren't?

Sex and the City: The Movie opens today.

Entertainment Weekly:

The movie version of Sex and the City, written and directed by Michael Patrick King (always the show's savviest writer), is 2 hours and 22 minutes of love, tears, fashion, depression, lavish vacation, good sex, bad sex, and supreme tenderness. It's as long as five series episodes, a big sweet tasty layer cake stuffed with zingers and soul and dirty-down verve (it's not above having one of the girls poop her pants). Given the running time, though, not that much happens, and what does has several shades more gravitas. That's as it should be. We want Sex and the City on the big screen to be true to the show yet to feel more like a movie. And it does....If Sex and the City as a movie is good rather than great, that's because it lacks the show's antic, humming New York effervescence. King would have done well to come up with at least one major subplot that didn't have to do with relationships. And though Jennifer Hudson, as Carrie's assistant, has a delicate presence, the character is almost embarrassingly saintly. Why couldn't she, too, pine and chatter with the verve of the city? These are relative quibbles, however, in a movie that taps directly back into the show's primal appeal, which is the sweet, sad, saucy delight of sharing these women's company.

NY Post:

The plot, which includes a detour to Mexico, often stops for fashion parades - Carrie alone has dozens of costume changes, including montages of wedding dresses and all the '80s get-ups in her closet. An episode at Fashion Week accomplishes nothing except to bloat the punishing running time. As was often true of the series, Nixon gives the best performance and she's rewarded here with the most developed story arc. The still-sizzling Cattrall has lost none of her skill with one-liners - especially in the movie's funniest scene where the girls use the euphemism "coloring" to discuss sex in front of a child.Davis, still amusing, has almost nothing to do...This movie provides no good reasons to revisit "Sex and the City," except to fulfill fans' desires for one more for the road and add millions to Time Warner's coffers. Be careful what you wish for.

Village Voice:

Less a movie than a very long goodbye (again), at 142 minutes, Sex and the City is basically a whole season's worth of episodes—or outtakes—slung together for no better reason than to squeeze all remaining revenues from a stupendously popular show that got out while the going was good. If nothing else, Sex and the City confirms Michael Patrick King's gifts as a television director while demonstrating conclusively that he's in way over his head working on the big screen. Where TV is small and broad and domestic and episodic, movies are large and potentially deep and climactic. But here, the show's lifeblood—its trippy, backtalking, très gay script—sags into the garden-variety sassiness you'd find on any network sitcom. After sampling the movie's bloodless dialogue, I missed the show's bitchy one-liners like hell. And despite the pubic hair, well-hung penis, and mildly graphic Malibu copulating that won the movie its R rating, there are more bad sex jokes than good sex.

Ain't It Cool News:

But I just couldn’t get over how much this shared in common with BRATZ: The Movie. Montage after montage after montage with each and every problem finding a solution by the fabulously dressed four getting together, squee-ing in a pitch that will deafen dogs and neuter most of the males in the audience, and realizing that friendship will get you through any bout of rampant self-absorption. Oh, so this is what happens when you leave Bratz dolls in the sun too long.

Hollywood Reporter:

Unfortunately, where episodes of the series used to take their cue from a question posed by one of Carrie's columns, writer-director Michael Patrick King never finds that focus, and "Sex and the City" loses its tart edge in the process. In need of some serious tightening up, the flabby picture does what the old Samantha would have never done: It keeps hanging around, pushing for a long-term relationship.

Variety:

For a series so steeped in romance, the eagerly awaited “Sex and the City” movie feels a trifle half-hearted. Although there’s pleasure in seeing HBO’s fabulous four reunited, writer-director Michael Patrick King doesn’t fully bridge the gap between TV and film — delivering major story flourishes but, too often, playing like a regular episode bloated to five times its customary length.

New York Magazine:

The movie, which reunites the whole cast, even if the other actresses aren’t palsy-walsy with Kim Cattrall, has the delish/insufferable mixture about right. (It wouldn’t be SATC if it weren’t a little annoying.) Sex and the City: The Motion Picture (not the actual title) is a joyful wallow. And it’s more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it’s what the series finale should have been. For one last time, the relationship columnist–cum (no pun intended)–anthropologist Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) tests the fairy-tale trappings of modern romance—turns them inside out, pulls at the loose threads, and wrings the tears that have saturated them into iridescent cocktails. (God, that’s terrible. I have to work on my Bradshaw-esque relationship musings.) It’s not that the writer-director, Michael Patrick King, breaks new ground; it’s that these women are in their fifth decade, and age is a more insistent subtext. The time for do-overs is almost up... I shall not spoil what follows, but the wedding sequence (about midway through) is a heart-stopper—a mirthless farce in which cell phones and limos function as agents of the unconscious. It’s a chance to watch Parker pull out the acting stops, and she’s spectacularly good: The neediness that makes her one of our giddiest comediennes is also a kind of black hole. Parker has come in for some monstrous derision of late—and I suppose it’s understandable, given that she’s pushed on billboards as the personification of kitty-cat sultriness. But you can sense the fragility beneath the poses. She’s always the little girl dressing up, wriggling from one outfit to the next, elated for a bit but apt to wither in the face of rejection or self-doubt. There are plenty of reasons to resent Carrie’s incessant hunger for designer anything, but how can you resent Parker’s fleeting enchantment? It’s what anchors the show.

Yahoo! News:

It's all really soapy, though, with only some smidgens of substance. Co-star Cynthia Nixon's story line is meaty, but more often than not our heroines are defined solely by the partners in their beds and the clothes on their backs, as if to suggest that the right wardrobe and a big enough closet to put it all in are the keys to ultimate happiness. The movie (and the series that inspired it) perpetuate stereotypes of female superficiality, but then again, these women do stick by each other no matter what, which makes it somewhat easier to stick around for the conclusion... Sitting through this extravaganza of extravagance, though, I couldn't help but wonder ... is this movie ever going to end? It takes about as much time as watching five episodes of the series all in a row, which you can do for free on TBS, albeit in a form that's cleaned up for basic cable — the city sans the sex. Then again, one girl's slog is another girl's celebration.

MSNBC:

Writer-director Michael Patrick King, one of the driving forces behind the original series, has cannily avoided trying to open up the material too much in taking it to the big screen. Samantha doesn’t go into outer space, Miranda doesn’t start talking to dead people, and Charlotte doesn’t break into a musical number. It’s simply an extension of the groundwork that the show already laid down, and for “Sex” fans who have waited four years for another fix, that’s all it has to be...While [Jennifer] Hudson is just fine in her first screen appearance since winning an Oscar for her “Dreamgirls” debut, the rest of the cast has the advantage of slipping back into characters they played for years on cable, and that comfort comes through in the performances. The leading quartet pings and zings as well as ever, and even second bananas like Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) get their moment as well. (Candice Bergen returns briefly as Carrie’s editor at Vogue, delivering a brutally funny line that will be quoted in bridal shops for years to come.)

Carrie
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L to R: Miranda Collection, Rosangel Low Rise Hotpants, $50; Miranda Collection, Rosangel Molded Bra, $62

Sex And The City Lingerie [Outblush]
Earlier: Sex And The City Really Is Full Of Expensive Shit

So, right here, Chris Noth is certainly wearing bronzer, but has he also gotten work done?

He looks like Tony Curtis!

Carrie was supposed to get married in the New York Public Library.

Charlotte's little girl gets bonus points for being unimpressed/annoyed with Carrie.

Do the girls go on Carrie's honeymoon with her?

OK, the pubic hair discussion was pretty great though. And Samantha's face was priceless.

And yay for Smith Jarrod!

Now That's Good 'Sex' [PageSix]
Earlier: OMG! It's The Sex And The City Movie Trailer!