Cinema Hype

A lot of people seem to be talking today about this New York Times story comparing the first American Girl movie, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl to Sex and the City: The Movie. It seems the two have a few points in common, from shared punctuation to the financial failure (and subsequent dissolution by Time Warner) of the studios that made them. Both could be considered chick flicks, though the chicks in question may vary wildly (or not; ostensibly, some Sex and the City viewers will also accompany children to Kit). They both have the potential to draw very specific, but very lucrative, niche markets. But in the middle of all this, one question remains: do girls actually need a Sex and the City of their very own?

I would argue that, while need is an awfully strong word, the answer is yes. Nobody’s condoning Samantha Jones joining the Big Sisters/Big Brothers—that’s a kind of education most kids won’t need for awhile yet—but pretty much all adolescent and pre-adolescent girls could use positive models of female friendship. And if there’s an example of women being there for each other, celebrating and confiding and fighting and making up and ultimately showing up when it counts, it’s Sex and the City.

And that’s the thing: before they hit High School Musical and the first half of Mean Girls, where the world revolves around Zac Efron and, well, mean girls, girls could use something that’s just about girls—about how to tell a friend the honest truth, about how friendships change and grow, about girls having adventures, about how sometimes hanging out with the girls is really the best medicine. And when you take away the Manolos and the constant stream of good-looking men—they’re secondary anyway—that’s what you’ve got in Sex and the City. Lots of other pre-teen girl movies are strikingly individual, from girl sleuths to random animal movies. This is something different, something striking and specific: girls in groups succeeding because they’re in groups. This is gives a whole new meaning to the term Girl World.

Kit isn’t the first tween-girls-against-the-world movie, just like Sex and the City isn’t the first women-against-the-world movie—but there are fewer of the former than you’d think. If they’re willing to make some use of the Wayback Machine, today’s pre-adolescents could check out Troop Beverly Hills or Now and Then, and maybe The Parent Trap (original or re-make; take your pick), but after that it’s all post-puberty. Even The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a mainstay of the pre-Steel Magnolias set (with a sequel coming out this summer), starts at age 15. Maybe tween girls don’t have the spending power of their older sisters, though Hannah Montana and her sisters seem to prove otherwise. Maybe they’re just not interesting without the promise of any kind of romance. Maybe tween girls in groups are just too hard to wrangle on set (don’t think I don’t know; I was eleven once, myself). Who knows? But it seems like a few more girl-power movies for the younger set might not be such a bad plan.

After all, we can save them Cosmopolitans for later.

Sex and the City, Sex in the City, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, Kit Kittredge, American Girl, American Girls, Abigail Breslin, chick flicks