Husband gone wrong (or, not all films with women in them are chick flicks)

I am about to beat my husband to an unrecognizable pulp, and then blow him to smithereens. Okay, I’m not, but I would if I acted on my emotions the way people do in the action movies he so loves. Craig’s fatal flaw today is lumping any movie with a prominent female character in it and a narrative touching on love or relationships into the unfortunate category “chick flick.”

If I ignore its terrible misuse of the adjective “stereotypical,” I mostly agree with Wikipedia’s definition of chick flick as “slang for a movie, usually a romantic, contrived comedy, that appeals to the stereotypical tastes of the female gender.” In other words, chick flicks are generally bad movies. I don’t like bad movies. I do like movies that explore realistic problems in fresh, well-constructed narratives, whether they’re led by male or female protagonists. If there’s some emotion along the way, I can deal—it doesn’t feel mushy to me unless it’s ham-handedly done.

Hugh Dancy, one of the male actors in this season’s “The Jane Austen Book Club,” responded as follows to the accusation of his involvement in a chick flick: “A ‘chick flick’ implies a kind of frothiness, a surface quality and not really, in a way, related to life. These [‘Book Club’ characters] are people living real lives and facing real challenges. I don’t think of the film that way. I think about it as a script and a story.”

Couldn't agree more.

The film’s female director, Robin Swicord, asserts, "I think that it's only women who are told that their movies are in a separate category, as if the other categories of film were the real categories."

I wouldn’t go so far as Swicord: I wouldn’t dispute that there is a category appropriately called “chick flicks.” I simply say that the category should be considered much smaller than it is by my dumb-dumb husband and others of his ilk. It should be limited to films like “The Holiday” or “The Wedding Planner” or most Sandra Bullock films. Chick flicks should be thought of as “bad films directed at women.”

What are not chick flicks?

•    Dirty Dancing
•    Ghost
•    Pretty Woman
•    Thelma and Louise
•    and yes, Terms of Endearment

Why? Because they are great films that only neanderthalesque men should be incapable of enjoying. They are rich, beautiful films with smart dialogue and great acting that make us think about life and all its complications and wonders. Tell me, men, what is so icky about that?

Do you not feel?

Do you not love?

So many questions I could ask, but I must go down to the living room and bounce on Craig's head in all my pregnant heaviness until he agrees to watch “Evening” with me. And like it.

Comments

[Craig]

"Evening" is a deeply emotional film that illuminates the timeless love which binds mother and daughter – seen through the prism of one mother’s life as it crests with optimism, navigates a turning point, and ebbs to its close. Two pairs of real-life mothers and daughters – Vanessa Redgrave and Natasha Richardson, and Meryl Streep and Mamie Gummer – portray, respectively, a mother and her daughter and the mother's best friend at different stages in life.

[James]

I giggled a little when you wrote, 'blow him to smithereens' because I am a man and a pervert.

'Evening' may be a hot-blooded thriller. I dunno and never will because it's marketed as a complete chick flick: http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809765401/info

That gauzy, sunset cover shot and the overwrought copy give it away. We can smells that kinda hooey from miles around.

And for me, chick flicks are movies where a dreamy male character says things that he would never say. They play as modern fairy tales. Nothing wrong with them, but they act as the female equivalent of pornography - intended to arouse, not to engage.

Excellent faces to deliver the precious lines include the two Hughs (Grant and Jackman, as Mr. Darcy not Wolverine) and Jude Law. I believe salty Richard Gere qualifies as well.

So you're stretching taut as a toned belly to make me believe Pretty Woman counts as part of a tradition of 'rich, beautiful films with smart dialogue and great acting that make us think about life and all its complications and wonders.' Ditto, Ghost and Dirty Dancing. (Got a Swayze jag going?)

Please provide a follow up post on the 'Evening' viewing experience with your husband.

[kiley]

Okay, okay. Yesterday's post may have been somewhat emotionally motivated. It's possible my principal issue is that I don't like the term "chick flick"—I find it derogatory and it rankles my feminist molecules. It connotes airheadedness and old-fashioned, Freudian notions of female hysteria for me, things I don't like to be associated with. Action films just don't have that same negative throw-off on men, I don't think. Maybe it's that when a guy says "chick flick," it's so dismissive.

I think you're right, James, in making the point that "chick flick" is mostly a marketing label created by promotional imagery and copy. It tells women to check the film out and men to steer clear. That bugs me, too. I just wish the gender divide weren't so encouraged with big swaths of films. Or that so many chick flicks (under my revised, conceded understanding) weren't so bad, tarring other films with female leads in them.

And "Evening"? I won't defend it. It's not up there with my list of goodies. But Craig did watch it, silently and with thoughts of all he could get away with for the next 72 hours for his sacrifice.

[kiley]

My cousin Kate has come up with a good starter list of women-centric films that are not chick flicks:

Volver
Moonstruck
Shopgirl
Erin Brockovich
The Piano
When Harry Met Sally
Friends With Money

James would include The Devil Wears Prada. Feel free to add to the list!

[streel]

Call me a neanderthal.Because I completely agree with Craig. To prove that I feel, I almost wept at the brilliance of James' post. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

The only movie on your lists that I have even seen is Erin Brockovich, which I enjoyed. My personal list of good movies with female leads would be Ghost World (Thora Birch & Scarlett Johansson), The Good Girl (Jennifer Aniston) and Hysterical Blindness( Uma Thurman & Julliette Lewis). These movies were completely devoid of the syrupy fromage and were down right entertaining.

Steph usually watches this tripe by herself and she is good with that, that way she avoids me groaning and gagging next to her. When she watches something that she thinks I will like we will give it a whirl together. A recent example is The Last Kiss. It was not a bad movie and one that I never in a million years would have picked myself.

[doug]

Ya, the thing is: we're all already aware that the genre exists, we're just debating which movies are in it and where it ranks on the scale of domestic crime. For me, anything with Richard Gere is a CF. It ranks (so to speak) somewhere around farting in bed.

[kiley]

Wow. The wrath the CF invokes! And comparisons so visual: Streel's "tripe" and Doug's "farting in bed" ... I love it!

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