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.