Chick Flicks: A Guilty Pleasure

Psst. Come ‘ere. I have a dirty secret I want to tell you. Want to hear it? Okay, here goes…I like chick flicks.

“What?” you cry, “I can’t hear you!”

I like chick flicks! I enjoy them. Not all of them, mind you, but the intelligent ones—can’t get enough of ‘em.

“That’s fine,” you say, “But I don’t think a biker rally is the best time to confess this information.”

Truthfully, I do actually like chick flicks. Not the really cheesy ones, of course—I could barely stand the trailers of Serendipity, and thus I never saw it. Cor, just the title—Serendipity—makes me want to puke. Any film that relies heavily upon having a character not saying or doing something that any logical person would say or do is not the type of movie for me. From what I remember of the trailers, Serendipity relies heavily on the fact that the Girl just doesn’t want to give her name and number to the Guy, so she writes it in a book, and says that, if it’s meant to be, he’ll find it and call her. For fuck’s sake. How about you give him your name and number, and if you end up liking each other and enjoying each other’s company, then it was meant to be?

Another such film is The Wedding Planner, starring the one and only J.Lo as a woman who, for some reason totally unbeknownst to me, can’t get a date, so instead she obsesses over her job, as a wedding planner. Talk about masochism. I suppose it would be akin to a hypochondriac becoming a doctor. But I actually saw five minutes of this one. She meets and promptly falls in love with a guy who saved her from being hit by an out-of-control dumpster (don’t ask. In the alternate reality of romance comedies, things like this always happen), kisses him a couple times (which, in the puritanical, wishy-washy alternate reality of romance comedies, means true love), and subsequently learns that he’s the groom at her next wedding. For some reason, we’re supposed to like the guy, although, in the five minutes that I watched of the movie, all he really does that’s somewhere close to charming is take her to see a black-and-white movie in the park, and dances with her then and there (I hate when couples in the row in front of me start slow-dancing. That’s when I take out my laser pen and blind them.)

If romantic comedies are generally regarded as the trash bin of the film world, then made-for-television romantic comedies are the silver fish of romantic comedies in general. I’m talking about the ones you find on TNT or—ugh—the Family Channel. They are, for the most part, about lonely dog-walkers who are mistaken for millionaires (why would a millionaire walk his twenty dogs himself?) or ridiculously neurotic women who take their grandmothers’ prediction about marrying the sixteenth man they go out with to heart, only to find that, gasp, they’re in love with the fourteenth man (maybe Gamma couldn’t count. Or maybe Gamma knew you were an incredibly gullible idiot who would actually abide by ridiculous predictions). I’ve never watched any of these made-for-TV movies; I know all this because the commercials tell you everything, and if they don’t, then your accumulative memory will. Here, I’ll tell you the ending to every goddamned romantic comedy out there. Listen carefully:

Everything turns out right in the end.

Yeah, cheers, thanks a lot. There you have it. Everyone will end up happy, except for the one-dimensional jerk boyfriend, or the bitchy girlfriend. Even the gay best friend (always a gay man, because everyone knows they're way more hi-larious than lesbians) will find someone, or at least be the one front-and-center, grinning, and applauding for the couple at the end. And another thing--the guy and the girl are always the most incredibly insipid characters in the film. They have nothing going for them except for their Colgate smiles. They have dream jobs in that they apparently don’t have jobs unless it’s called for. The guy will be named Jack, and will be an architect or a writer (journalist or a novelist, doesn’t matter, as long as he’s not stuck in a cubicle for the entire movie), while the girl has a slightly larger choice of names, but it is usually, for the most part, Annie or Meg. You know, something peppy. Her job is usually a bit more vague than Jack’s, but you can be certain that it’s high-profile, corporate, and screams “independent woman”. Because that’s what the feminist movement was for, in the world of romantic comedies—for women to assert their independence in the workplace while still maintaining their maddening neurosis regarding love.

I don’t know; I remember reading Oliver Twist and being rather surprised that there were actually additional characters never even mentioned in the constant film adaptations—namely Rose, the fragile-and-loving aunt of Oliver, and Harry Maylie, who’s in love with Rose. They are never—absolutely never—mentioned in film adaptations, or even those Children’s Adaptations that, without the drawings on every page, have about twenty pages of actual text (you know what I’m talking about. Kids read them instead of reading the actual book, and miss out on about half of the real story). Harry Maylie and Rose were, in effect, the foils for Nancy and Bill Sikes—while Bill Sikes and Nancy were swarthy, fornicating, lower class heathens in an abusive relationship, Harry and Rose were a proper, lily-white, can’t-hold-hands-until-marriage couple. While Nancy and Bill are killed in horrible ways in the novel, Harry and Rose live to see the end of the story (although I imagine both of them dying of cholera. Don’t know why.) Do you want to know why they’re never mentioned in adaptations? Because they’re boring. No one wants to see a couple morally superior to them throwing said superiority into everyone’s faces. Not to mention the fact that Sikes was (in my humble opinion) literature’s coolest badass, and—when accompanied with Nancy’s heartbreaking devotion to him—completely overshadows Harry and Rose to the hilt. Judging by the fact that people actually do go to see romantic comedies, I’d guess that I’m in the minority of people who don’t want to see goody-goodies bemoan the fact that they keep missing their One True Loves by mere seconds. Give me the hurtful barbs of T.R. Devlin and Alicia Huberman in Notorious or the manic arguments of George and Martha in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? any day.

But I’m getting off track. There are some good romantic comedies out there. I actually started this blog entry with a point.

There are actually a few really good romantic comedies out there, waiting to be seen. It always seems that these movies are character-driven rather than plot-driven, so perhaps that’s why they’re much better. Bad romantic comedies are driven by plots that are gratingly false, with some gratingly unrealistic characters thrown in for good measure. Good romantic comedies have more-or-less realistic, amusing characters who just happen to be following an amusing story. At the top of my head, I’d say that Bridget Jones’ Diary is a great romantic comedy, as is About a Boy and Four Weddings and a Funeral (these are all Hugh Grant movies obviously, as Hugh Grant is the master of smart romantic comedies). Sleepless in Seattle, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, and While You Were Sleeping were endearing, but rather because the plots had tinges of seriousness about them that made you sympathize with the protagonists (Sleepless in Seattle most of all; I love that movie.) One of the best romantic comedies—if not the best romantic comedy—out there has to be The Princess Bride, although I find myself enjoying Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya a bit more than the star-crossed lovers, but not by much. It’s just that Inigo Montoya is driven by revenge, which is way cooler than love, and has one of the greatest lines in film history: “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” But my favorite bit has to be when he finds the guy who killed his father, and—while cutting him to shreds—has this exchange with him:

Montoya: Offer me money [to spare your life]!
Six-Fingered Man: Yes!
Montoya: Power too, promise me that!
Six-Fingered Man: All that I have and more! Please!
Montoya: Offer me everything I ever asked for!
Six-Fingered Man: Anything you want!
Montoya: I want my father back you son of a bitch!

Ha—and that’s all I wanted to say. Wordy, you say? Rambling, you cry? Incoherent, full of frighteningly conservative mantras, much like the Unabomber manifesto? Pshaw. Oh, and be sure to open that package I sent you veerrryy slowly, and eat a lot just before you do it (that way the explosion will be all the more gruesome, yes, yes, heh heh heh heh heh…)