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Douglas Sirk's movies were considered "woman's pictures" back in the day and dismissed by critics for being banal tear jerkers. Now they're recognized by contemporary critics and scholars for being ironic, complex critiques of American society thinly veiled in melodrama and bright colors. With this highly commercial Lana Turner vehicle, Sirk wasn't just pulling at the heartstrings, he was also subtly confronting the divide between white and black America. Makes you wonder if someday we'll be discussing the xenophobia dynamics in Made of Honor. Probably not, but Sirk's movies show how a filmmaker can be dismissed as trite in his own time only to be understood to be so much more in later years.
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On the one hand, it seems sacrilegious to even call this classic a "chick flick." On the other hand, right at this moment, some 16-year-old girl with a black-and-white picture of Audrey Scotch taped to her locker is trying to get her boyfriend to watch this movie while he argues for yet another viewing of Superbad. Finally, the dude will give in, perhaps the victim of his girlfriend imitating Audrey's kittenish ways, and he'll enjoy every frickin' minute. Yes this movie has the romance, the happy endings, and the material obsessions common to sucky contemporary chick flicks (Sex and the City movie, we're talking about you), but it also has an intriguing dark side — both Holly's and Paul's lifestyles are subsidized by their own amorality and loneliness — that tempers all the pretty stuff just bit. But, in the end, it's that beauty that makes the movie a classic. It's as if all that is pleasurable and beautiful about movies was distilled into Audrey Hepburn's face for 115 blissful minutes.
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From Sixteen Candles to Dirty Dancing, the '80s are brimming with non-sucky chick flicks. How do they manage to not suck? First, there are the soundtracks. When you have New Order and the Psychedelic Furs playing, as in this movie, it's hard for a movie to be that bad (think how much more bearable Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette was made by the New Order factor). Then, there's the fact that in the best '80s "chick flicks" the leading ladies aren't just waiting for some dude to call; they're making killer prom dresses out of old ones, they're learning the mambo, they're borrowing money from their dads to finance secret abortions. In short, they're doing things, and they're not conventionally pretty. Lastly, writer John Hughes imbued Pretty in Pink, and all his '80s high school flicks, with a cliquey realism. He portrayed high school as it was, as you wanted it to be, and as you hoped it never would be. Plus he's the undisputed master of the ugly-duckling-turns-to-a-swan-for-the-prom scene.
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While its feminist principles continue to be debated in film studies programs across this great nation, there's nothing at all sucky about Ridley Scott's female road movie. Love it or hate it, find it empowering or problematic, this was a movie that struck a chord, that started conversations, and challenged the idea of what women could and couldn't do on film.
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A French chick and a broken-hearted slacker wandering around Vienna, just talking for 105 minutes and slowly falling in love. It could have gone so wrong, but with writer-director Richard Linklater things go so right. No one does disaffected dialogue like him, and he manages to take what could of have been a cheesy, gooey mess of a premise and make a thoughtful, genuinely romantic movie. The romance isn't simply between the two stars, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who have an easy chemistry and look the best they'll ever look. Moreso, it's more a quickly scribbled love note to travels, trains, and chance meetings.
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If you can watch the scene in which the two stars perform a dramatic interpretive dance to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" and not be at least a tiny bit amused, you don't deserve your DVD player. Citizen Kane it isn't, but this female buddy movie has some of the same charms of an Apatow flick (if not all the accolades), except the ladies, not the dudes, are the loveable losers. As played by Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino, the title characters deliver such great lines as "I invented Post-Its" and "I was so lucky getting mono; that was like the best diet ever." The funny is further aided by Alan Cumming and Janeane Garofalo — at her mid-late '90s best — in supporting roles.
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There are plenty of my-friend-is-getting-married-and-I-just-realized-I-really-love-him/her pictures that totally suck. This one doesn't and for one simple reason: It doesn't have a happy ending. It's a brave, somewhat shocking, move in a super commercial Julia Roberts picture to have her not get the guy, and here, it elevates the movie well above suckiness. The other woman — Cameron Diaz before she jumped the shark and did that Vegas movie with Kutcher — is actually likable, lending the movie a degree of complexity not often seen in the genre. Rupert Everett is as charming as he'll ever be as the gay BFF, and when Roberts end up his arms, and not Dermot Mulroney's, the movie subtly asks some deeper questions about friendship versus romantic love.
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It's easy to pass this one over in your Netflix browsing and dismiss it as just a cheesy Kirsten Dunst high school flick. It's actually a scathing, hilarious satire of not only beauty pageants but also middle America. The amazing cast — including Allison Janney, Ellen Barkin, Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, and a before-she-was-big Amy Adams — turns in performances so over-the-top hilarious they border on the grotesque. Director Michael Patrick Jann wrote, directed, and produced on the TV wundershow The State, and it shows in this movie's every drop-dead funny scene.
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It starts with the typical beginning of many a chick flick — successful, neurotic New York career woman can never find Mr. Right — and then twists it. The leading lady meets a maybe–Ms. Right. In doing so, the movie at once manages to be a cute chick flick that you could watch with your mother, and a gently subversive movie that turns the romantic comedy genre on its head with girl-on-girl action. Like My Best Friend's Wedding, the movie is at its best when it raises questions about who we love and why, about the blurry boundaries between friendship and romance, instead of giving us cheap, easy, happy endings. Also, Jon Hamm has a small role.
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Like many of the non-sucky chick flicks, the focus is on the relationship between girlfriends; dude stuffs are merely sub-plots (see Thelma & Louise, Romy and Michele's, Steel Magnolias). Sure, here the female friendships are explored via a ridiculous plot device in which a magical pair of pants perfectly fits four very different girlfriends, but no matter. While it's ludicrous to propose that a pair of pants fits and flatters both America Ferrera and Blake Lively, you find yourself wanting to believe they might, just as you once wanted to believe in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny long after you knew they weren't real. What is real here is the strength of the sisterhood casting, in addition to Lively and Ferrera, Amber Tamblyn and Alexis Bledel give affecting, truly believable performances that we've seen draw tears from even the most jaded indie- and foreign-movie-snob dudes.
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