The ABC's of Chick Flicks

I am a woman. While this statement may mean very little to you, the next person or any other person, what it means is that I am a born expert on the genre of film so aptly named, “The Chick Flick.” (Then again, if you’re a chauvinist, it might mean that I can make a damned great sandwich.... Well, I can, I have witnesses and guinea pigs to vouch, but that’s hardly the point.)

            Just this past year I was part of a communal blogging website for a Canadian College. As such, we were required to pick blog topics which would be the highlight of our very own webpage. Now naturally I am a procrastinator, I feel this gift/curse (ala Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde) of a habit was not my fault; I was simply born into it and eventually found a profession which accepted it as the norm. What happened then was something of a frantic last minute topic pick and I just so happened to pick “Chick Flicks,” yes, having Gerard Butler on the television may have influenced my decision... so what?

            I spent the year watching chick flicks with a bowl of popcorn and a trusty box of Kleenex, sometimes scribbling down notes to blog about at a later time. Basically, I am well-versed in the art of the chick flick. So, when it was time for me to think of what I could write about for this week’s blog post, chick flicks naturally came to mind. I know, I hear a groan or two, maybe a few less clicks on my blog this week but I thought I could make it fun... you know that thing that people sometimes have?

            Without further ado, I present to you: The ABC’s of Chick Flicks!

SPOILER ALERT: I SPOIL CHICK FLICKS AHEAD!

     A is for atonement. Yes, ironically also the aptly titled chick flick starting Keira Knightly and James McAvoy but also a very very important plot standard of chick flicks. Boy loves girl, boy does something nearly irredeemably idiotic. Girl vows never to forgive boy. Boy finds way to make her forgive him. Atonement can also be very unconsciously woven into the plot, misleading the viewers until moments before the film ends. In this case, I’m using the actual movie named after this plot device, Atonement (so shoot me.)

            I’m not going to lie; I have a big weakness for period pieces that find a way to very accurately use little bits of large scale historical events in the plot. Based on a novel of the same title by British author Ian McEwan, Atonement is such a film. Set in the years that would ultimately lead up to World War II, Atonement is all about people proving others wrong. Robbie (McAvoy), the male lead, falsely accused of a crime he did not commit based on the testimony of a child with a dashed crush, goes off to war to earn his freedom. His newly found love, Cecilia (Knightly) becomes a nurse etc, etc. We see Cecilia and Robbie come together time and time again only for the relationship to fail – wrong time, different pages, different choices. What becomes clear to the viewers nearing the last five minutes of the movie is that the entire show of the relationship Robbie and Cecilia have over the course of the many months and years has all been a ruse. The girl who gave the false testimony that put Robbie in prison and eventually pushed him to war tells an interviewer in the film that she wrote a life for Cecilia and Robbie out of guilt for separating them. The novel she writes is her way of atoning for her actions that she could never take back. Atonement, also very sneaky.

     B is for bad boy. The bad boy can easily be identified by his tattoos, a leather jacket, very manly scruff, possibly an accent, most likely more than twenty-odd notches on his bedpost... of which he will brag about frequently: see most Gerard Butler roles. The bad boy is a common plot device seen in such films as Grease (a personal favourite), The Ugly Truth, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton and numerous others that shall remain unmentioned by title for the simple reason that this post is already going to be long enough. It’s a formula that isn’t difficult to figure out; it plays to the old tune of how women would love to change men... treat them as a hobby between work and other such time consuming issues in life. Women would love to date that bad boy and change him into something all together different. As many women I know can attest... this rarely works and usually ends up in failure on many levels. For the sake of examples, I’ll use The Ugly Truth, starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (notice that I chose a Gerard Butler role for poetic justice to my previous statement).

            In the film Heigl plays an uptight, work obsessed TV producer that also happens to be a dateless wonder. Enter Butler, a crude, uncouth, foul-mouthed TV personality that lives life in the fast lane. Butler agrees to train Heigl to woo her single doctor neighbour before Butler and Heigl’s characters eventually fall for each other. In the end, Butler’s character changes and becomes softer and a lot less like the character we see in the beginning of the film. Recall the word film; this does not happen in real life. 

    

C is for catastrophe. This is one of the plot devices that doesn’t need much of an explanation. Ingredients: 1 female lead; 1 male lead; 2 heaping scoops of love; 1 catastrophe to tear them apart and in the process play with our heartstrings and bring on the tears. Catastrophes can be large scale or minor but for the effect of absolute hopelessness and the feeling of overcoming the seemingly insurmountable odds, the catastrophes usually end up being large scale. War, accidents, clashing of societal classes... it ends in death en mass: identifying marks of major catastrophe. I won’t name multiple films about catastrophe because it’s unneeded really because one chick flick really wraps this category up in a package complete with a pretty bow.

Titanic my friends, yes, Titanic.  

A blockbuster film, Titanic is a chick flick you start watching already knowing fully what will happen in the end - the ship will sink, people will die – and yet most women have watched it more than once and burst out into tears like clockwork at marked scenes. Titanic is still the master of catastrophe chick flick themed movies, even fourteen years after its release.

D is for disease. I’m starting to feel as if we’re part of a Sesame Street episode. Now disease is a very overused plot tool used in this genre of film; A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Love and Other Drugs, Sweet November (to which the tag line is: “She only needed a month to change his life forever.”) and 50 First Dates use disease as a vessel to get their point across. Now usually this disease will come in three forms, ranking them in order of most likely so: cancer, Alzheimer’s and/or progressive heart failure. Since I’m pretty sure most of the known world and everyone within the sixth degree of separation rule has seen The Notebook, I’ll use that one as an example. Noah and Allie – two young people that fall in love and go through life fighting to be together; eventually they get married, have kids who have kids and grow old as most of us do. Later we will find out that Allie, the love of Noah’s life has an aggressive form of Alzheimer’s which means that Noah must painstakingly read Allie the story of their love to spend only a moment with her. Noah does this everyday for as long as he can remember.