Chick-flickering

Now that my dance recital is behind me, the BBW actually has had quite a bit of free time on the weekends!  And honestly, I do not know what to do with myself...

So instead of filling the time with gardening (too hot), house-cleaning (too much), re-caulking the bathroom tile (too lazy), I have been watching a lot of movies.  Actually, I have been catching a lot of bits and pieces of movies.  You know how it is, you start off watching one piece of a movie, and then when it ends and you start flipping channels, you happen upon another piece of another movie, and the pattern repeats until you've spent an entire day trying to catch the repeat of the movie you only saw the end of the last time it came on. 


Anyway, it must be that time of the month when the chick flicks are in heavy rotation because I have seen bits and pieces of several since Memorial Day when I spent a good six hours glued to the TV while trying to two-strand twist my own hair (yes, and I can I tell you that it took much longer than that).  That weekend I managed to see most of Toy Story 3, followed by the second half of The Joy Luck Club, the last hour of Steel Magnolias, the end of The War of the Roses, and then a good hour and a half of the final three episodes of Sex and the City.  I also saw an indie movie called Cheri starring Michelle Pfieffer and Kathy Bates.  This past weekend I watched the beginning of Marie Antoinette, About a Boy twice, Steel Magnolias again, the last few minutes of Julie and Julia, the last half of Forget Paris, and the entire Joy Luck Club on demand. 

And after a couple of laughs and a few tears, I realized something that I have always known, but tried to ignore--chick films are essentially grown-up kid movies!  Think about it...there is a heroine (princess), who meets a man (prince), and they fall in love, only to be thwarted by evil forces (over-bearing mothers, bratty children, ghosts of ex-wives, etc.), and through the intervention of good (nosy friends, wise old Southern ladies, sympathetic ghosts of ex-wives), the couple reunites and everyone lives happily ever after (more or less).  If that does not sound like the plot of every pre-90s Disney princess film...

Ladies, are we really that gullible? 

And even in chick movies that are technically not romantic comedies, the heart strings get a few tugs.  I saw Bridesmaids a couple of weeks ago, and doggonit, I was weeping like a baby during parts of that film too and these were not the kind of tears that one gets from laughing too hard either!

So I started to wonder if the same was true for guy films, and after watching a few fragments of The Rock, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the Bourne movies, a smidge of Saving Private Ryan, and the second Karate Kid movie, I determined that their films are just an endless string of gun fights, car chases and explosions just like the cartoons I used to watch with the younger brothers.  So I guess their films are also just grown-up kid movies too...

Whew!  And here I thought I was going to rail on about how Hollywood must think women are a bunch of silly sappy simpletons, but it appears they see men the same way--as a bunch of boorish big-headed blowhards!  No real conspiracy to keep gender norms unchallenged, and certainly not through subliminal messages that suggest real happiness only comes through being in a couple or that the guy with the biggest, loudest and/or fastest gun/boat/car/chip on his shoulder wins. 

Thank goodness they know we are much smarter than that!