A woman-a young widow, perhaps, or the survivor of a recent breakup in short, vulnerable and receptive-meets or marries a handsome jawline who’s too handsome, too nice, too slick, too grippy in his embrace, and before long he’s looming in doorways (ominously silhouetted), making secretive phone calls, and turning her own daughter against her. Cast with familiar, beloved B-list drama and sitcom TV stars (Rob Lowe, Roma Downey, Valerie Bertinelli, Jami Gertz) and visually designed as comfort food for tired eyes, the typical Lifetime cable movie is a domestic melodrama of seduction and abduction. Although it targets a female audience, it is not to be confused with the Lifetime/Oxygen cable movie, which addresses a similar demographic with its own distinctive, watered-down, easy-to-swallow formula. First, though, we must define what a chick flick isn’t. It’s catchy, it rhymes, and it gets me where I need to go. There are those who would argue that the candy-flavored phrase “chick flick” is demeaning, reductive, and sexist. François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, Zone Books, 2004. Marriage and a semblance of maturity have collaborated to make me a student and captive of the chick flick, even if it means suffering through the ordeal of Georgia Rule.įirst, one accepts the paradox: that to honor the bland-to value the flavorless rather than the flavorful-runs counter to our most spontaneous judgment (and elicits a certain pleasure in thus contradicting common sense). No, today, I am more likely to find myself situated in front of the zillionth cable replay of Dirty Dancing or Legally Blonde, worrying what will become of Mandy Moore if she co-stars in one more stinko, and wanting, actually wanting, to see Enchanted. Much as I revered Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks, I have no interest in the stunted toadstools taking up couch space in the slackers’ hangar he’s built on the big screen ( The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up). I see zombie-face Javier Bardem toting his air-pressure cattle gun in the ads for No Country for Old Men and I think, My, aren’t we the fancy serial killer fresh from the hardware store? I read ecstatic reviews extolling the flashing, slashing steel and arterial spray of Sweeney Todd and I realize I’ve lost my love of tomato paste. Today, macho movies make me shrug, their excesses no longer enticing. I look back and wonder what happened to the former me, who went to see Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs twice on successive evenings to get his lurid fix of sweaty, grubby sex and spasming carnage photographed and edited at full crescendo-a rhapsody in red. Even musicals from the scruffy 70s, such as Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, drummed the floor with boot-heel stomps of macho declaration, and not every serious sports movie doubled as a Celebration of the Human Spirit, as witness the racy hockey picture Slap Shot, starring Paul Newman, who, critic and blogger Kim Morgan recently observed in tribute, “carrie the picture with an odd sort of foul-mouthed dignity we simply don’t see in movies these days.” Yes, I too think back fondly on those hairy days when foulmouthed dignity was still in flower (before political sensitivities became so squeamish) and foulmouthed indignity was also free to break into aria, with Jack Nicholson cursing up a blue fury in Carnal Knowledge and The Last Detail. My moviegoing wonder years coincided with the glory stretch of macho grit in the late 60s and early 70s, when Steve McQueen’s Bullitt tore down the straightaway when directors Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegel doused their antiheroes with flea powder and cut them loose in the scorpion desert when New York City played surly host to Al Pacino’s Serpico, Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle ( The French Connection), Robert De Niro’s Johnny Boy ( Mean Streets), and Robert Shaw holding the subway system hostage in *The Taking of Pelham 123 *when Burt Reynolds exuded beefcake prowess with his bow and arrows in Deliverance, Billy Jack preached peace and love with barefoot kicks to the head, and the Corleones reigned as America’s First Family. I wasn’t some B-movie barbarian, junking out on biker films and gore-fests at Times Square grind houses, where lonely men went to molt. Sure, I might catch an Astaire-Rogers musical now and then just to take the “edge” off, but put an action film in front of me, packed with violence and bravado, and I was ready to gnaw. Go ahead, scoff, but there was a time when my movie tastes were rugged and chapped, downright virile. Renée Zellweger chews her finger in the title role of Bridget Jones’s Diary.
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