Time of your life?... does Dirty Dancing make it into your top five in chick flickery?
How do you make the perfect chick flick? In this week's issue of Film&Music, Emily Barr and Jenny Colgan offer their guide to girl plus boy equals Dirty Dancing.
Personally, I dislike the term "chick flick" or "chick lit" or "chick" anything. It's a label that invariably leads to demeaning gender stereotypes of the chardonnay-and-chocolate variety. Chick flicks perpetuate the tired generalisation that women can't have it all and, in fact, only really wanted a man all along anyway.
Men don't escape the brush of banality either, being portrayed as emotionally flawed but physically perfect (Bridget Jones), or chauvinists who need a woman to set them straight (What Women Want) - and heterosexuality is, of course, the only option in such films. One of the worst examples in this genre is the puzzlingly popular Pretty Woman - a blinkered, rose-tinted and potentially damaging portrayal of the life of a sex worker, which is not something that often, so far as I'm aware, ends with said sex worker marrying a handsome millionaire and riding off into the sunset.
But if you file such films under "amusing escapism" rather than "depressingly irritating", would the likes of Pillow Talk and Sleepless in Seattle feature in your chick flick top five? Or maybe, for the sake of subversion, you'd like to suggest an alternative list where the women don't always weep and the men aren't always so macho...
