Reviews & Previews - Top 4 Chick Flicks Guys Grudgingly Liked

Posted on Tuesday, June 03, 2008 at 06:00 PM

Top 4 Chick Flicks Guys Grudgingly Liked

By: S. Tran

This week we're going to get away from some of the annoying dumbness found in some films and have a look at some chick flicks that did the seemingly impossible...appealed to guys. Whether we will admit it or not, after we got dragged kicking and screaming to these movies we somehow found ourselves really enjoying them. Once the film was over of course we had to make the standard derogatory comments about how lame they were, but inside we were secretly glad our wives or girlfriends forced us to go to see it. If you went to these movies with another dude, well...uh...that's cool too.

This week we'll look at the first two movies on our list, in no particular order.

The Princess Bride

Tag Line: Scaling the Cliffs of Insanity, Battling Rodents of Unusual Size, Facing torture in the Pit of Despair. - True love has never been a snap.

What it Promised: At best we thought it might be some syrupy fairy tale appealing to 12 year old girls, taking a love story and adding a few elements to make it appealing to 8 year old boys as well. At worst we thought it was going to be a lame attempt to modernize a classic love story, a "re-imagining" of some classic romance.

The end result, we were sure, would be a horrible mess where half the cast would forget their accents partway through the movie and the female lead would turn against convention by finding her inner woman power, transforming into a strong modern woman by the end of the film and burning her bra or corset or whatever. Either way, the thought of seeing a movie with a title like "The Princess Bride" made us go into our own Pit of Despair.

Why Guys Actually Liked It: It was pretty damn funny. Yeah the old fashioned love story was "re-imagined", but it was re-imagined with Andre the frikkin Giant!

Never taking itself seriously, the film took the best clichés from swashbuckling romances that came before it and ran with them. It was based on a book by William Goldman who apparently wrote the book while wrestling alligators, BASE jumping and other manly things because when it came time to name things that appeared in the film he gave them such awesome monikers like "The Cliffs of Insanity" and "The Pits of Despair" to show us he wasn't messing around. Yeah this was a fairy tale, but it was going to be a bad ass parody at the same time.

Nothing about the traditional fairy tale was sacred and everything was fair game. You need an evil prince? Screw it, we'll give you one, his name is Prince Humperdinck. There was probably a King Slapherass too but he was left out of the film because he was too boring.

Sure we had to put up with the love story between Wesley and Buttercup but it was a relatively minor price to pay to watch scenes like Carey Elwes and Andre the Giant debate the merits of different styles of fighting while trying to knock each other unconscious.

In addition, in a brilliant bit of casting Mandy Patinkin channeled his inner Tony Montana and delivered probably one of the only lines any guy can recite from a chick flick:

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

Which is basically the fairy tale equivalent to "Say hello to my little friend."

Love Actually

Tag Line: Love actually is all around.

What it Promised: If you were a guy it didn't promise anything good. The title of the movie and the tag line for it basically repeated themselves. The message could not have been any clearer if they called the movie "DO NOT SEE THIS IF YOU ARE A GUY!". This promised to be nothing more than a two hour suck fest that would have us envying coyotes for their ability to chew off a limb to escape traps.

Plus we heard the movie was shot by the British which meant that the actors would be mumbling about love in ridiculous accents and using slang we wouldn't be able to understand. Yeah, Snatch was a great movie but this film didn't look like there was going to be any guns, fighting or mobsters involved, unless it was going to be some weird gangster love story.

Why Guys Actually Liked It: Kiera Knightly, Elisha Cuthbert, Denise Richards, Shannon Elizabeth what the hell? This wasn't a chick flick it was a Maxim magazine shoot! They even threw in some gratuitous nudity with that chick who was the movie stand in. It was like the director, Richard Curtis pulled some weird bait and switch with this movie, like a mom covering brussel sprouts in chocolate.

All this talent on display was just a small part of the movie though because the thing was also funny. Apparently the British can make with the haha even without having shootouts and bad guys with ugly teeth, who knew? Bill Nighy was hilarious as the over the hill rock star and Hugh Grant  cracked us up even though he just played the same character he's played in the last 20  movies he's been in. Throw in that dude who went to America to get laid and there were enough laughs to keep us going between the dull parts.

Finally we admit that for each of us at least one of the love stories actually got to us. No, we didn't really care for watching Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman work out their old people love problems but we reluctantly admit that most of the other stories were interesting, if not downright engaging because the emotions were nicely balanced with a bit of comedy. Except for the chick with the brother in the mental hospital, she was just annoying.

Another reason we liked was because some of the stories are pretty much carbon copies of a lot of typical male fantasies. The boss and the secretary, the guy with 2 (or more) women, meeting a super model mom, getting it on with the maid. So even with the other unappealing story lines there was enough to keep us interested which is a feat for a movie centered around love and made by the Brits.