Four Chick Flicks That Weren’t a Total Kick in the Balls
The majority of chick flicks don’t really have a place on this site, and you’ll rarely even see us type those words. However these movies are some of the exceptions. Whether we will admit it or not, after we got dragged kicking and screaming to these movies we found something to like about them. Once the film was over of course we had to make the standard comments about how lame they were and then punch a random person in the face, 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.
1) 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.
“The” is the only word in the title that didn’t suck.
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 Giant!
He will love you…to death.
Never taking itself seriously, the film was based on a book by William Goldman who didn’t just give us a fairy tale but also 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.
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.”
2) Love Actually
Tag Line: Love actually is all around.
The original title was “Periods and Other Women’s Stuff” but they though that was too manly.
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 “A Two Hour Punch to Your Jewels!”. This promised to be nothing more than a 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.
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 knew how to ease our pain with this movie, like your mom covering your brussel sprouts in chocolate… and boobs, not hers of course.
Not British or really that funny, but we’ll give her a pass for obvious reasons.
In addition to all the talent on display the thing was also funny. Apparently the British can make with the ha-ha 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.
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.
3) Coyote Ugly
Tag Line: The Party Never Ends
What It Promised: Hot chicks who might possibly kiss each other, at least that is what we hoped. This film confused the hell out of us when it came out. The story was about a small town girl trying to follow her musical dreams so we know its a chick flick, and yet the poster for the movie hinted at possible girl on girl action. So we were curious but cautiously guarding our balls in case this was going to be a classic bait and switch.
Why Guys Actually Liked It: The movie gave us a chick flick wrapped in a premise we could really get behind. Piper Perabo played a hot small town girl who is forced to work in a bar with other hot girls who dance suggestively on the bar every night. This movie was only one prison scene away from being the plot of a porn film.
The main story about the girl trying to make it in music was dull as hell but each night she would have to go to work and get dirty at the bar. This meant more of the ‘crazy Russian’ played by Izabella Miko and Tyra banks, before she became really annoying.
In Russia the boobies stare at you.
Yeah we would have rather gone out to the bars with our friends, but at the end of the day we saw a lot of the same stuff we would have seen at the club anyway.
4) Bull Durham
The last movie on this list was going to be Wild Things with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards. We thought this was a tender story about forbidden love between two young women. But apparently it was just some bad soft core B thriller with gratuitous nudity. Who knew?
So Bull Durham makes this list. You may think this isn’t a chick flick but we found it on a list of top chick flicks so it counts.
Tag Line: A Major League Story In Minor League Town
What it Promised: Damn, much like Coyote Ugly, we had no idea what this was going to promise. It sounded like a baseball movie but then there was that Susan Sarandon chick on the poster and she is always bad news so we were suspicious. Plus our girlfriends seemed a little too anxious to agree to go see the movie. This confused us from the get go.
Why Guys Actually Liked It: It was a sports movie, kind of. Yeah we got suckered a bit with the Susan Sarandon, cougar-super groupie love story, but the rest of the film was pretty entertaining in showing us the life of a minor league ball player.
It was almost like the guys in the movie found out they were stuck in a quasi-chick flick and were determined to bust out and have some fun, like crashing a wedding shower. There was enough humor and guy talk that we made it through the goofy love story. We could even pretend that the scenes with Sarandon were just long trailers for another movie.
Plus, you know, she has her good days.
Bonus, there were no cry baby moments to suffer through, unless you count the bitter sweetness of Costner’s character breaking the minor league home run record. And that is ok because that is pretty sad when you think about it.
