27 Dresses and the state of the chick flick

We had a movie marathon a few weekends ago which involved us watching 27 Dresses and Alien vs Predator back to back. This Shit Cinema Sunday was rather disappointing. Like most people, I do like the occasional bowl of mac and cheese, a movie where the boy and girl meet cute and live happily ever after….

However, watching it made me concerned for the state of the chick flick. Yesterday we watched when Harry Met Sally, where by comparison, 27 Dresses is just a bit rubbish. The characters are all stereotypes; the uptight, desperate single, her amazingly attractive, selfish younger sister, the witty yet dowdy friend – and I could go on, and on and on…

I am just wondering where have the good films for women gone?

Apparently the logic is that it’s mostly adolescent boys that go along to the cinema on a film’s opening weekend, and the success or failure of a movie is decided in this weekend. This sad cliche of a movie brought in $27 million dollars on its opening weekend, which is not shabby considering the highest grossing film of all time; Titanic brought in $28 mil in its opening weekend. I’m not saying that 27 Dresses is any good, or even that Titanic is good, but it does show that women are willing to go to the cinema if there is something out there for them. But is 27 Dresses the kind of film we want to be seeing?

Sadly any film with Katherine Heigl in it tends to cause me a minor case of the heebie jeebies. I say sadly because as far as actresses go she is less annoying than most, she doesn’t look too anorexic, she comes across relatively down to earth and intelligent in interviews and she is not so beautiful that you can’t relate to her.

And yet… She is squandering her not insignificant talent on movies like 27 Dresses and Knocked Up. Knocked up is precisely one of those films that the development teams must have thought ‘this film’s great, and chicks will dig it too’. But here’s the thing, no ‘chick’ I know really wants to spend two hours dreaming about getting drunk, having a one night stand and then contemplating a life with the stoner layabout that got you preggers in the first place!

In When Harry Met Sally, Sally is a strong, multifaceted female character with her own live and narrative drive that doesn’t exist in relation to someone else – as a sister or a girlfriend or a wife. Sally falls in love because she wants to, but poor old plain Jane falls in love with Kevin Doyle (James Marsden) because there doesn’t seem to be any better alternative on the horizon. Alison stays with Ben in Knocked Up because she won’t be able to do better now that she’s going to be a baby momma.

I love film and part of it is seeing a movie and identifying or aspiring to the lives of the characters in those films. I can’t think of a female led film that has seriously captured my imagination since Amelie, which was released nearly seven years ago.

There are a lot of women running studios these days, why aren’t they making films that represent themselves; strong, independent and funny women? Now that would be a movie I would be really interested in seeing.