Everyone who knows me knows that I hate chick flicks. But today, I'm going to do something my friends never thought possible, and that is come up with 10 chick flicks that I actually like. Considering "chick flick" is not an actual genre, and it's pretty subjective what actually qualifies, I will give you my definition...
Chick flick: A film geared towards a female audience that you'd watch at a sleepover or after a breakup, and that guys are often too embarrassed to admit they like/cried during.
For the record, I am excluding period pieces like Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Belle, The Painted Veil, Titanic, etc, musicals like Dirty Dancing, Greece, and La La Land, and also anything that came out before the 2000's. This is MY personal list of favorite chick flicks, so if you came here to get YOUR personal favorite validated, the exit is that way. ––>
With that, and starting in no particular order, here we go!
For the record, I am excluding period pieces like Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, Belle, The Painted Veil, Titanic, etc, musicals like Dirty Dancing, Greece, and La La Land, and also anything that came out before the 2000's. This is MY personal list of favorite chick flicks, so if you came here to get YOUR personal favorite validated, the exit is that way. ––>
She's The Man
After getting rid of the girl's soccer team due to budget cuts, Viola (Amanda Bynes), pretends to be her brother so that she can still play. Now she must learn to act like a boy in order to convince her teammates. The trouble starts when she begins to fall for one of them.
What makes this movie so great is the stereotypes Viola tries to project of how she views men, before realizing that they're not THAT different from women. This was an extremely funny film and definitely worth watching if you can get over Channing Tatum's wooden acting.
The Fault In Our Stars
Adapted from the lovely John Green book of the same name, The Fault In Our Stars is the story of two teens who meet in a cancer support group. Not knowing exactly how long one of them has to live, they try to make the best of their current situation.
I absolutely loved this book and the movie follows it to a T. While there are definitely a couple of sappy moments, The Fault In Our Stars never strays away from the hardships of cancer and suffering. If you have a heart, you will cry. If you don't, you'll still appreciate this film for its philosophies, Shailene Woodley's excellent performance, and its emotional potency.
Enchanted
Nothing says chick flick more than a Disney Princess movie. In Enchanted, our cartoon Princess is banished to the real life, and horrible city of New York, preventing Giselle from marrying her lover of one day.
I absolutely adore this film and the way it takes cliches of Disney Princess movies and shows the ridiculousness of them in real life. It's funny, it's entertaining, it's cute, and we get super fun performances from Amy Adams, Susan Sarandon, James Marsden, and Patrick Dempsey.
Silver Lining Playbook
Fresh out of a mental institution, Pat (Bradley Cooper) goes to live with his parents. Trying to get his ex-wife's friend Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) to deliver a letter to her, he agrees to be Tiffany's partner in a dance competition.
This rom-com succeeds on multiple levels: comedically, emotionally, and authentically. It's an unpredictable and refreshing film that takes on complicated subjects like mental illness and manages to hit us in the feels while doing it.
Mean Girls
While I feel this film needs no introduction, I will give one anyway. Mean Girls is the story of a quirky homeschool girl from Africa that moves to America and is thrown into public school. She quickly learns which cliques are the cool ones, which ones aren't, and that popularity takes you a lot further than character.
Mean Girls is one of the funniest movies out there, nailing how it is to be a girl and the passive-aggressive world of teenagers. For a movie geared toward teens, it's actually pretty mature, focusing on how our words and actions effect others.
Blue Valentine
Blue Valentine follows the story of a young couple in the beginning of their relationship when the romance is just beginning, and into their middle-aged years where it begins to fall apart.
This is definitely the movie you will want to watch after a breakup or if you want your happily-ever-after completely spoiled. Seriously though, this film wrecked me.
Ryan Gosling and Michelle William's performances were so raw and uncomfortable to watch at times, but that is what made it so beautiful. Blue Valentine is an absolute masterpiece that you probably won't want to see more than once.
500 Days Of Summer
This is a love story about a man who falls deeply in love with a woman who doesn't believe in love. It's about expectations, and how we perceive a relationship while we're in it, verses how it actually is. That is what I love most about this movie. It uses the audiences expectations against the audience, all while demonstrating things we've accurately experienced ourselves in relationships.
500 Days of Summer is just as deep and layered as it is hilarious, which makes it one of the best (if not the best) of the chick flick genre.
The Spectacular Now
When Sutter Keely (Miles Teller), a troubled high school senior, falls in love with "the good girl" Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley), people begin to get hurt.
This film is smart, nuanced, unsentimental, and deep. It puts the audience in a familiar, relatable backdrop of highschool and then gives us three-dimensional characters that aren't always what they appear to be. It's more somber and realistic than your usual chick-flick, but that's what makes it so much better. The quiet moments that this movie is made of, are never anything other than sincere.
The Proposal
Moving onto a more light-hearted film, The Proposal is about a Canadian-buisness woman who is about to be deported back to Canada. Not wanting to lose everything she's worked so hard for, she convinces her assistant to marry her for a Visa, in exchange for a promotion. Let's just say that hilarity ensues.
Is it a particularly deep film? No. Is it formulaic? Yes. But due to casting of the charming, charismatic talents of Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock, we are in for one extremely entertaining guilty pleasure.
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