GUEST COLUMN: Best Chick Flicks For Your Next Movie Night

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Best Chick Flicks For Your Next Movie Night

by Devin Caldwell

A chick flick is a movie that focuses on stories about and (usually) by women. They are sometimes dismissed as silly, and some of them legitimately are. Nevertheless, some are really quite profound and explore important truths about life. As for the chick flicks that are silly, that's not necessarily a bad thing either. Everyone needs a chance to relax and escape into some pure, mindless entertainment once in a while. So snuggle up on the couch, either with your best gal pals or your favorite furry friend, and enjoy the following chick flicks on your next movie night.

Clueless

Clueless is easy to dismiss as being mindless entertainment. Many people are surprised to learn that it is based on a piece of classic literature: Jane Austen's Emma. Set in a world of clunky cell phones and fashion that would have been unrecognizable to the 19th-century author but now seems anachronistic, Clueless is a good illustration of why only professional NY matchmakers should be trusted to intervene in other people's love lives. Amateurs with good intentions may cause more harm than good.

Bridget Jones's Diary

This film is based on another Jane Austen novel, Pride and Prejudice, making the 19th-century classic relatable to the 21st-century woman. The movie adds an interesting wrinkle by combining the characters of the wayward younger sister and the social-climbing mother, thus going further to explore the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship, and the moment when the caretaking roles reverse, than Austen's original story does.

Never Been Kissed

Never Been Kissed is the story of a forbidden romance between a sweet, swoon-worthy teacher and a journalist who goes undercover posing as a high school student for a story. It is instantly relatable to anyone who was a late bloomer in high school. It sends a message that things get better and also offers hope to those who, for whatever reason, are still waiting for that first kiss.

Fried Green Tomatoes

There are relatively few movies about real, genuine friendship, in which romance takes a backseat. Movies about friendship between women, though more common than movies about male friendship that don't involve car chases or explosions, are still pretty rare. Fried Green Tomatoes is a movie about multiple friendships that cross generations, race lines, and social taboos. It is also a movie about the power of story to empower people to change their own lives for the better and the benefits of having a role model to look up to. Kathy Bates won the Oscar for Misery a year before, but she gives an even better performance here, perhaps the best of her entire career.

Notting Hill

Ordinary people have romantic and unrealistic views of celebrity life. Money, fame, glamor may all be nice but they make it difficult to know whether people really care about who you are as a person or whether they would abandon you if all those externals suddenly disappeared. Hugh Grant, the handsome but devilish cad from Bridget Jones's Diary, here plays a nice, unassuming guy who gets a little more than he bargained for when he falls in love with a movie star who wanders into the bookshop he owns. It takes a lot for them to get beyond all the static that their situation imposes and learn to see each other for who they really are. But the pay-off makes you believe that, when it comes to love, anything is possible.

You've Got Mail

You've Got Mail is the epitome of the unintentional period piece. Nevertheless, if you can get past the hopelessly dated technology, it still tells a very charming story about true love, mistaken identity, and the importance of getting past externals to get to know a person's inner self. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are two of the most likable and charismatic people in the world, and watching them fall in love, first online and later IRL, is sure to give you the warm fuzzies.