Chick flicks-a guilty pleasure

First of all, this isn't an article only for girls. In fact, it will probably tell guys why girls everywhere watch these kind of movies. Why sleepovers include a CD of The Ugly Truth, and why we prefer The Devil Wears Prada to Star Trek.

      They are meaningless, they are fun. And most importantly, they always show the girl in a good light. She is this pretty girl with a golden heart; except that life just isn't fair to her. It hands her the perfect guy and takes him away, only for her to realize he wasn't perfect after all, and that the guy she had friend zoned years ago was!

          This is directed especially to all the girls, who have at some point or the other in their lives, sat on a couch with crispies or ice cream, to watch movies that make them feel good about themselves. That make them feel hopeful about life. Yes, this is the widely explored genre of chick flicks…whose very soul is the quintessential sweet protagonist with heart issues, who lives ‘happily ever after’.

            Like all other girls (well, most of them anyway) I started my dose of chick flicks with the Anne Hathaway starrer ‘The Princess Diaries’. The story of a dorky teenager who yearns to be ‘invisible’ who finds herself the princess of a faraway country and her love in her best friend’s brother, it had me feeling all warm and happy. What followed was a truckload of movies with similar endings, i.e. happy. 27 dresses, The Nanny Diaries,50 First Dates The Proposal, Alex & Emma, just to name a few.

          What really had me hooked to these movies was the obvious lack of tragedy and how the girls just somehow seemed to always turn their lives right by the end. Emma quit as Alex’s typist because she thought he loved somebody else, and what followed was Alex changing the story’s ending to be with her! When Sandra Bullock thought she would be deported and had lost her love too, Ryan Reynolds (hunky to death Ryan Reynolds, I meant) did not let her go. When Rebecca Bloomwood went into gigantic debt, her prince-charming saved her. Even if they lost a job, fought with their parents, went bankrupt, suffered a heart-break, lost a friend. Whatever happened, they always got perfect bliss. Now isn't that just amazingly optimistic and encouraging??? Some people read self help books. They write questions to agony aunts in newspapers. Well my counselor are these movies.

     Skeptics might argue that they are highly misleading. They are highly repetitive. Guys often say that these movies set impossible standards for chivalry and love. They paint a larger-than-life picture. True that.

      But the thing to be understood is that girls are not supposed to act on the lines of the movies. They shouldn't set their standards for love, for friendship according to these movies. Now that would be absurd, taking it a bit too far. These pick-me-ups come with a statutory warning! (the warning includes: not applying them literally to your own life, not expecting guys in real life to be like, say Patrick Dempsey for instance, not comparing yourself to Katherine Heigl or Anne Hathaway in what might set of a body dysmorphic disorder and definitely not discussing chick flicks in front of the opposite sex!)

    No, all we girls do is watch them when we are sad, to lift are mood; watch them when we are happy-to lift our mood even further. Chick flicks are like chocolate-you feel fabulous after watching them, but you can’t keep on having them all the time, they’ll make you sick.

    So this guilty pleasure acts like an occasional medicine for us, a reminder of how perfect our lives can be, if we want them to.