It’s a movie conversation I’ve had dozens, if not hundreds, of times, quite often in the halls of EW. A woman will ask me if I’ve seen the chick flick that’s about to come out that weekend; I’ll say yes. She’ll ask me what I thought of it, and I’ll say, I didn’t care for it much. (I don’t always say that, of course; I’ve been known to enjoy a few chick flicks in my time. But more often than not, I’ll probably cough up some variation on…not very good.) And then, almost inevitably, she’ll respond with a conspiratorial smile and a variation on the line: “Well, that movie isn’t really for you!”
For a long time, I confess I bristled at that response. I’d think, “Come on! Do you really believe a man can’t like a romantic comedy?” But of course, I wasn’t getting it — I really wasn’t. It took me years to figure out what my female questioner was really saying. Which was: This movie isn’t for you not because men don’t like romantic comedies, but because they don’t like bad romantic comedies.
And women — let’s be honest — do. In fact, I’d wager to say that the cheese factor in a romantic comedy is quite often its secret ingredient. It’s part of what makes romcoms such munchy, fun, guilty-pleasure comfort food.
Take The Ugly Truth. It got horrible reviews (most of them a bit too harsh, if you ask me), but on Friday it racked up $10.7 million at the box office, on the way to a potential weekend gross of roughly $30 million, making it the umpteenth example of a chick flick that woos its core audience a lot more effectively than it does reviewers. Yet right now I’m not so interested in the usual, boring fan/critic audience/elitist disconnect. What I want to know is: How many women went to see The Ugly Truth because they expected it to be terrific? And how many went expecting it to be the cheesy-tacky, horndog-caveman-meets-classy-Barbie cartoon it is, yet almost welcoming the mediocrity?
As that chick-flick goddess Carrie Bradshaw might put it: Are chick flicks good because they’re not good for you? Is the key to what makes a chick flick good…that it’s sort of bad?
‘Year One’ tanks? Blame Twitter
I’m not a Tweeting type. I go ballistic when anyone around me in a theater or screening room fires up a BlackBerry or iPhone in the middle of a movie, interrupting my concentration with a selfishly loud flash of me me me blue screen. (Lisa’s rule of audience etiquette: There’s no excuse for checking your phone in a theater unless you’re expecting a birth, a death, or a kidney transplant. And death can probably wait 90 minutes, since you can’t do much once you know, anyway.)
So I’ve got mixed feelings about the report I read via Gawker this morning: Movie studios are miffed that word-of-mouth, guy-in-the-seats, thumbs-up-thumbs-down opinions spontaneously shared by the Twitter generation are getting in the way of laboriously crafted studio marketing campaigns devised to trick potential ticket buyers into thinking Year One is funny. According to this kind of corporate thinking, what’s the use of working so hard to contain the influence of professional critics — by, for instance, choosing not to screen a movie for the press in advance, thereby stalling the effects of bad reviews at least for opening day–when any civilian can, with a click, broadcast her instant reaction to the latest Jack Black act?
Under the circumstances, the professional journalist in me who has herself been thwarted at times by (non)screening ploys goes, ‘hah!‘ But (more…)