It's time to face facts: I'm hopelessly addicted to chick flicks. As emasculating and pathetic as that sounds, I really do think it has left me with some insight into the fairer sex.
It all started, innocently enough, with Jerry Maguire, which wasn't even really a chick flick since it was also about football. The fact that I sat at home listening to Bruce Springsteen's "Secret Garden" from the movie's soundtrack and getting choked up is irrelevant.
There was also Clueless, which I justified by telling anyone who would listen that it was just an updated version of Emma by Jane Austen. As an English major it was my duty to see what Hollywood was doing to the classics and express my outrage. I have, of course, never read Jane Austen.
Sometime during this summer the wheels really started to come off. My girlfriend was away for the first few months, and I got into the habit of coming home, a bit drunk and quite lonely, flipping on HBO and watching not just chick flicks, but bad chick flicks. I could think of no excuses for these ones. I'm talking about Life or Something Like It or Someone Like You, movies so generic that their names can be changed without anyone noticing the difference. It was a sorry state of affairs.
I intend to compensate for this by seeing the new Tomb Raider movie a record number of times, thereby restoring my lost masculinity. Eventually I'll be strong enough not to cry every time someone says "you had me at hello."
-Eliot Sherman
