Due to my pervasive social ineptitude, I have not experienced an actual "Chick Flick" in the company of other "Chicks". I saw Beaches and Dead Poet's Society at a drive in, and I have viewed most others while blubbering in the privacy of my own home.
This evening, Chris & I went to see My Sister's Keeper. There were 2 men in the entire theater, and I surmised they were dragged by their significant other. Ok, so one poor fellow was holding "the purse", therefore I assume he either expected to get some kind of reward, or couldn't find anything worth watching in the other 23 theaters. Female after female poured into the room, and I was nervous for the first 10 minutes about how quiet the movie might be or if I should just escape now before I wasted my premium movie bucks. Evidently, there is some unwritten code of chick flicking that does involve immediate silence upon the first interesting thing that occurs in the film.
So this movie was a genuine tearjerker. I had tears within the first 20 minutes of the film. As the film progressed, I had to stop eating my popcorn because I got salt in my eyes everytime I tried to catch the tears, which brings me to the most interesting feature of this particular flick.
Often in a movie, if I need to cry for some unknown reason, I usually use my sweatshirt sleeve, or my t-shirt. I don't carry a purse for multiple reasons, so I have no special package of Kleenex that fits in my purse. I watched the row of 10 chicks in front of me get out their individual packages of Kleenex, apparently this is another important rule of chick flicking, and pass them around to each other.
Now, this was an incredibly depressing show. I mean, beyond the iceberg Jack in Titanic depressing. As the show went on, the women used up their stashes of Kleenex. At this point, the most fascinating thing happened. The youngest member of the group pulled a sandwich size zip baggie out of her purse, stuffed FULL of Kleenex. All I could think was, "All hail the queen of the Chick Flick!" Evidently it was her turn to pick the show.
I have been in a doctor's office full of sick people, and never imagined the amount of sniffling and nose blowing that happens in a Chick Flick. I can now fully understand why Chick Flick deserves it's own genre in the movie categories.
