Chic Flicks

Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lilly Tomlin – lassoing the douche bag boss (Dabney Coleman) and saving the day. This flick was the battle cry of a class on the cusp of looking back – but in the mean time, they had these giants to laugh with and root for.

Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Julia Roberts, Shirley Maclaine, Olympia Dukakis and Daryl Hannah (also starring Tom Skerritt and Dylan McDermott)…. How could it NOT rank at the top of a chick flick list? This is a movie about women as mothers, daughters and friends – close friends who walk with you in the sun and through the rain and understand that sometimes, laughter is the single most important thing to give. As heartbreaking as it is, it’s a movie women love to see, and laugh and cry along with over and over again.

If liberated is feigning an orgasm in the middle of a crowded café just to prove a point, then Meg Ryan had a hallmark moment for womankind. Well, actually, she had a hallmark moment regardless. There was something rather close to heart in the least girly-romantic of ways of addressing the whole friends as lovers scenario. And it worked. I don’t know a woman who hasn’t seen it and didn’t relate to it in a personal way.

Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Barrymore and Mary-Louise Parker starred as three friends on a cross-country road trip, about women as friends, and as women with lovers, and women who love women, where they were all going somewhere else and ended up with each other right through to the sad, heartbreaking end. It crosses racial and social barriers, and as the movie says, “sometimes the person you end up with in the end is the one you’d least expect but they’re there.”

Starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, it was about a road trip gone wrong, and they try to find a way to make it right. Aside from its ending, which catapulted me out of my seat in the theatre when I saw it yelling “YEAH!” and madly applauding, much to my friend’s horror – it also contains a line I have often remembered: “Well, you get what y settle for.”

As if any movie with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford in it wouldn’t be enough, it actually wrapped very serious social and political issues around a beautiful and heartbreaking love story. “Your girl’s lovely, Hubble.” What woman, myself included, didn’t see that last scene with all the understanding of a world that was absent the day happily-ever-after was taught?