It isn’t too faint. There’s a passage, don’t ask me where, where Sebastian and Charles’ sexual activity is made pretty unambiguous, though of course in a way that is obviously not as simply expressed as that. It’s made clear nevertheless in a passage that’s pretty hard to interpret in any other way. I wouldn’t call Brideshead ‘faintly’ homoerotic for its time.

And I never thought of it as a ‘chick flick’ because it’s fundamentally (sorry about that) about two guys though two women play substantial (ie co-star) roles.

Kathering Heigl – Ideal girlfriend
Seth Rogen – Cool Dude
Brother In Law – Even Cooler

Does something stupid, chick hates him.
Guys go to Vegas, do drugs.
Comes back, Chick loves him again.

The end.

A rarer version is where the main protagonist is male, but acts female.

Examples:

What Women Want (Mel Gibson acting Female)
Made Of Honor (dude from Grey’s Anatomy Acting Female)
4 Weddings And A Funeral (Hugh Grant Acting Female)

Most men found in chick flicks are good looking but impossibly neurotic and commitment-phobic, but are eventually brought around by the main character’s effervescent personality.

In contrast in male-oriented romantic comedies, the women are usually portrayed as the “Ideal Girlfriend” in pretty much every way, who dump the main character for doing something stupid but eventually forgive them blah blah blah.

E.G.

Wayne’s World
Van Wilder
Jerry Maguire
40 year old Virgin
Something About Mary

It’s possible for some films to be both but it’s rare (Jerry Maguire for example was a huge hit with male audiences, because it’s about sports – and cool dudes, but also has a fair bit of chick flick in it).

Oh sure it does:

Some guys, they
Walk down the street and
Get called arseholes
This never happened to
Pablo Picasso
He would walk down the street
And girls could not resist his stare…

Not to mention various esoterica viz the macho ethos of the Western Man.

I hadn’t heard of this rule before, so thanks for mentioning it.

They’re just like the labels you get in bookshops – ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’, ‘humour’, ‘young adult’, and so on. Often such labels are unhelpful, sometimes they’re misleading, and in some cases they vanish after a decade or so. (Whatever happened to ‘grunge literature’?)

You do get some films that try to cross genres – ‘The Jane Austen Bookclub’, for instance, which tried to appeal to a) a ‘chick flick’ audience b) an Austen/period-drama audience, and c) a romantic comedy audience.

That’s probably why it was such a crap film.

Also:

Its [Brokeback Mountain] about a love affair between two blokes NPOV. Which, at least in Australia, makes it deeply dodgy as a straight mans viewing choice

Heh.

http://alisonbechdel.blogspot.com/2005/08/rule.html

And fuck she’s right. The Alien quadrology pisses all over any bloke’s action franchise.

Oh, and of course “war films” should be on my list above. And I suppose “gangster movies” is a better term than “mafia movies”.

Nowwhy isnt there a similar term for films obviously marketed primarily at men?

P-O-R-N-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y.

Now…why isn’t there a similar term for films obviously marketed primarily at men?

Perhaps you’re looking for “dick flick”. (Although personally I wouldn’t use this term either.)

Nowwhy isnt there a similar term for films obviously marketed primarily at men?

Um, Action Film?

It’s about a love affair between two blokes NPOV. Which, at least in Australia, makes it deeply dodgy as a straight man’s viewing choice:) Unless you’re an habitue of arthouse movies or an admirer of Ang Lee’s oeuvre.

It’s a pity because it is a very good movie and Heath Ledger’s performance is remarkable.

Brideshead is a bit suss on the same grounds given that the faint homoerotic suggestion that Evelyn Waugh wrote into the novel has been much more emphasised in the film/TV versions.

I think the love stuff in Austen is very much the backstory – Austen didn’t do overt emotion or passionate displays of affection – but I suspect most guys get put off by the bonnets (if not the bosoms)and the mannered exchanges of the characters.

Brokeback is a borderline case – the men are not very nice to the women in it. The Devil Wears Prada was also borderline: the men barely existed and the women were frightful bitches but the fashions were fabulous and the main character ended happily ever after as a true female with a nice caring guy. The Full Monty was a chick flick.

Now…why isn’t there a similar term for films obviously marketed primarily at men? “Macho movie” gets reasonable number of google hits, but it’s not a term I’ve heard used particularly. And yes, there is “guy cry” – but that’s not really what I had in mind.

There are also films with minimal (or even zero) exploration of the whole romantic/sexual relationship thing that would classify surely…say, Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood type, or Little Women etc.

Exploration of *human* relationships (and specifically emotional ones – business relationships don’t really count) is obviously key, plus I would suggest, significant roles for women actors – indeed you could probably safely say that the cast of a chick flick would never be dominated by men (or even a single man).

Wikipedia’s definition “a film designed to appeal to a female target audience” seems reasonable, but I wonder if there are films out there that the directors/producers never intended to primarily appeal to female audiences, but have turned out that way anyway.