"Chick flick? That movie? I don't think so."

"Well, no, you wouldn't, being female and all. But trust me, it was."

"What made it a chick flick? What makes one movie a chick flick and the other not?"

"Well... er... hmmm."

Ok. So this needed some more thought. What defines a chick flick? Lord knows I know one when I see one... but since those who define art have already claimed that cheesy answer as their own, I've been left struggling for my own.

I was originally going to say that a chick flick was defined by overly heavy emotional tones... but we've got movies that are guy favorites that are heavy on the emotional tones. They're just not the "right" emotional tones. We've got revenge, and fear, and triumph, and pride, and all that good stuff.

I was then going to say it's any movie that doesn't have a decent helping of those staples that guys go to see; explosions, car chases, special effects, gun play, sword play, action, monsters, steely eyed battles of will and cunning. I thought for the longest time that this was the clincher. You give me a movie with any of these, and I'm content; this is a movie I'll happily put in the "I'll go see a Jane Austen movie with you because you came to see this guy movie with me" column.

Show me a movie where the hero's trapped and bleeding, and the villian is about to destroy civilization, and yet with nothing but grim determination and a massive special effects budget the hero saves the day at the last minute... and you'll have shown me a guy movie. Definately not a chick flick.

That lasted as long as Deep Impact. It had special effects, it was a science fiction apocalypse movie, and at its very heart was a chick flick. Damn my eyes. Most of the movie centered around a boy and girl and the fact that one would live and one would die and they didn't want to be apart. Pah.

So it was back to the drawing board.

And then it occured to me... when a guy says that a movie was a chick flick, he's using it as a term of derision. Something has got his hackles up in a bunch; something's been poking him the wrong way, and he feels he needs to defend himself. I'm going to have to say that a chick flick is any movie that would make any man question the strength of his beer-drinking, chest-thumping masculinity if he admitted he was in any way touched by parts of the movie.

The movie doesn't have to have even succeeded in getting the guy to do any soul searching. Guys can tell when a movie wants him to peer inside his soul. It's not like Deep Impact was anything special, it wasn't going to show me something about myself that I hadn't seen before, but it wanted to do so. It wanted to make me get all teary-eyed at seeing the couple chose to die just so that they could die together. And that was enough; time for me to call it names.