Other Crap

Oprah Magazine's "50 Greatest Chick Flicks of All Time". The list includes "Aliens", "Bull Durham" and Hitchcock's "Notorious."

• There is no doubt that Aliens is a terrific movie, but men like it more than women do (objective measurement: it rates higher with male voters than with females at IMDb). Men and women are about even in their appraisal of Notorious. Women do like Bull Durham more than men do, but the difference in the ratings is small.
• This is a particularly sloppy list that was assembled with little thought to what a chick-flick is. It is a film that women like way better than men? Is it a flick that women really love, irrespective of men's opinions? By either of those definitions, this list left the all-time #1 completely out of the Top 50. This is equivalent to making a list of the fifty best baseball players and leaving out Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner.
• Our own measurement of "chick-flicks" is calculated by taking the female rating at IMDb and subtracting the male rating. Based on that measurement, the all-time champion chick-flick among major releases is Dirty Dancing at 1.9. Women rate the Swayze flick as an all-time classic at 7.5 (higher than they rate Bull Durham), but men evaluate it as a stinker: 5.6.
• Another possible objective measurement would be the raw score awarded by women. In other words - if you ask women to rate movies, which one do they simply rate the highest? The winner in that case is Amelie, which is a genuinely brilliant movie, which women love, and which is not even in Oprah's Top 50!