 Starring: Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, Maria Bello, John Goodman, Tyra Banks
Director: David McNally
Year Of Release: 2000
Plot: 21-year-old Violet Sanford heads to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a songwriter, only to find her aspirations sidelined by the accolades and notoriety she receives at her new job, as one of the sexy, outrageous Coyote Ugly barmaids. However if she wants to succeed as a singer, she’ll need to get over her shyness, which she may do with the help of her romance with Kevin. |
When people talk about Jerry Bruckheimer, they normally call him the king of action films, because over the last few decades he’s been the producer on movies such as Top Gun, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Pirates Of The Caribbean, National Treasure and the upcoming Prince Of Persia and The Sorceror’s Apprentice.
However if you look over his career, he could also be known as the king of the camp chick flick for guys, as it’s a genre he virtually created and has had he’s pretty much had all to himself. One of his first big hits was Flashdance, which kind of typifies what I’m talking. It’s a film that on the surface has all the hallmarks of being a normal chick flick. After all, it’s about a woman who dreams of a better life and wants to get into a dance school - which aren’t the usual hallmarks of a film designed for men. Yet despite the chick flick plot, the main character, Alex, is a welder who puts bits of metal together while looking hot in slinky tops. It’s the equivalent of when in Transformers Megan Fox picks up a spanner and tinkers with a bike, and therefore become 10 times hotter in many men’s minds.
 Uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer |
In Flashdance, she also has another job as an exotic dancer. While the film tries to present it that she’s the embodiment of early 80s female empowerment, who can do a man’s job and be confident about her body, her entire life is actually about the sexual gratification of a male viewing audience. It is essentially a film made for men, which looks like it’s for women. Flashdance is also very camp. There is of course the famous scene where Alex is doing some exotic dancing and drenches herself in water to set male pulses races. However if you watch it, it’s all insanely camp, as is the famed dance audition towards the end, with its leg warmers and slightly bizarre flinging of the character’s body around the room. In fact the only thing camper is the J-lo music video rip-off of the scene.
The film I’d actually class as Bruckheimer’s greatest contribution to the camp chick flick for guys is, bizarrely enough, Top Gun. Although it all looks very macho on the surface, the suggestion of homoerotic undertones is well known, and Quentin Tarantino’s character famously dissected the idea in 1994’s Sleep With Me. Indeed, if you watch the movie knowing that people have said it’s a bit gay, it’s difficult not to see what a camp film it is, from the way the planes are talked about in terms of basically being giant penis extensions, to the topless beach volleyball sequence, which is filmed exactly like an 80s sex scene. Kelly McGillis is almost incidental (and gets butched up anyway) to what is essentially a love story between a bunch of guys.
If you take the planes away, the plot is a very basic chick flick about learning to believe in yourself and falling in love, but about a man. It’s just got a lot of action plonked on top of it.
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Quentin Tarantino explains why Top Gun is gay in 1994's Sleep With Me |
Coyote Ugly also very much fits into this mould. It is an insanely generic chick flick, about a woman who comes to the big city to become a singer-songwriter but has to learn to believe in herself and fall in love before she can find success. However all that is hidden under a giant male fantasy of a small-town, girl-next-door type who starts flaunting her sexuality when she gets a job in a sexy bar. Even though it’s definitely a chick flick, it’s actually more interested in scantily clad girls prancing about on a bar for the delectation of the male viewer. Even the rom com elements seem to be a vaguely camp parody of the genre’s clichés, simply because it’s all so stereotypical.
I have to admit though, that I do have a bit of a soft spot for Coyote Ugly, because while awful in many ways, it’s also kind of sweet, and I also love the audacity of the end of the movie, where apropos of nothing it becomes an utterly random LeAnn Rimes music video.
In 2006 Bruckheimer tried to bring the subgenre to TV with the sitcom Modern Men, about three long-time single men who hire a life coach to help them with romance and women. However it seems TV audiences aren’t that interested in camp click flicks for guys, as the Bruckheimer produced series was cancelled after only seven episodes.
Bruckheimer’s men’s chick flicks are rather odd, as few other really make films quite like this (although the likes of Make It Happen have had a go – and I suppose you could count Titanic), which take all the elements of a female-skewing movie, but present them in a way that’s obviously designed to appeal more to men. That said, it’s fairly common for romantic movie to have some elements to try and keep a male audience happy (such as the murder-mystery angle in Ghost, which helped the film appeal to both sexes), but not to the extent of the Bruckheimer flicks, where female viewers almost seem like an afterthought when you actually watch the movie.
I think the difference is largely that unlike most films of its ilk, the sexuality is pushed to the foreground, but done in a way that’s less about female empowerment and more about male ogling – and not particular subtly hidden male ogling either – while Top Gun does the same for man-on-man action, while pretending it isn’t. They’re peculiar films, and well worth rewatching so you’ll see what I mean.
TIM ISAAC
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