Women tend to like to see "chick flicks", movies about relational angst where a gaggle of put-upon gals get back at their male oppressors through clever humiliation or where a woman tenderly falls in love with that oh-so-perfect guy only to have one of them die of some incurable disease that nobody can pronounce and curiously always seems to off the inflicted just before the credits roll.
Men tend to like to see "action/adventure" romps. Movies with more bullets and bombs than actual words, where the bigger the explosions the better. They are thankful for the kissy/mushy scenes only because they afford them the opportunity to go take a quick leak and grab another tub o' popcorn and vat o' soda before the real movie actually starts up again.
Then there is me. I seem to only go see animated movies. Try as I might to defend these types of movies as "mainstream" or "acceptable for a grown man to see", I just cannot do it with a "straight face" or without using lots of "quotation marks". I recently came across a web site that listed the 500 biggest grossing movie releases of all time. The strange thing about the web site was its tag line, "Where Data and the Movie Business Meet." Whilst shaking my head at that inspired bit of inanity, I ran my finger ponderously down the list, keying on the top 100 movies. It turns out that I have seen 8 of the top 100, but 7 of these 8 are animated movies (Frozen, Toy Story 3, Finding Nemo, Up, Kung Fu Panda 2, Kung Fu Panda, The Incredibles). The only non-animated movie on my list was the first Star Wars movie released back in the 1970s, back before I was forced to pop Geritol caplets like Skittles. While I would like to think that this list shows that I possess a certain youthful innocence, it probably would provide a health care "professional" fodder for years of painful therapy, probably involving "electroshock".
