Image: www.thetimetravelerswifemovie.com
In a year when the top chick flicks involve vampires, it’s hard to say what makes a geeky chick flicks stand out from the rest of the genre. But it’s safe to say geek women are drawn to films with intelligent dialogue, an interesting premise, a strong female lead and a leading man who’s quirky but charming. (Good-looking doesn’t hurt either.)
Here are five of my personal geeky romantic favorites, in five different categories: separated by time; separated by death; shades of the supernatural; fun and silly adventures; and alternate realities. All are out on DVD, so you can pick out one or two of your favorites, open up the chocolates and snuggle up in front of the home screen with your favorite geek:
Sure it’s got time travel paradoxes galore. (Would the main characters have become a couple if the time traveler hadn’t begun wooing his future wife when she was just a little girl and he was a mature man who had already known her for years?) But the movie won my heart by incorporating many of the novel’s best little throwaway lines into the script. (I especially love the scene where Eric Bana cracks wise while bursting out, Hulk-like, from some way-too-small effeminate clothes he’s pinched to cover his time-traveling nakedness.) Still, it’s the chemistry between Bana and Rachel McAdams that makes this a love story of the first order. (For what it’s worth, my husband even concedes this is one chick flick he found interesting enough to stay awake through.)
Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze may have been there first, but this is the dead-husband-comes-back movie for the geek crowd. First off, you’ve got Alan Rickman as the dead husband, Jamie. Severus Snape he’s not, but Jamie is still a whiner lacking in social skills. Even in death he’s too self-absorbed to ask his widow Nina (Juliet Stevenson) before inviting all his dead friends over to hang out. Sound familiar, ladies?
Gerard Butler (with his shirt on) and Emmy Rossum in The Phantom of the Opera
You pick your ghoul, I’ll pick mine. I’m actually not a big fan of Gerard Butler, who plays the Phantom, and Emmy Rossum as the ingénue with the big voice may be a little too readily led astray by her guardian, the diabolical Miranda Richardson. But the kids and I enjoyed reading the novel so much that I was willing to give it a try. First I was grabbed by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music, and then by the setting – the Paris Opera, with more dark nooks and crannies than you can shake a stick at. And who wouldn’t want a candelabra-lit lake passageway in their basement?
When this one came out I was more than happy to take the kids to the theater. Johnny Depp is sexy even at his most ridiculous. Even Geoffrey Rush had a certain Captain Hook-like appeal (nothing against Orlando Bloom, either). Why is this film geeky? Well, I have a theory that what made this movie work was the Keira Knightley character. It’s her dream to be a pirate, and the story is told from her point of view. Without Elizabeth, it’s just a story of a bunch of smelly drunk guys and some skeletons.
I love Minority Report. It’s got that whole Tom Cruise/Steven Spielberg/Philip K. Dick thing going for it, to the nth degree. Talk about scifi world-building – Spielberg made this movie extra creepy by using futuristic technology that was actually not that far away. (How long before the signs in The Gap start talking to you through your iPhone?) Maybe it’s not really a love story, but it is about a man and his family. And to us GeekMoms, that’s as sexy as it gets.
