Chick-Flicks normally involve a number of characters that revolve around female leads. The situations that lead these types of movies are based around the emotional struggle and understanding of relationships, friends, and family. Movies like Fried Green Tomatoes, Beaches, Steel Magnolias, On Golden Pond, and Terms of Endearment all show women trying to understand their relationship (connection) to the person they are with or talking to. They demonstrate the highs and lows of what that relationship entails and where it all stemmed from and what it has turned into. Some films for women do deal with women's issues but they try not to make that the complete focus, unless it is a remake of a true story or documentary. The idea is that you still have to make it interesting enough for people to follow along with, so many times, filmmakers will combine a woman's issue with a family/friend conflict on top of that. The design of a movie script still requires certain elements to be present in order to the script to be approved by a studio.

If you look at Terms of Endearment, it is about the bond between Mother and Daughter, you see them grow apart, together, apart and then back together again. Their relationship is that of an emotional roller-coaster as women are more receptive to films that deal with a larger part of the emotional understanding between two people than just what they talk about. The reason it won best picture in 1984 is because it had so much going on in both the women's lives. There was the struggling of the mom getting older and trying to figure out how to live her new live, while at the same time, the story portrayed her daughter just starting her new life with her husband and what that does to the mother-daughter relationship.

Woman's movies deal with a larger extent of the emotional complexity of their understanding about situations. Movies for men are clear and cut because men understand that more than a long-winded speech about how a daughter felt when she saw her mom dating a new man. You can tell this more by who wrote the script and the number of words that appaer in a script geared toward women and scripts that are geared toward men. The number of words in a male-centered movie have less words.

Misogynistic films on the other hand use women as pawns or as side characters in a man's world. Even if they might be lead characters they are still "used" in some way for the man to get what he wants. Movies such as the Twlight series, Once Upon a Time in America and TV shows like The Sopranos show woman used by the men either for sexual pleasure or to get something from someone else. The men rely on the woman for fulfilling their needs and, in many times, disregard their needs when the woman wants something. Mobster movies portray this kind of male-female duel all the time. The women are only there for the man's pleasure after being with his buddies all day. Many times in the TV shows and movies, you will see the women ask, "Do you want sex?" only to roll back to sleep if the man says no.

The dimension to understanding these types of films is that they convay a deep emotional tone that women, and men who are more in touch with their feminine side, can pick up on. In order to understand the context of the words and movies, the viewer has to be able to pick up on what the characters are not saying, essentially reading between the lines. Another aspect to consider about understanding women-centric films is that the individual watching is more akeen to understanding the social dynamics of relationships between people. This is why certain types of people enjoy watching Seinfeld because it requires the viewer to already have a deep understanding ot the social dynamics of social relationships and networks. Hence why men hate watching chick-flicks because they understand the untones that the director has been into the script.

I would hesitate to differentiate between women's-centered and misogynistic - a film can be both, can have elements of both... even in opposition to each other. When working on a project about film and women, i would thus advise keeping a definition broad enough to be flexible while narrow enough to help readers understand the constraints of definitions. Something like "I will be looking at films focusing on women that filmmakers and audiences have understood as engaging positively with gender themes. In some cases, these films might also have conflicting messages, even misogynistic ones, but my primary interest is the representation of women in a generally progressive manner..." would allow you to be specific without excluding films that do not fit neatly in to one category or the other.

There is an interesting metric called the Bechdel Test. To pass this test a movie must simply:

1. Have at least two [named] women in it

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something besides a man

It is notable how many movies fail this simple test.

http://bechdeltest.com

To tease apart the various other issues in this area, it may be worth devising other such tests.

@Benita: Does that imply that only films that depict women in a progressive manner are "women-centric"? I ask this since there are several films in Indian cinema that portray women's issues (for instance, the plight of widows) which is not entirely progressive, but it does depict sociopolitical circumstances from a female perspective. Would such a movie then fit into a misogynistic or progressive label?

@Chris: Thanks a lot for such a detailed perspective. Women whose presence is merely to fulfill the needs of men or as their supportive actors, are not of any major consequence to the plot. Their individuality is subdued. Such movies are highly misogynistic. So i think that films in which women possess the power of expressing themselves and are more in control of their lives are women - centric.

@Benita: The role of 'progressive women' is highly coveted and i hope that more and more films spring up where they are projected as empowered entities.

@Viveka: Yes, indeed a very interesting tool. Thank you !

Pooja, dont know if this is helpful, but might be worth having a look at this book: The princess story : modelling the feminine in twentieth-century American fiction and film by Sarah Rothschild. However as previous speaker already said; the bechdel test is always a good place to start.