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Coyote
Ugly
****
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Buena Vista International on October 20, 2000; certificate
12; 101 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by David McNally; produced by
Jerry Bruckheimer, Chad Oman.
Written by Gina Wendkos.
Photographed by Amir Mokri; edited by William
Goldenberg.
CAST.....
Piper Perabo..... Violet Sanford
Adam Garcia..... Kevin O'Donnell
John Goodman..... Bill
Maria Bello..... Lil
Izabella Miko..... Cammie
Tyra Banks..... Zoe
Bridget Moynahan..... Rachel
Melanie Lynskey..... Gloria
Del Pentecost..... Lou
"The movies are so rarely great art, that if
we can't appreciate great trash, there is little reason for us to
go."
--Pauline Kael
Right on, PK. "Coyote Ugly" is cheesy, simple-minded
garbage, but it has clear rhythm and the courage of its convictions, it goes
for broke, and is a wonderful entertainment. I'll need a second viewing to
be sure, but I think it's a masterpiece. Or one of the year's worst films.
Or both.
It's another one of those stories about a small-town
kid who moves to the big city in innocent search of fame and fortune. The
girl's name is Violet (Piper Perabo), a sweet little thing in her early twenties
who moves from New Jersey to NYC with aspirations of becoming a great songwriter.
She can't get a name through playing gigs because she doesn't want to perform
the material herself. Bad stage fright, you see. Bless. She does the rounds
of record companies, handing out demo tapes, but they get thrown back in
her face with instructions to get an agent.
Broke and disillusioned, circumstances launch
Violet into getting a job at a bar called Coyote Ugly -- so named, says the
owner, after occasions "when you wake up from a one-night stand, and were
so drunk you can't remember a thing, and the person next to you makes you
wanna puke... that's coyote ugly." I'll leave it to you to decide whether
that's a logical explanation.
This is one helluva bar. I could tell you some
odd stories about the Krazy House, where I spend most of my weekends... the
beer bottle football games that sometimes erupt in the middle of the mosh
pit; the time when a stranger grabbed me on the stairs, rammed her tongue
down my throat, winked, and then started making out with another girl; the
kind of atmosphere in which I once accidentally put a cigarette out in some
guy's beer, and he drank it anyway. Coyote Ugly shames me -- this is a place
that exceeds its standing capacity by four hundred percent, where the staff
jump on the bar to perform sexy dances before setting fire to the surface,
where drinks get poured on the clientele, and where chanting and jet-spraying
takes place if anyone dares to order water. A lot of the stuff that goes
on can't be physically possible -- how come the barmaids never slip, for
example? -- but what the hell, it's fun to watch. I wanna find a boozer like
this.
The bar scenes are so surreal, so lowbrow, so
hyperactive, that they reduce the tone of the movie to gutter level, and
that's the best place to hold this party. The audience I saw it with seemed
to have the right idea; during the screening there were instances of hooting,
clapping and cackling, and at one point a girl jumped out of her seat, ran
to the front of the auditorium and started dancing along with the
Coyotes.
The surrounding plot is shamelessly tacky melodrama.
Violet has sombre scenes on her rooftop where she composes songs, stares
into the moonlight, and wonders about her future. She falls in love with
an Australian guy with the Irish name O'Donnell (Adam Garcia), even though
the pair's relationship consists entirely of word games and romantic
clichés like walks through silent streets and breakfast at dawn. There
are manufactured crises, ridiculous reconciliations, tearful disclosures
of childhood scars. And John Goodman as Violet's father is a jaw-droppingly
lame figure of comic relief who moves clumsily, pretends to be on a diet
in a pointless running joke, and... well... here's some sample dialogue:
"I've got three rolls of film, do I need more?" "Dad, I'm only singing one
song!" "You're right... I'll take one more!" (When he gets to the show,
incidentally, he only takes one picture.) It's good that the performers speak
their lines with sincerity, especially Perabo, with her coy little gestures
and childlike eyes -- if anyone had looked like they'd known they were in
a bad movie, it would have been depressing, not fun.
"Coyote Ugly" will make a great midnight movie
some day. It's a throwback to that stylistic black hole known as the 80s,
right down to its emphasis on laser lights and synthesiser music. In diving
so deeply into badness and doing it with the accessibility of technical polish
and sex appeal, it transcends it. It rises beneath bad taste.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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