Katherine Heigl = Abby Richter
Gerard Butler - Mike Chadway
Highlights of the movie"
The beauty of Sacramento and Oregon
The hot air balloon and I am dreaming of it in my Farmville
Gerard Butler is a good dancer and his aura is sooo manly...
Katherine Heigl’s latest romantic comedy is “The Ugly Truth,” pairs her for the first time with chunky screen hunk Gerard Butler. The new tandem’s film highlights the dynamic difference between the two leads’ screen personas: Heigl is a cool and even arch beauty, while Butler is as macho as can be. The contrast in acting types energizes the movie and informs the plot’s central love-hate, hate-love progression.
Heigl plays a TV executive whose well-ordered life is messed up by Butler, a new TV personality she’s ordered to work with when he’s hired to generate higher ratings for the morning show she produces.
Butler does draw viewers with his sassy comments about delusional and lonely women, but his forthright views turn Heigl off because they’re the antithesis of what she wants to hear.
Thus, the movie quickly degenerates into a constant quarrel and bickering that sometimes gets physical. At first, all that bickering is bemusing, but it soon feels repetitive and consequently redundant.
Heigl’s hatred for Butler is alleviated when he offers to help her get the “perfect” man she wants. Unfortunately, the truce they call too simplistically results in their falling for each other, much against their “logical” intentions.
Fine, but the plot twist is too pat and predictable to be all that interesting and involving, so the viewer is left underwhelmed.
More productively, the film shares some tips on male-female relationships that some viewers may find diverting or informative. Basically, Butler faults women for living in a world of illusion, which in his view explains why so many of them end up lonely and dissatisfied with their love life.
In his view, women can have a better chance at finding love and happiness if they realize that what men want is very different from women’s hopes and expectations.
Macho males get turned on by physical allure and sexiness, so he advises women to always look their most seductive best. But, he also warns them that, if that’s all they have going for them, they won’t be able to keep their beaus, whose attention span is notoriously short-lived. So, he teaches his show’s avid female viewers to play psychological games designed to keep their boyfriends confused—and hot and bothered.
This cinematic tutorial is occasionally entertaining, but the lecture-demo technique is far from cinematic and thus eventually weighs the movie down. Romantic comedies need to fly high, but this one barely scrapes through—and that’s the truth.
