The Ugly Truth

As you might have read, I love low-key shopping center cinemas, for the reason that they provide the feel of just how little you need to make a movie theater. It gives evidence of just how powerful the experience is, all in all, that you don't really need all the bangs and whistles.

Sometimes seeing a movie in one of them is a challenge. This wasn't the case here, although I thought it would be. When I walked into the auditorium for the 7:30 pm show, the place was already half full of teenagers. I felt strangely out of place as the oldster, and took a seat down in the third row. I had a feeling that the kids were all in the area for vacation, since it had the feel of a "camp" movie somehow.

I thought I was going to hate The Ugly Truth, but I didn't. The idea in the title, and in the premise of the movie, is that women want love, whereas men want sex. For the movie to succeed, it must challenge these assumptions in an ironic fashion. That is, the story must evolve such that woman (Katherine Heigl) winds up wanting a physical relationship, whereas the man (Gerard Butler) winds up wanting emotional attachment.

The movie got to that point, all in all, but not in a way that really explores it. I think we are just too wedded to the Postmodern idea to do a full inversion. Still enough was enough to be funny.

The skeleton plot is extremely formulaic. To wit, at the beginning Heigl is a news director at a Sacramento television station. The manager tells her, "We're down in the ratings. We're not a family run station anymore. I'm getting pressure from corporate. If something doesn't change, we'll be cancelled." You could almost write a computer program to spit out these kind of plots.

But thankfully it uses this only as a set-up for the sexual banter part. It was actually quite refreshing to see a "liberated man" (Butler's character) who is not a prisoner to his sexuality. Of course they have to make it turn out that he's actually a "wounded soul" who is only "strong" because of a hurt inner child. But that's Hollywood for you. Everything has to be explained by past hurts.

For a standard romantic comedy, I've seen worse.

On the other hands, the teenagers just loved it, especially the jokes about blow jobs, whenever those came up. The whole audience just erupted in laughter. So as a summer camp movie, it succeeded very well.