I speak in the past tense, since Katherine Heigl comes near to emptying her reserves of goodwill with a disastrous new concoction called The Ugly Truth. In its wan attempt to be raunchy, the picture fails where Judd Apatow has usually succeeded; written by three women, this is a girl's mistaken idea of an R-rated comedy. Heigl, as star and executive producer, doesn't do herself any favors either. She spends virtually the entire movie getting mocked up and knocked out. (See TIME's review of (500) Days of Summer.)
Here, as in her two earlier starring roles, Heigl is an efficient professional who has no luck finding men. Her Abby is the producer of a Sacramento TV news show whose ratings skyrocket when the on-air team is joined by Mike (Gerard Butler), the host of a late-night cable program called The Ugly Truth. Mike is a macho man with a Cro-Magnon spin on sex, telling his female listeners, "We fall in love with your tits and your ass. And we stick around for what you're gonna do with them." Desperate to get a man — any man but Mike — Katherine Heigl biography takes his advice on landing the hunky surgeon (Eric Winter) who's moved in across the way. Mike will play a burly Cyrano to the doctor's winsome Roxane until Abby realizes that Mr. Wrong is right for her.
The screenwriters — Nicole Eastman, Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith — had one sharp idea: to explore the polar-opposite rules of guy comedies and gal comedies. Guy comedy revels in the blithe display of unruly behavior; a Rogen or Jason Segel character doesn't do or say crude things for new beauty shock's sake but as an expression of his unhousebroken personality. It's not what he does; it's what he is. Gal comedy plays on these same embarrassing words or situations to test the heroine's decorum and destroy her dignity.
In both kinds of Katherine Heigl pics movies, the activities and attitudes that men are proud or unaware of are exactly the ones that women try desperately to suppress. The dichotomy is both reductive and profound: the male brute's let-it-all-hang-out vs. the civilized female's try-to-pretend-it-didn't-happen. (See an audio slideshow of Sandra Bullock's film roles.)
So The Ugly Truth's plot is a series of humiliations for Abby. At a restaurant meeting with network clients, she happens to be wearing a pair of sexually vibrating panties that Mike gave her, and, in a gloss on Meg Ryan's fake orgasm in When Harry Met Sally..., Katherine Heigl biography writhes, way too long, in ecstasy and mortification. At a ball game with the doctor, she follows Mike's advice and fellates a hot dog, then is seen on the scoreboard Kiss-Cam bending over, and I can't even type what happens, it's so demeaning and annoying.
Yet Abby deserves all this public grief because, at new beauty fashion heart, she's a pill and a pain. Beneath her cheery demeanor is the iron will of a control freak who is bossy both to her staff and to the men she might get it on with; for one blind date, she prepared a series of mutual talking points.
We're led to understand that Katherine Heigl pics need to dominate comes from a lack of erotic pleasure in her life. What the movie doesn't address is the root problem of Abby's character. It's not that she's this way because she hasn't gone to bed with a guy. It's that no guy would go to bed with her because she's this way. (See TIME's movie covers.)
Mike, meanwhile, for all his rough fashion online edges, is not a predator or a bully but, for his and the movie's perspective, a truth teller. More important, he's comfortable in his own skin, like the Rogen and Segel guys. The Ugly Truth thus establishes its agenda as a rehab process for Abby, not a comeuppance for Mike.
Source : time.com/time/arts
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