Coyote Ugly (2000)

Really Surprised!

good back-story, and good acting

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The acting in this movie is really good.

"Coyote Ugly" is a real bar in New York; the name is presumably an ironic allusion to the fact that its female staff are all very attractive. I wonder how many other real bars in America have been able to benefit from the ultimate product placement of having an entire Hollywood movie dedicated to their activities. Violet Sanford is a young woman from South Amboy, New Jersey who moves to New York to follow her dream of becoming a songwriter. The film is clearly based on the dubious theory that songwriters need to live in big cities because no songs worth listening to have ever been written in small towns. (It is also based upon the assumption that "Violet" was a plausible Christian name for girls of Piper Perabo's generation. Well, perhaps it was in New Jersey, but in the seventies the only Violets in Britain were those queuing up for their old age pension). Violet quickly discovers that, in the songwriting trade, success does not always come quickly and realises that she will need another source of income to tide her over until her genius is recognised by the music industry. She therefore gets a job at the Coyote Ugly Saloon."Coyote Ugly" reminded me of a slightly later film, "Burlesque". In that film Christina Aguilera also plays a rather naive young girl who leaves her small-town home to settle in the big city and who ends up working in a rather risqué establishment. Lil, the bar owner, also bears certain similarities to the character played by Cher in "Burlesque". The main difference is that the Coyote Ugly Saloon is not actually a strip club; taking their clothes off is not something the Coyote Girls are expected to do. If, however, they are not strippers, neither are they barmaids as that term is more generally understood. They are encouraged to flirt with male customers, to dance on the bar, to take part in wet T-shirt contests and to behave in a generally raunchy way. The film charts Violet's rise to fame not only as a bartender but also as a singer-songwriter, and there is a subplot chronicling her romance with a handsome young Australian named Kevin. Actually, "handsome" seems an inadequate adjective to describe Adam Garcia. He achieves the rare feat for a Hollywood leading man of being even prettier than his leading lady. The film-makers seem to have had the cynical idea of making a romantic comedy (normally regarded as a genre which appeals more to women than to men) which would be equally popular with both sexes. Garcia would provide eye-candy for the ladies, while for the men there would be the sight of various sexy girls parading their charms in tight- fitting T-shirts and jeans. Among Violet's co-workers is the gorgeous supermodel Tyra Banks, at this period trying to carve out a cinema career for herself. (Tyra's bid for screen stardom did not prove a great success, but at least she was no worse than some of her fellow supers, such as Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Elle Macpherson, who also tried their hand at acting around the same time). Good looks, whether of the masculine or feminine variety, are not always enough to ensure the success of a film, but "Coyote Ugly" did relatively well at the box-office. The critics, however, were less impressed, and I must say that my sympathies are with them. The plot is weak and clichéd, and the acting is undistinguished. Both Perabo and Garcia are forgettable; about the only one of the cast to make anything of an impression is John Goodman as Violet's father Bill, like most Goodman characters an amiable slob. Even the sight of Tyra Banks in a T-shirt cannot make "Coyote Ugly" anything more than a below-average rom-com. 4/10

A lot of the movies I write reviews for are branded 'amazingly bad' nearly every single time and more often than never, I'm left sitting there going, 'did you even watch the damn movie?' Because sometimes, that's how I feel. Sure, I'm all open for people to share their opinions but there's just some out there that make me want to tap them to a chair and play the movie over and over again.Anyway, that's exactly how I feel with this movie. I've read reviews where they judge even the music they use during the film, which is ridiculous - the music choices in Coyote Ugly just help make it.This is a story about Violet Sanford; an aspiring musician who moves to the big apple in hope of getting a record deal. So, that doesn't happen as easily as Violet had hoped and in order to gain some easy money, she becomes a bartender. Oh! But, not just ANY bartender - A Coyote. Sounds fun, doesn't it? They dance on the bar and guys buy them drinks (which they subsequently hardly ever drink). There is a lot of reason behind the making of this film. I mean, for one, it's a Jerry Bruckheimer film; Mr Big himself. So, just because the movie isn't something along the lines of CSI: Miami, doesn't mean it's not worth the watch. It's funny, it has romance, drunk hot guys... drunk hot girls! C'mon, you have to hand it to them - the whole cast made the film good, great even.Personally, I love this movie, I would've given this a 10/10 BUT I had to take into consideration what other people thought. I mean, whether you watch the Director's Cut or the cinema version, it's still worth the watch. Don't take any one review for granted, watch it for yourself. Solicit Opinions. It's totally worth it. I give this 8/10. Thankyou!

I decided to watch this film because I admire the work of the young actress Piper Perabo, who has been so brilliant and charming as the lead character in the ongoing series COVERT AFFAIRS. The reason why she is called 'Piper' is not because she is a tropical bird who makes strange sounds in the jungle, but because she was named after the fifties movie actress Piper Laurie, remember her? But the reason why she looks so unusual is that she is half Norwegian and half Portuguese, a mixture so rare that we have never seen one before and may never see one again. She attended high school in Toms River, New Jersey, one of the small New Jersey towns I have actually been to long ago, strange that. (How many people have been to Toms River? If you have six fingers on one hand that's too many.) I first encountered her on screen in SLAP HER SHE'S FRENCH (2002, see my review), in which she and the whole film were equally hilarious. She was also in the wonderfully funny BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA (2008, see my review). So I thought I would jump from chihuahuas to coyotes and see what that was all about. Well, what a shock. All those girls dancing on the top of a bar in a Manhattan bar called Coyote Ugly, the girls themselves being called 'coyotes'! I got a DVD of what is called the extended cut, whatever was extended. This is in some ways what is called a chick flic, but not really. Perabo plays a good little girl from the tiny South Amboy, New Jersey (is that an in joke of some kind?), who gets the nickname 'Jersey'. She loves her dad who is a widower, excellently played by John Goodman, who has just the right sentimental sad sack tone for the part. Perfect casting there. She falls for the quirky Australian actor Adam Garcia, who has just the right amount of whimsy and works at a grill, so that is the love story part of it. She moves into the most terrible filthy and collapsing apartment in China Town, but seems to love it. But it's the bar that makes your jaw drop far below floor level. The girls cavort on the bar from where they throw buckets of water and buckets of ice cubes all over the patrons, and the patrons just love it. Everybody drinks bottles of whiskey and it gets poured all over the counter and the people too. Perabo wants to be a song-writer, like her deceased mother, but is too shy to sing her own songs in public. She takes a job as a coyote to pay the rent. The girls are all dressed in as little as possible and, as the woman owner puts it, 'must give the impression of being available while not really being available'. Perabo slowly warms up to this, which is not exactly her thing. There are numerous ups and downs, not to mention sideways wriggles, and Perabo is forced to sing to the patrons of the bar to stop a violent fight, which means she has sung in public for the first time by accident. Eventually after endless rebuffs she gets someone to listen to one of her own songs. There is a lot of very good satire of the music business in the film. Perabo's father comes to the bar unexpectedly one night and is shocked, and this makes for problems, as he says he never thought he could be ashamed of her but he is. She gets fired but then gets rehired. She realizes she is not a natural coyote. The pure unrestrained anarchy of the bar is really something to see and behold, though pardon me if I don't go searching for such a place, for as much as I can cope with anarchy, I really don't want to be soaked with buckets of water all evening and forced to drink that much whiskey. I'll give it a miss. Nor do I necessarily think girls should be demeaning themselves by wriggling on bar tops. It goes against my male feminist principles. But still! It's a movie! And there she is, Piper Perabo with her girlish smile, surviving it all somehow, for after all she has a big future ahead of her as the world's cutest super-spy in COVERT AFFAIRS (to be reviewed).

A shy Jersey girl hits New York hoping to be an aspiring song writer and she ends up working at a sleazy joint doing dances on the bar with her fellow 'coyotes'. Why is this happening? What kind of moron would use such a contorted device to advance a story? Unfortunately, Coyote Ugly doesn't not want to be a descent music movie, it wants to be Showgirls; a bad decision. I'll give points to the choreographer for staging a bar dancing style that doesn't rely so much on nudity to sell (unlike Showgirls), however that fact that the movie spends more time on such sequences than it does on anything else, results in Coyote Ugly being pretty Indescent. On the other hand, Coyote Ugly, is a much nicer film than Showgirls. There are fewer A**holes in the cast of characters, and far more laughs (although some may be unintentional)None of this however changes the fact that the storyline is tripe. Of course the intended audience won't care, but even if one treats the film as pure eye candy, its effectiveness doesn't go beyond moderate. Coyote Ugly feels wacky and rushed, and it's over before you know it. Ignoring the indecency, I don't feel there's quite enough here to warrant a look.