Coyote Ugly

I occasionally take my 38-year old cousin Larry to the movies. Larry is what the experts call "developmentally challenged," but I call him a retard. I can say that because he's family. About five minutes into "Coyote Ugly," I realized this movie was for people like him, fully-grown mentally retarded adults. So, this week, Larry is going to sit in with me.

Piper Perabo is a walking cliché, the generic spunky girl with a heart of gold from New Jersey. She moves to the big bad city to pursue her dream of being a songwriter. She leaves behind a bunch of pale, dimbulb friends and her fat father (John Goodman), who is worried his daughter will get eaten up by New York.

After learning how hard the music business is, Perabo lowers her goals and becomes a coyote at "Coyote Ugly," an extremely loud bar where bad 80s music always plays. I mean, Blondie, INXS, and other shit that should have been buried already. The coyotes are near-stripper bartenders, but they are supposed to be empowered because they let men objectify them for money without having to put out. So that's what all those feminists want. Shit, I thought it was equal treatment.

Perabo also meets Adam Garcia, a man who can afford expensive leather jackets, lots of hair-care products, platform shoes and a well-maintained convertible on his shitty minimum wage jobs. He's Aussie man-meat (and a midget) who cares about her, and not just for her ass.

Well, Perabo starts out as a very bad Coyote, being threatened with firing every night. But she improves. She goes from dropping bottles, to singing on the bartop, finally graduating to the always difficult wet T-shirt dancing. Just about when she has mastered the art of keeping greasy frat boys at bay, she is hit with a barrage of screenwriter obstacles. Her dad catches her dancing on the bartop, she is fired when the midget Garcia shows up and starts a brawl, her dad breaks his leg, she thinks Garcia's got himself another piece of tail, she has a bad case of the always exciting stage fright. For most of the story, she's indifferent to her songwriting, but at the end she performs in a local club. How that turns out will be a surprise saved for those who go see the movie.

Larry: At the end she sings really pretty and becomes a star and all the other pretty girls are there, too. And the boy is there and kisses her. I like Regis Philbin.

Filthy: "Coyote Ugly" deserves some sort of recognition for being so consistently shallow. It's being sold as more than a lingerie video because these women have "power." And yet, they're vapid stereotypes who can only sooth the riled up men by dancing on the bartop to "Devil Went Down to Georgia." Good God on Gravy, these women are fuckably hot, but they piss me off.

Hollywood wants us to think that more than sex is for sale if the girls don't take off their tops. Well, the jokes on them because I stripped every one of these chicks (except skanky Leann Rhimes) in my mind. Then I sucked on their tits until their pencil-eraser sized nipples stood at more attention than Gomer Pyle.

Larry: I like "Coyote Ugly" because it was good. The girl with the big lips is poor and lives in a small town, then she moves to New York City, and then she is all scared because she didn't know mean people lived there. They treat her bad, like Mrs. Wilson treats me when I do a naughty. Mrs. Wilson makes me take a bath in ice water. The big girl lips is very pretty and I want top stick my fingers in her.

Filthy: Piper Perabo, Larry. And she is perfect for the innocent girl role. She's not a great actress, probably not even a good one, but she smiles innocently, and "Coyote Ugly" demands nothing more from her. Out of those big fat lips pours pure, unadulterated crap like asking her boyfriend "What do you do when all your dreams come true?" after not a single fucking thing happens to him other than he gets to bang the snot out of Perabo. A worthy pursuit, sure, but only in the shallow world of this movie is that a lifetime's worth of dreams.

Larry: Remember last week when we saw "Thomas the Tank Engine"? I liked it too but it was confusing about the trains and the story. This movie was way easier to understand, and I could tell the girls apart.

Filthy: Tell the girls apart? They were all the same. There is "the bitch" who is a bitch because she has brown hair and because the movie insists many times on saying she's a bitch. There is "the law," who disappears early, only to come back to dance on the bar. There's the flirt who I couldn't tell you a single thing about except that she had small tits.

Larry: They were all different and special in their own ways.

Filthy: What was different about the black girl?

Larry: She was black.

Filthy: What about the brown-haired girl?

Larry: She had brown hair.

Filthy: The setting of the movie is a strategically dirty New York. It's just dirty enough, with carefully placed pigeons and wrappers, but not so dirty as to destroy the "Fairy Tale" magic. You know which fairy tale it is? It's the one mothers tell their daughters at bedtime about how they can make a lot of money by teasing men with their looks and by acting loose.

Larry: Do you like it when Regis says "Is that your final answer?" That's funny.

Filthy: Most scenes are of a bar playing extremely loud 80s music, packed with drunk frat boys and ladies dancing on the bar. The good time atmosphere is as fake as when those sluts at TGI Friday sing their Goddamn happy birthday song with those bullshit smiles on their faces. The whole vibe is the movie prodding us, saying "Isn't this fun? Isn't this a great party?" If you say no, they say "It's not? We better turn the music up louder!"

Larry: I liked the movie because everyone spoke slowly and clearly. And they didn't talk like real people. They explained what was going on, and they repeated it. A lot of times I couldn't tell what was happening, but then the girl would say it.

Filthy: Um, well, I can't say that any better than Larry did. But one bright spot in the movie was John Goodman. His character is by far the most developed in the story, and he has the only dialog that sounds real. I wonder if he rewrote it.

Larry: He was fat. Then he dances on the bar. Remember the scene where he tells the girl he is ashamed of her? My mom told Mr. Morgan she was ashamed of me. Then I got sent to the home to live. One boy at the home stole my radio.

Filthy: The rest of the dialog is hackneyed tripe that made me cringe. "I would tell you, but then I'd have to kill you" is said as a punchline and we're expected to laugh. Holy fuck, Larry says that to me, and he's a retard.

Larry: I will tell you, and then kill you. (laughs)

Filthy: What pissed me off most about "Coyote Ugly" was how this story went nowhere. It is packaged as hot chicks dancing on a bar and it doesn't go deeper. Girls dance, poor girl makes it good, everyone hugs, Aussie fuck gets another hot American chick. I didn't expect Jane Austen here, but I thought they might try to do something, anything, different.

Larry: But I liked it.

Filthy: Did you like Leann Rimes cameo? Remember when she dances on the bar at the end for no reason at all?

Larry: No, she's a skank.

Filthy: One fucking finger for "Coyote Ugly."

Larry: Five fingers.

Filthy: You want to go home now?

Larry: No, no, I don't want to go to home. I want to stay. I don't want to go to the home. Mrs. Wilson beats me. (crying)