If you wake up from your booze induced one night stand and discover someone so ugly that you’d rather gnaw off your arm than awaken them then you understand the phrase coyote ugly. However, there’s not an ugly person to be found in this film but you might be a cavity from the excessive sweetness.
Violet (Piper Perabo) is a super naïve girl from Jersey who leaves her father (John Goodman) to venture into the giant city of New York to make it as a songwriter. I guess she thought it was going to be easy but finds that it’s an uphill battle and that nobody will listen to her tapes at all.
It doesn’t help that she has stage fright and cannot bring herself to perform her own songs when given opportunity to expose them to potential audiences. Her apartment gets broken into and she’s short of cash.
She overhears a group of girls counting out their money in a café one night and discovers that they’re not ladies of the night but bartenders at a bar called Coyote Ugly. She approaches the bar’s owner (Maria Bello) and is brought on as a Coyote on a temporary basis. The other Coyotes (Tyra Banks, Izabella Miko, and Bridget Moynahan) have no trouble putting on a show for the customers, as well as handling bartending duties, but Violet is very green at both.
Coyote Ugly, despite its name, appears to be what could be termed a “girl empowerment” film since the main characters are mostly ladies. What makes that a bit strange is that it comes from action producer extraordinaire Jerry Bruckheimer, who I would think is not one when you’d think of when you say chick flick.
Although its heart may be in the right place, I’d say that Coyote Ugly really doesn’t succeed in empowering anyone. Firstly, Violet is so naïve that you’ll more than likely be rolling your eyes at her antics. She thinks that she’s going to make it as a songwriter but she doesn’t appear to know the first thing about the big city music business. She should’ve realized that it’s a tough town since the local pizzeria where she works has a wall of former waitresses’ autographs and they left in the hopes of making it big and none of them did.
We see that her dreams are not going to come true, but in true movie fashion fate makes them fall right into her lap. She claims to have stage fright but eventually has no trouble gyrating around on the bar for a bunch of drunks and yet still claims to not be able to sing solo. The movie is so syrupy sweet that I think I got a cavity from watching it. I guess it does have its fans (as you might tell I found it rather maudlin) and now they can catch the film in the high definition of Blu-ray.
This was my first viewing but I wondered if you could notice that Violet has put flower stickers over the sprocket holes in the tape cases that she shops around to the various record companies? Well now you can as well as adding some resolution to the scenes that take place in the dark bar of the title. Even though I didn’t care for the film itself I could see that this transfer absolutely sparkled.
Coyote Ugly is presented in 1080p anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. This edition combines all of the special features that were found on the previous standard DVD releases. You get both the theatrical cut and an extended, unrated cut of the film.
The theatrical cut features separate commentaries from the Coyotes (Piper Perabo, Maria Bello, Tyra Banks, Bridget Moynahan, and Izabella Miko) as well as director David McNally and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The extended cut combines those commentaries. Next is the 10 minute “Search for the Stars” featurette, the 7 minute “Coyote 101,” the 3 minute “Inside the Songs,” the 4 minute LeAnn Rimes music video, 6 minutes of additional scenes, the strange 1 minute “Action Overload” that condenses the action scenes from the film into a clip, and the theatrical trailer.
If you have the standard releases, you might want to consider the upgrade for the perceived resolution enhancement but there’s nothing here special features-wise to make you upgrade. I found the movie a little too maudlin and syrupy, but ladies might take not, to their anger, that this is the only chick flick that their man might watch with them but it’s for the Coyotes on display.
Coyote Ugly: The Double Shot Edition [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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