As much a chick flick as Fried Green Tomatoes . . . but it's also pure male fantasy.
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The real Liliana Lovell, better known as "Lil," had a pretty basic business plan and philosophy: "beautiful girls + booze = money." The veteran bartender opened her own place, Coyote Ugly Saloon in New York's East Village, in January of 1993. But thanks in part to this Jerry Bruckheimer film (more on that later), it's become one of the most famous bars in the world.
The place first gained notoriety when a former Coyote bartender wrote a piece for GQ magazine, and the movie rights were sold shortly thereafter. Suddenly there were people all over the country who wanted a night of Coyote Ugly, and so the raucous watering hole went the way of Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, spawning franchise establishments in eight states (surprisingly, given the Hollywood tie-in, not California). The real Lil, who frequently got up on the bar and sang for patrons, says that "serving cheap tequila from a boot, bartending with boa constrictors, and just doing whatever the hell I wanted are what made the Coyote great."
Well, there are no snakes on a bar here, no tequila in a boot, and no singing done except by a brand-new bartender nicknamed "Jersey" (Piper Perabo), who's really a songwriter trying to make it in the Big Apple. She's clearly not cut out for this sort of thing--getting up on the bar to dance for customers, spraying everyone with the water hoses when someone orders a drink with H20 in it, dousing aggressive drunks with buckets of ice, and flirting outrageously with the customers in order to milk them of every last dollar they've got. In fact, she only applied there because she saw three of the Coyotes flashing wads of cash the day that her apartment was robbed and she was suddenly penniless in New York City.
The Coyote is a wild bar with a road house atmosphere--the kind of place where you'd expect Patrick Swayze to materialize and twist somebody's arm off to calm them down. Here, in a bar run totally by women and just one male bouncer to handle a crowd that's as nervous and ready to break loose as a corral full of Texas longhorns, when a riot does threaten the place, it's a single song from Jersey (a.k.a. Violet Sanford) that calms the savage beasts. It's that kind of movie.
But for a film with five "babes" in it-Coyotes Zoe (Tyra Banks), Rachel (Bridget Moynahan), Cammie (Izabella Miko), and Lil (Maria Bello)--"Coyote Ugly" is pretty tame, even in the unrated edition. I've seen skimpier outfits shopping at my supermarket, and there's more dirty dancing in, well, "Dirty Dancing," than there is on this bar. The hottest it gets is when the Coyotes leave a trail of booze on the counter and set it aflame--and the only person who gets really aroused is the fire marshal. The unrated edition tacks on a mere seven minutes, with the only noticeable thing being an extended love scene that shows a little butt. But whoa there, horndogs, it's Adam Garcia's backside that's shown. Adam plays Kevin O'Donnell, a cook who runs into Violet when someone pranks her and says he's in charge of music at the Fiji Mermaid Club. In the love scene there's a flash of breasts that don't belong to Garcia, but you can bet they don't belong to Perabo either. And the theatrical cut? It's like "Flashdance" (the closest thing to this non-explosive, not-much-action film that Bruckheimer has hitherto produced) meets Guys (from the Suburbs) Gone Wild. Nothing too outrageous happens, just a lot of teasing and dancing.
More shocking than the movie is that a female wrote the screenplay. On the surface, it looks to be the kind of film that teenaged boys would flock to see, because it's the closest they're going to get to sex. With all that whooping and babe-dancing, it's a male fantasy sort of film. Though the real Lil's story is certainly one of empowerment, the focus in this film isn't on how a lowly bartender rose to become an entrepreneurial legend. It's about a timid, wholesome young woman from South Amboy who's mother had the ambition to make it as a musician, but not the drive--or so she's been told by her father (John Goodman). It's about a developing relationship between Violet and Kevin, about the expectations her father has weighed against her own ambition, with the underlying question one that's as old as Hollywood itself: Can a nice, small-town gal make it in the "real" world of the hard, big city? There are more clichés dispensed here than shots of Jack Daniels, and the plot has about as many surprises as the chorus of a song you've heard for the 500th time. In fact, one of the film's only surprises comes when LeAnn Rimes appears on top of that bar in a cameo.
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