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The Ugly Truth: (Aaron Zigman) A pointless and
predictable romantic comedy,
The Ugly Truth was a surprising
financial success in the busy summer season of 2009. From the producers
of
Legally Blonde, the movie pits Katherine Heigl and Gerard
Butler against each other in roles as a stressed morning television show
producer and a chauvinistic television personality who gives dating
advice (respectively). The female producer has terrible misfortune in
her love life, and despite initially rejecting any of the advice that
Butler's disreputable self gives her, they enter into a pact that
entails her coaching by him to acquire her newest love interest (her
neighbor). Complicated by the mechanisms of the network's executive
choices and the success of the producer's luring of her neighbor, a
supposedly unlikely but logically inevitable attachment forms between
the two leads. Fate thrusts them together during an on-air revelation of
these feelings and everything if fine and dandy at the end. While
audiences fell for this variety of garbage once again, critics were not
as thrilled, supplying
The Ugly Truth with an overwhelmingly
negative response. The music for these kinds of films is as predictable
as the scripts. It's productions like this one that really do require a
musical director, for a wide range of existing songs, some perhaps as
source, have to be chosen and licensed for various scenes before a
composer can come in and fill the gaps. A dozen contemporary songs were
eventually inserted into
The Ugly Truth, but for some odd reason,
Lakeshore Entertainment and Relativity Media didn't allow their
dedicated record divisions to produce a song compilation soundtrack for
the obvious reaping of money from female audiences. Instead, Lakeshore
went ahead with a score-only album, leading to one of those hilarious
situations when you see an extremely low Amazon.com customer rating for
the score simply because people thought they were going to get the songs
they heard in the film but instead got knock-off John Debney comedy
instrumentals. At least such situations usually result in low used-CD
prices for the score. In this case, the unintentional recipient of
royalties from these angry female listeners is composer Aaron Zigman,
whose career in the late 2000's started being defined by these sorts of
nebulous comedy works. He wrote music for both
The Ugly Truth and
The Proposal for concurrent theatrical release, an impressive
pair on the resume in terms of box office prowess.
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It would be great to be able to write that there's
something in any of these scores by Zigman (including his
Sex and the
City music) that distinguishes his take on the genre from dozens of
others who have come before. Unfortunately, that's not possible, because
ultimately every one of them sounds in many ways connected to the
accepted formula established by Debney and other romantic comedy
veterans. As usual, the score for
The Ugly Truth is orchestral,
but that doesn't really matter, given the emphasis on solo elements.
Acoustic and electric guitars, rock percussion, saxophone, piano,
Hammond organ, synthetic keyboarding, lightly percussive loops, and a
variety of other pre-records really define the work. Because Zigman was
forced to divide his score into a series of really short cues to
accentuate punch lines and offer unique stylistic tones to specific
moments of 30 seconds or less in the score, there is really no
substantial narrative development in the music for
The Ugly
Truth. The concluding "Abby & Mike Rant" is, at two minutes in
length, the best summary of the score's thematic material and various
dominant styles, from enthusiastic light rock coolness to sappy waltz
rhythms for the comedy element. At the other end of the score, those two
styles collide in "Flick the Bean," setting the stage with plucky,
snazzy movements of allure. The entire score seems like a series of
short capitulations of the same general, ascending structures over these
tapped rhythms. Most of them blend together enough to help the listener
ignore the short cue times. Latin tones creep into the mix in "Post
Kiss" and several cues thereafter, sometimes in brief, token statements.
Outward stingers are held to a minimum, thankfully. In these kinds of
scores, you always look for a couple of unique cues of immense
personality to appreciate from the viewpoint of silliness. In
The
Ugly Truth, there really aren't that many such moments. A faux news
theme in "New Theme" is a little too sparse to meet that standard, and
the great guitar work in "Your Replacement" is over before you can get
into its funky groove (thanks to a nasty LP record-scratching effect).
Only in "Naked Weather Girl" do you really hear some fantastic
personality that transcends the rest of the score, a retro
post-production mix and some flair from trumpet waking the listener from
a slumber. Ultimately, you know that a score doesn't hold much interest
when you wonder why nothing impresses you about cues titled "Thank Your
Pussy for Me," "Frowny McFlaccid," and "Oral Sex" (though that last one
was renamed "Somethin's Up" on the final album pressing). Unless you
absolutely fell in love with this movie and its score in context, pay it
no mind.
** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
