Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... only if you deeply desire the lone souvenir from this movie on album, a score-only product that goes through the motions but fails to really stimulate. Avoid it... if you're looking for any of the songs you heard in the film or, for that matter, anything more than generic instrumental sounds for the romantic comedy genre. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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. 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. ** Track Listings:
Total Time: 38:07
(alternately pressed titles for some tracks shown in parentheses) All artwork and sound clips from The Ugly Truth are Copyright © 2009, Lakeshore Records. The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 4/27/11, updated 4/27/11. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2011-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
