The Adventures of Piper Perabo in Manhattan

Rating: 8/10 (27 April 2013)

I decided to watch this film because I admire the work of the young actress Piper Perabo, who has been so brilliant and charming as the lead character in the ongoing series COVERT AFFAIRS. The reason why she is called 'Piper' is not because she is a tropical bird who makes strange sounds in the jungle, but because she was named after the fifties movie actress Piper Laurie, remember her? But the reason why she looks so unusual is that she is half Norwegian and half Portuguese, a mixture so rare that we have never seen one before and may never see one again. She attended high school in Toms River, New Jersey, one of the small New Jersey towns I have actually been to long ago, strange that. (How many people have been to Toms River? If you have six fingers on one hand that's too many.) I first encountered her on screen in SLAP HER SHE'S FRENCH (2002, see my review), in which she and the whole film were equally hilarious. She was also in the wonderfully funny BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA (2008, see my review). So I thought I would jump from chihuahuas to coyotes and see what that was all about. Well, what a shock. All those girls dancing on the top of a bar in a Manhattan bar called Coyote Ugly, the girls themselves being called 'coyotes'! I got a DVD of what is called the extended cut, whatever was extended. This is in some ways what is called a chick flic, but not really. Perabo plays a good little girl from the tiny South Amboy, New Jersey (is that an in joke of some kind?), who gets the nickname 'Jersey'. She loves her dad who is a widower, excellently played by John Goodman, who has just the right sentimental sad sack tone for the part. Perfect casting there. She falls for the quirky Australian actor Adam Garcia, who has just the right amount of whimsy and works at a grill, so that is the love story part of it. She moves into the most terrible filthy and collapsing apartment in China Town, but seems to love it. But it's the bar that makes your jaw drop far below floor level. The girls cavort on the bar from where they throw buckets of water and buckets of ice cubes all over the patrons, and the patrons just love it. Everybody drinks bottles of whiskey and it gets poured all over the counter and the people too. Perabo wants to be a song-writer, like her deceased mother, but is too shy to sing her own songs in public. She takes a job as a coyote to pay the rent. The girls are all dressed in as little as possible and, as the woman owner puts it, 'must give the impression of being available while not really being available'. Perabo slowly warms up to this, which is not exactly her thing. There are numerous ups and downs, not to mention sideways wriggles, and Perabo is forced to sing to the patrons of the bar to stop a violent fight, which means she has sung in public for the first time by accident. Eventually after endless rebuffs she gets someone to listen to one of her own songs. There is a lot of very good satire of the music business in the film. Perabo's father comes to the bar unexpectedly one night and is shocked, and this makes for problems, as he says he never thought he could be ashamed of her but he is. She gets fired but then gets rehired. She realizes she is not a natural coyote. The pure unrestrained anarchy of the bar is really something to see and behold, though pardon me if I don't go searching for such a place, for as much as I can cope with anarchy, I really don't want to be soaked with buckets of water all evening and forced to drink that much whiskey. I'll give it a miss. Nor do I necessarily think girls should be demeaning themselves by wriggling on bar tops. It goes against my male feminist principles. But still! It's a movie! And there she is, Piper Perabo with her girlish smile, surviving it all somehow, for after all she has a big future ahead of her as the world's cutest super-spy in COVERT AFFAIRS (to be reviewed).