The Ugly Truth
The problem with many chick flicks is that the roles women play are more than stereotypical — they’re often downright offensive. Of course, if a woman (in this case, Katherine Heigl) is a successful television producer, she has to be a bitchy, perpetually single control freak. And, of course, the reason she “can’t find a man” is because she is too picky (there couldn’t be anything wrong with the guys, right?). It gets worse. When Heigl’s character, Abby, sets her sights on the hot doctor next door, she can’t possibly go about snagging him by — gasp — being herself. With the guidance of Mike (Gerard Butler), her crass, alpha male co-worker, she goes about landing her man by laughing at whatever he says and pumping up her sex appeal (“You have to be both the librarian and the stripper”). In the end, it turns out the hot doc doesn’t like the real Abby, only the woman she was pretending to be (go figure!), so she and her alpha male mate fall in love and live happily ever after. Because Mike only loves desperate women he can manipulate, clearly.