The Palm Beach Post
By Jonathan Tully   |  Movies, Romantic comedies  |  July 22, 2009

Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler star in 'The Ugly Truth'. (Sony Pictures)

Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler star in ‘The Ugly Truth ‘. (Sony Pictures) | Photos ‘Ugly Truth’ Premiere

Leslie Grey Streeter: Is Katherine Heigl biting the feeding hand again?

Is the ugly truth about The Ugly Truth that no critic likes this movie?

At this point, the romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler has scored a horrific 8 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.

The good news for The Ugly Truth is that it’s early yet. A film that had previously scored a zero, I Love You Beth Cooper, finally started getting positive reviews and now has a whopping 13-percent score.

Metacritic, which uses fewer reviews but more sophisticated scoring, has so far given it a 55.

(A quick word about how each site scores a movie: RT is pass-fail, either a critic likes it or doesn’t, and its score is a percentage of critics that liked the film. Metacritic takes the reviewer’s own scoring system — stars, grade, 1-10 rating, etc. — and assigns a score, then averages. That’s why sometimes you’ll see wildly different scores between the sites — If a critic says a movie is two stars out of five, RT would score the film as “rotten” or disliked, while Metacritic would assign the movie a relatively low score of 40.)

Where was I?

Oh, right, everyone hating The Ugly Truth. Actually, that’s not altogether true — it has gained lukewarm praise in some circles. Is it worth seeing? Probably depends on how you feel about Heigl and/or Butler.

• Jeff Otto of MovieSet said the chemistry between Heigl and Butler was OK, but that the writing left a lot to be desired: “The script is weak and overly predictable, neglecting to develop story capable of seeing the concept through to the end. … Not much different from watching your average humdrum situational TV comedy.”

• Frank Swietek of One Guy’s Opinion wasn’t nearly as kind — he gave the film a D: “The movie plays like a busted Fox sitcom pilot, though heavier on the raunchiness and dragged out to a literally painful hour and a half.”

• Though Stephen Farber of the Hollywood Reporter also points out problems with the script, the chemistry wins him over in the end: “Even though the picture sputters and stumbles, it arrives at the ending that audiences crave.”

G-Force: For just the second time this summer, a film has not been screened for critics, so no reviews yet for the guinea-pig action film.

The first movie to try that approach this summer, Dance Flick, hit 27 with RT and 40 at Metacritic.

Orphan: Hmm. No reviews yet here either. For those of you who haven’t seen the trailer yet, Orphan’s about an adopted girl who… you know, I could just show the darn thing:

Home (showing at Mos’Art Theatre, Lake Park): An intimate film about struggling with cancer from a mother and daughter’s perspective stars Marcia Gay Harden and her real-life daughter, Eulala Scheel.

Critics thought the chemistry between the two leads was striking. Prairie Miller of NewsBlaze called it “a simultaneously lyrical and brutal window into cancer as a complex life altering experience.”

Afghan Star (showing at Emerging Cinemas, Lake Worth): A documentary about Afghanistan’s version of American Idol and the battles women have to sing in public has gained universal acclaim.

Film-Forward.com’s Nora Lee Mandel says the film shows an important step forward for Afghanistan in the world’s eyes: “(Havana) Marking’s film demolishes Western stereotypes of the country. (She) captures not only the exuberance of a country where 60% of the population is under 21, but its ethnic, geographic, and religious diversity with a proud musical heritage that drew from the Sufis, Persia, and Bollywood before being banned by the Taliban.”

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