Are You Still Watching? Aléna Muir gets personal with Coyote Ugly (2000).
Plus, a poem about the total eclipse and Juice (1992)
Monday, April 8, 2024, 3:15 pm
by Camila Valle
I am inside during a solar eclipse & I am trying to pray but can only scribble respect for the cosmos the ancestors my siblings our love on a paper scrap & feel that I have reached some kind of end
we exist at the same time in the same universe the clouds unmoving & we are all water & we are all holding onto something we don’t recognize arms reaching from the ledge our bellies pressed to the limits like q in juice & in the alternate ending q doesn’t lose his grip bishop lets go & chooses death over cops which is to say a different kind of death & in another world tupac is alive & I am beautiful & no one whose name I have ever lovingly called is dead or will ever be & I do not cry looking at a photograph of my parents young & smiling in jujuy & I am the andes in the background
in this world even the moon swallows the sun
Camila Valle is a writer, translator, and abortion acompañante.
Coyote Ugly is So Personal to Me
by Aléna Muir
When it comes to my movies, the ones I claim as personal with my whole chest, I have many darlings. But not all are mine to write about. Rax King covered Josie And The Pussycats for her debut essay collection (and those of us who joined the Best Movie Ever Army are so grateful). My grad school professor T Kira sent me a short piece about My Best Friend’s Wedding after I’d told her of my love for it and any film that features a romantic plot and a Julia Roberts perm. The piece was about Julia and she titled the document “For Aléna.” My Best Friend’s Wedding played at T Kira’s wedding ceremony, so yes, that one is hers. I might steal that idea though (the wedding thing not the essay), if I find someone willing to contractually commit to riding the waves of my whims and rewatching a highly curated list of rom-coms and coming-of-age movies from the late ‘90s and the aughts with me until we die. I hope she publishes the piece someday.
I’m claiming Coyote Ugly in hopes that no one else has. I’d be very upset. It’s mine. And I’ll tell you why.
The first time I watched it was in the exact fashion it had been made to be watched: adolescent sleepover. This is hilarious because it’s a film about a rowdy New York City bar, but the premise is rendered into a mostly scatheless PG-13 viewing experience. Anyway, my parents were out of the country on a cruise from Southampton to Florida. I thought it was the coolest thing because they were on the QE2, the boat Lindsay Lohan’s parents met on in The Parent Trap (which is personal to me). I also wanted presents from America and knew they would return on my birthday. I hosted my birthday sleepover while they were gone. My godmother Stella was staying with me and I got to have all my gals for pizzas and movies on a Christmasbed. The Christmasbed is a quintessentially South African concept. You remove mattresses from beds and place them on the living room floor, then, you plop down and arrange all the pillows and blankets at your availability. This way one avoids who-sleeps-where politics and it’s also so much fucking fun.
Stella took us to Vee’s Video, the only DVD store in my hometown. My girl Debbie from Vee’s always had some good recommendations, except when she suggested My Boss’s Daughter (big flop). Although, I’m glad I’ve seen it. I’m proud to be versed in Tara Reid lore and filmography, not many people can say that. Tara actually does have a name for her fanbase (so it must be real). Shoutout to Debbie, a true Taradactyl. She passed away a few years ago.
So the girls and I decided to get the one with the five beautiful, skinny women on the cover. I say the girls and I despite vividly recalling my shameless, youthful flair for the autocratic (I have an otiose retrospective wish that it was experienced by most as more cute than annoying). Alas. As an older sister, I was happy to offer input and leadership, solicited or not, and I was not to be shamed for wanting to help and guide. Moreover, I was the birthday girl! I recognized Piper Perabo from Cheaper By The Dozen, a movie I’d watched as soon as it dropped at Vee’s because, as everyone in my circle knows, I am a part of a little group of loyalists you may have heard of called the Duffheads, and I will support anything Hilary does until my final breath. That’s my woman, I chose her in 1st grade, and I’m nothing if not loyal. Speaking of the presents I got from America, one was a VHS tape of Raise Your Voice, the movie where Hilary very believably sings opera in like, seven different voices—so many Oscar snubs in this story. To my knowledge, this movie was never released in South Africa so I was one of the few South African Duffheads to see it. I don’t take these blessings lightly.
Where was I? Coyote Ugly on the Christmasbed. Violet Sanford (Perabo), an aspiring songwriter with crippling stage fright, leaves adorable and young Melanie Lynskey and Pops (John Goodman) behind to move to spooky-scary New York City in hopes of making it big. Rent is due though, so she convinces Lil (Maria Bello) to hire her as a “Coyote,” a bartender in a very early Shania Twain-coded outfit with a serious attitude, catering to the predominantly male clientele by dancing up on the bar. She’s replacing Tyra Banks who honestly had a great year in 2000, also starring as a gorgeous woman slash doll in Life-Size with Lindsay Lohan (soundtrack also popped off). Tyra is barely in the movie but features prominently on the poster to serve Smize (and that’s called pretty privilege). Violet’s new co-workers are Cammie (the Russian tease) and Rachel (the New York bitch). She stumbles into love, of course, and it has an Australian accent (Adam Garcia) and a name that is unfortunately on my list of unsexy names (Kevin).
I won’t fabricate profundity to validate my unabashed devotion to this movie. None of us were particularly inspired to chase our dreams or girlbossified by the notion that women could own sleazy bars. We loved the outfits and got very excited about the prospect of growing up and getting HOT. These were the takeaways that catered to our curiosities and qualms. We also couldn’t believe we somehow bypassed restrictions posed by Stella to be blessed with the scene of our New York City lovebirds getting down in a loft apartment, surrounded by cardboard cutouts of public figures (including former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton). The future was looking bright and womanhood would surely be a blast. Now I live in America and whenever someone mentions the state of Texas I tell them that I have a dream that involves a little Coyote Ugly outfit and a mechanical bull.
This was the beginning of my People magazine era so I was well-versed in some shenanigans that went down behind the scenes. Miss LeAnn Rimes, who sang the infectious final scene ballad “Can’t Fight The Moonlight” up on the bar with the Coyotes, got some heat. Many thought it inappropriate since she was only seventeen at the time (considering the era we’re in, LeAnn being the sole recipient of said heat should track). This was also her big pop debut as she’d strictly been yee-hawing up until this point. LeAnn was dating Andrew Keegan of 10 Things I Hate About You (so very personal to me) fame. Rumour has it Andrew then got eyes for the leading lady while visiting the set and went on to date Perabo after he broke up with LeAnn. Keegan later fell off from acting and started a “spiritual community center” in LA (we all know what that means). A Vice article claimed that this spiritual community and/or cult once platformed the political endeavours of Marianne Williamson, a United States presidential candidate.
The other interesting thing is that the movie is based on a 1997 (birth year!) GQ article about the original Coyote Ugly bar in the East Village. The piece was written by former bartender, Elizabeth Gilbert, who also wrote the book Eat Pray Love, which was developed into a Julia Roberts movie. This one I saw at the mall cinema in 7th grade with my best friend. We couldn’t wait to get past the pray part to finally get to the fun stuff which ended up not even being that steamy and left us tragically bored.
It would be ambitious to try and guess how many times I’ve seen Coyote Ugly; my personal films and I have a groove, they become routine. The last time I watched it was with my gals at my family home in South Africa. One of them, Jana or James I think, requested it because they hadn’t seen it before. I needed no convincing. Larissa had always loved it too, it’s one of the pieces of art foundational to our union, like Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name or the Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann triumph The Other Woman (personal!) I considered the small-town-girl-needs-big-bright-city-lights trope. I joked that this was educational; so they could get me. The movie was much funnier now that I lived in New York. Like, this bitch is making all this fuss about moving to the city from New Jersey? I’m sorry, she was going home to do John Goodman’s laundry every Sunday! It was funny to pick up Goodman’s foretelling line, “Handrails on the subway system could one day lead to an outbreak of the plague” (I’d always known this movie was special, a necessary omen). It’s also simply funnier to watch an adolescent sleepover movie as a 26-year-old. They got away with so much. Not one, but two scenes emphasizing the lucrative business of… human auctions? A truly fearless film that bravely tackles the issues, speaking to one's charitable sensibilities. Does anyone know of any foundations supporting the overlooked and forgotten minority of people battling stage fright? Please do let me know.
I’m not insulted by Coyote Ugly’s 23% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Hilary Duff’s A Cinderella Story sits at 11%. True cinephiles know this is an unreliable website. To the haters and losers, I say: some things are just not for you. I don’t get involved and blare out brash opinions on their little war movies. Some movies are drenched in self-importance or smarts and others are just a regular small-town gal from New Jersey: unbound by affectation with nothing but a dream and a song in her heart, who gets bestowed greatness and bottomless relevance by the girls and the gays. We know her well enough to know she needs no approval but ours. She unifies, she endures, and she remains one I’ll always return to.
Aléna Muir is a South African writer and pop culture enthusiast currently based in Brooklyn.
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