(One way or another, the Sheik would have what she was having)

An international press junket for Katherine Heigl’s The Ugly Truth at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills had to be moved after a bomb threat emptied the building.

So what did Sony execs do? Shepherd all the junketeers including the movie stars and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association from the green median on Burton Way across the street to the nearby restaurant Il Cielo — and set up the junket there until the hotel gave the all-clear signal. As my source emailed, “Publicists never give up.” [DHD]

Meanwhile, terrorists are lazy, apparently.  The people who made The Ugly Truth and a room full of publicists?  Talk about a missed recruiting opportunity.  Deliver that bomb via a white guy with dreadlocks listening to techno in his car and trust me, the whole world would ululate as one.

You know that scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm in a restaurant?  Of course you do, it’s the most famous romantic comedy scene of all time.  Well Katherine Heigl and the makers of The Ugly Truth do too, which is why they made this… uh, homage?  Which manages to take all the sexiness and surprise out of the original and turn it into lame, plodding gag about vibrating underwear (“I’ll have what she’s having” is now “What’s in ceviche?”).  I’m not sure if they meant to rip off When Harry Met Sally or the under-the-table-jerk-off scene in Wedding Crashers, but in either case, Heigl’s fake orgasm is one of the least sexy, least convincing ever, and I’d like to think I know a little something about fake orgasms.  And she was raised a Mormon, so you’d think she’d know a little something about magic underwear.

[via Comingsoon]

It seems the way to write a Hollywood rom-com these days is to collect your most insanely obvious and intuitive relationship observations and fashion a crude narrative out of them.  Like, “If you meet a guy and he seems uninterested at first but then says, ‘call me in six beers,’ and later you have sex with him but he never calls and then when you confront him about it he says he was weirded out by your oversized labia …he’s just not that into you.”  Such brilliant insight into the human condition abounds in this red-band clip from The Ugly Truth.

1. “Men are very visual.”
2. “Wear a bra that makes your boobs look good.”
3. “Wear a skirt short enough to see some thigh, but not so short we see vag.”
4. “Don’t whine about your problems.”
5. “Long hair is good.”

And all the while, Katherine Heigl has to pretend like this is all coming from a mutant with superhuman powers of perception who has shapeshifted into the form of her father in order to make her feel more comfortable.  I can’t wait until the next scene, when Gerard Butler and his mangled accent explain the trouble with dingleberries.

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The Ugly Truth is about a chauvinist type (Gerard Butler) with a TV show dedicated to telling women “the ugly truth” about what men want. Katherine Heigl is his feminist producer. Guess what happens.  Strangely enough, it’s almost the exact same concept as Vh-1′s Tough Love.  Now, I’m not saying that one of these came first or that someone’s idea got stolen, all I’m saying is that a special-needs chimp could’ve pulled this premise out of a rom-com lottery ball machine, and that chimp has a really good job at Fox.  (Okay, to be fair, it isn’t a Fox movie, but that was only because the Fox execs couldn’t understand the poster).

You want my impression of this movie?  Just look at these pictures back and forth really fast for two hours.  WOMEN BE SHOPPIN’!

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Tales of the Black Freighter is some kind of story within a story inside Watchmen, which is getting a its own separate release on DVD March 24th.  The trailer just hit the web and of course I’m posting it, because as a movie blogger I’m required to mention it every time Zack Snyder has a loose stool.  Seriously, I would suck a blue dick if it would make this movie come out faster.