Very best movie i ever watch

Excellent adaptation.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

The Truth about Cats and Dogs is a Surprise Story in that it appears at first glance to be a typical Romantic Comedy with a stock ending, but it i much more than that. After seeking various clips of the film at different time a viewing of the full feature was a very pleasant surprise, with what I believe are outstanding performances by the players, all of whom seemed to fit their role and exude a comfortable expression of the characters. For a film almost 20 years old it hold up well in a market filled with a need for Blockbusters or Bust. I emphatically recommend this film as a nice departure from the stock Love Story yet filled with the tried and true formula. I would highly recommend it.

One of the previous reviewers wrote: "It's Cyrano de Bergerac on the surface but more of a sitcom in its substance," and even that's a stretch.Cyrano is ugly, big-time ugly. So ugly that his own mother had no love for him, and no woman has been willing to love him.The female host of the radio show that gives this movie its name, "The Truth about Cats and Dogs," Abbey, is not ugly in any way. She may not be a striking beauty, but then, neither is Uma Thurman/Noelle, the neighbor she passes off as herself to the caller who wants to meet her. One is short, the other tall. One is brunette, the other blonde. One a little on the plump side - but only a little; the other skinny. Abbey is not ugly while Noelle is strikingly beautiful. Abbey has one kind of beauty, Noelle another.Cyrano de Bergerac is about a truly ugly man who wins the heart of Roxanne by the extraordinary beauty of his language, a non-physical type of beauty. He very definitely does not have just "another kind" of physical beauty. He very definitely has NO physical attractiveness whatsoever.Abbey, on the other hand, has bought into a socially-conditioned idea of what men find attractive - tall, thin, blonde - but it's really all in her mind, since her friend Noelle isn't all that attractive, and Abbey herself is certainly not unattractive. We don't really get a chance to see if Brian really started by buying into the same social convention, since he was told by Abbey over the phone that she was tall, blonde, thin, etc. We never see him attracted to tall, blonde, thin dumbbells whom he knows to be dumbbells.When Brian tries to explain what he finds attractive in the woman he has spoken to over the phone, he basically says: "She's nice." Abbey gives no indications of a remarkable, poetic command of language either on her radio show or over the phone. Noelle on occasion - but only on occasion, and not very convincingly - comes off as dumb. Brian says that he likes intelligence, but he gives no indication of being intelligent himself, nor of having been attracted to anyone else for her intelligence. So we never really understand why he becomes attracted to Abbey. She's pleasant, but then so is Noelle.The three leads are all pleasant, but the movie doesn't really seem to know what point it wants to make. If it's "a handsome guy can fall in love with a woman even if she isn't beautiful, as long as she has a striking character," this movie doesn't make that point clearly or convincingly. Abbey just isn't sufficiently not-beautiful, or sufficiently striking in terms of her character, for us to buy that argument. Nor, unlike Roxanne in Cyrano de Bergerac, is Brian ever presented as really interested in qualities other than physical beauty, so that his final attraction to Abbey comes off as convincing.

A radio DJ named Abby Barnes (Janeane Garofalo) conducts a live online show advising people about their pets. One day Brian (Ben Chaplin) calls for help. He gets it...but falls in love with her voice. He plans to meet her but she has low self-esteem so she gets her beautiful model neighbor (Uma Thurman) to pose as HER! Predictable complications follow and it leads to an insultingly stupid happy ending.I should hate this movie a LOT! The plot is stupid--these people are total idiots! Thurman or Garofalo's characters could have said something and stopped it immediately...but then there would be no movie. The complications that come up preventing them get dumber and dumber. Also the ending would NEVER happen in real life. So why am I giving it 7 stars? The three leads. They're great! They're attractive, give good performances and seem totally at ease with it. Also the script (basic plot aside) is funny full of great one-liners that the cast goes into with ease (only Chaplin seems a little unsure). There's also a steamy phone sex scene that was pretty risqué for a PG-13 movie (but it leads to a great punch line at the end). So the movie is stupid and predictable but I did like it. I give it a 7.

The politics of The Truth About Cats & Dogs is likely to be the last place with which people will find fault with the film; the idea of two women, one of whom is identified within as more photogenic than the other, switching identities for sake of observing which it is an ignorant to the situation young man will go for, is importantly played out honestly and correctly. It is the getting there within which the problems lie, those to whom the film is pitched will have to suffer the sitting through of misplaced phone sex sequences and some needlessly colourful language, while the rest of us, for whom the adult content will just sail past, will have to sit through a message-movie that'll already have been mapped out in most of the audience's minds if the natural conclusion point to which the film arrives hasn't already been prefigured before in their lives. Ultimately, The Truth About Cats & Dogs happens for absolutely no reason at all; other than to perhaps shuffle onto screens a meek message-movie about looks, rational thinking, male presumption and so-forth which are all items that happen to have been dealt with before and in more engaging fashions. The truth about The Truth About Cats & Dogs is that it's just not up to an awful lot.The film eventually comes to cover three predominant characters, the one with whom we start being a local disc-jockey in a warm; welcoming movie version of Los Angeles named Abby Barnes (Garofalo), a disc-jockey whose show specialises in veterinarian problems and animal issues. Seemingly lonely, living by herself in an apartment with her pet cat, and sexless for three years, she excels at her job more often than not made easier by the subdued level of callers whom ring in with the slightest of problems that she's usually capable of fixing without breaking a sweat. Abby's neighbour at her apartment complex is the ditzy, flimsy Noelle (Thurman); essentially a bit of a write-off of a human being, a model with some serious marital issues of her own in that she appears able to have most men without possessing the ability to maintain any kind of lasting bond with them. A woman, who upon hearing Abby has abstained from sexual encounters for all of three years, appears somewhat disturbed at such a happening.Enter Brian (Chaplin), a young English photographer working in L.A. whose call to Abby's show spawns all manner of events; a man in love with Abby's demeanour and intelligence but with Noelle's looks when he comes on down to the studio; the lab rat around which the study of male perception of the opposite gender, or how a woman's looks can blind a man to some seemingly obvious truths, plays out. For the most part, Chaplin essentially does the Hugh Grant act: the dozy but charming British male, who's a bit bleary eyed, but we don't mind 'cause that's all part of his charm, as he fumbles through these exchanges with women, usually foreign, in a happy and jolly manner in a desirable enough locale. Curiously, with Brian arrives an air of misogyny; distorting sequences with an African American supporting character who's a work colleague of his carrying with them notions of ill-thinking and nastiness, so much so that we question as to whether Brian would even work with a man of an African American ilk given his rather raging narrow mindedness. The item of persona swapping which later plays out between the women appears in contrast to that of Brian's own in-presence/not-in-presence attitudes in regards to the female characters when he certainly acts in a less appealing way.Young Brian is put through the proverbial wringer when Noelle and Abby decide to enforce that switch: idiotic and po-faced, but strikingly beautiful, Noelle now the expert veterinarian with Abby relegated to that of, well, a nobody living next door with her cat. The concept of this comedy outlined, that Chaplin loves Noelle's exterior but Abby's interior, and that everybody's pretending Noelle has both, kicks off all manner of both 'hilarious' hijinks and shenanigans, such is how the pitch would have gone in the producer's office. The film has fun with Abby's own liberation from her supposedly repressed confines linked to that of both exposure to the male gender and (lack of) sexual episodes, when she is granted access to Brian – access, of which, is only ever over the phone, in a manner often nothing more than moderately smirk-inducing but is rarely anything worse than slightly uninteresting. The lead is granted an escape from the celebrificated voice-over role as the radio vet, but is only allowed to do so under the guise of being a stunningly attractive blonde model whose face is fit for billboards; a notion supposedly highlighting that of the shallow nature of both contemporary men and, for the most, part contemporary culture.Where, you might say, screwball comedies of old centred around degrees of gender swap or gender transfusion, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, like a young moggy with its ball of string, loosely toys with this idea via the guise of a personality switch; the piece ultimately a middling effort which falls short of the line but isn't without premeditated charm which comes about purely because it throws its politics up into the air and all of it neatly falls back down again. If we're all brutally honest, the premise begins as a joke but comes to near enough render the film itself a joke; a film which spends its time toying with its gimmick via an array of goofy scenes before seeing things out into its final third with melancholic character content and an obligatory reveal. It isn't without that indifferent charm, but it certainly isn't with an awful lot more.