St. Petersburg Times film critic Steve Persall reviews the new comedy about a former Playboy bunny who becomes a sorority house mother.
Anna Faris is lethally blonde, a knockout knowing how to roll with the punches and leers that come with such beauty. She's more than a pretty face although that's an enchanting start.
Faris is also a deft comedian, a modern Judy Holliday whose head can't possibly be as air-inflated as she plays in The House Bunny. Mixing metaphors like a Cuisinart and creating words like quot;skimplifying,quot; Faris is a hoot. Only smart actors make dumb look so effortless and dawning cognition so adorably credible.
First you fall in lust with Faris. Then you fall in love.
The same thing happens to a degree with The House Bunny, a premise that could've been dreamed up during a frat house drinking game. That would make it just another college comedy in which women get used more than textbooks. There's more here than meets the roving eye, thanks to a script that initially delivers the sexism that previews promise then turns the tables just enough to be sexy.
Faris plays Shelley Darlingson, a Playboy model wallowing in Hugh Hefner's lifestyle of wild parties and limitless shopping sprees. That is, until she turns 27 ndash; 59 in bunny years someone explains -- and a message from Hef banishes Shelley from the mansion. She winds up as house mother for the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority, counseling bright but dowdy coeds in the ways of fashion and seduction.
The conclusion can be drawn that The House Bunny's message is that the surest way for women to succeed is without really trying, except in front of the makeup mirror. That conclusion would be wrong. Screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who performed a similar stereotype makeover with Legally Blonde, won't allow it to happen.
Those Zeta sisters go from notties to hotties, drawing male attention like never before. There's a price to be paid for that, which Lutz and Smith reveal ever so cautiously, with enough quasi-raunchy jokes masking the fact that trenchant lessons are being formed. The House Bunny never forgets what its audience wants, or what it needs to remember when the show ends.
Shelley's charges are a spunky bunch: encyclopedic Natalie (Emma Stone), punk and pierced Mona (Kat Dennings), hulking Carrie Mae (Dana Goodman), timid Joanne (Rumer Willis) and two (American Idol's Katharine McPhee, Kimberly Makkouk) who are pregnant. Their distinctive personalities keep The House Bunny interesting, even when clicheacute;s--a rival sorority wants Zeta's charter revoked--are propelling the plot.
Shelley also finds a boy toy, a nursing home manager named Oliver (Colin Hanks, who performs more like his father Tom each day). When she realizes the tricks she's teaching the Zetas don't work on nice guys, The House Bunny finds its rhythm of reversal, getting better than anyone depending on preview trailers has a right to expect.
The House Bunny
Director: Fred Wolf
Cast: Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Emma Stone, Kat Dennings, Beverly D'Angelo, Katharine McPhee, Hugh M. Hefner, Rumer Willis, Leslie Del Rosario
Screenplay: Karen McCullah Lutz, Kirsten Smith
Rating: PG-13; sex-related humor, partial nudity, brief strong language
Running time: 97 min.
