Sunday, August 24, 2008

Movie review: The House Bunny

Legally Blonde meets every other teenage girl-centered movie.

By Shawn Parikh

The House Bunny

Shelley Darlington has lived at the Playboy mansion for the last nine years. She is Hef's favorite and acts like a den mother to the other girls. On her birthday, she is unceremoniously evicted from Hef's pad for 'being too old.' Homeless and without essential skills, Shelley wanders around L.A. until she finds a new job--the housemother at the most unpopular sorority on campus.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on The House Bunny

You know exactly what you are getting into when you go see The House Bunny. But when you have someone as endearing as Anna Faris carrying the whole movie, you know it’ll be at least decently enjoyable. And that’s exactly what it is: a perfect weekend afternoon movie that will make you chuckle.

You don’t really have to look for any deeper meaning but of course, the movie has its typical teenage girl, “awkward-to-hot-girl-transformation-where-you-learn- inner-beauty-is-most-important” message. Since this has been done so many times (Mean Girls, The Hottie and the Nottie, Princess Diaries), you can just throw that out and enjoy it for what it is.

The premise rests on Shelley who grew up an orphan but had been welcomed into the Playboy Mansion as soon as she turned 18. She dreams her whole life of being a centerfold, but now having just turned 27, she is too old to be a Housemate and has to go find her own home. Somehow she stumbles onto a very awkward sorority house full of very awkward girls whose house will be taken away because of their lack of pledges. Enter Shelley, her hot body, and her sexy ways to get guys to like these girls and get girls to want to sign up to be Zetas. Throw in a makeover montage, a rival sorority, and a love story for Shelley, and you get an amusing Hollywood formula.

The hottie and the nottie

What really works is Anna Faris. She is able to play ditzy without being annoying. She makes it more of a naïve girl than a blonde bimbo and you really like her from the moment you meet her. She excels at the physical comedy as we know from the Scary Movie franchise, but she has quite a few scenes that are just laugh-out-loud funny because of her take on them. Watch out for her use of the word “sexy” and the way she first meets people. Even though we have seen Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods, Faris is just as charming.

Emma Stone (Superbad, The Rocker) as the head of the Zeta sorority also is able to get a lot of funny in especially before her “hot girl” transformation when she is being really nerdy and inelegant. Kat Dennings, as a pierced, emo Zeta girl and Colin Hanks, as Faris’s love interest, also play their parts really well without really much of a challenge.

The look says it all.

What really doesn’t work are quite a bit of the side characters. The rest of the girls in the sorority house try too hard to be different and a lot of their jokes fall flat. For example, there is a deep-voiced Amazon-like girl whose voice is obviously forced and her mannerisms are way too exaggerated to be believable. Not funny. Then there is a girl who doesn’t speak since she is too shy, so she ends up writing and texting to communicate. Not funny. Then there is Katherine McPhee (yes, from American Idol) who is a pregnant sorority girl, who is quite useless and it seems that the only reason she is in it is because she has a song and music video during the end credits. Definitely not funny.

The bartender at the Playboy Mansion also is very inconsistent. For some reason he has a nipple-being-pinched fetish, wears a vest, and then has this over-the-top freakout with a blender in one of his few scenes that makes no sense. Hugh Heffner and the Playmates from ”The Girls Next Door” make a few appearances, and their acting, mostly Hugh’s, slows down the movie quite a bit. It totally felt unnatural.

Besides all these qualms and predictability, you will definitely get to laugh. It will make for a great afternoon, whether you catch it on TV, rent it, or just see it on the big screen. It has something for the guys (Playboys) and girls (inner beauty prevails) so no one should be deterred from seeing it.

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