The House Bunny

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Anna Faris is really funny. I was never into the Scary Movie movies, but I thought she was the best part of Just Friends, which I for some reason ended up seeing about eight times when it was running on HBO. She has the kind of unintimidating hotness and comic timing that could turn her into a big star -- no small feat in a genre that habitually pretends the female race does not exist. (Tropic Thunder was hilarious, but see if you can remember if any woman had even one line in that entire movie.)

The premise of The House Bunny is pretty good, at least by the standards of Happy Madison Productions, Adam Sandler's company, which produced it. Faris stars as Shelley, a Playboy bunny who gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion and ends up as the house mother of a sorority at a nearby college. The sorority, Zeta Alpha Zeta, is about to lose its charter since it consists of only seven socially inept losers -- but if Shelley can teach them how to be sexy and popular, they'll get enough pledges to save the sorority.

That requires a few too many makeover scenes and fake-hugging for my taste, but it also produces scenes that will consistently make you laugh. Really, for something that looked as potentially stupid as it did in the trailers, you'll be laughing more than enough to convince you that going to the multiplex wasn't a bad idea.

Thematically, it's also a lot smarter than most comedies of its type. Shelley successfully turns the ugly duckling sorority sisters into popular girls by teaching them "what boys like": makeup, boobs, vapidity, and bikini car washes. But after meeting her requisite love interest (a dutiful Colin Hanks), a smart guy who miraculously doesn't seem to like ditziness, she realizes that maybe morphing the girls into the Playboy idea of perfect that she herself embodies isn't the best idea. They should just be themselves, and not dumb themselves down for guys who only want to sleep with them.

Okay, I didn't say it was genius, I just said it was smarter than usual. There is a bit of subversive humor involved: the big unstated joke is that the guys (minus Colin Hanks) are the most vapid characters in the story. There's a hilarious scene in which a group of frat boys start gawking and fist-bopping each other when Shelley gives one of the girls a hug.

While The House Bunny formerly announces Faris's stardom, it also hints at another rising talent: Emma Stone, who plays one of the Zeta sisters. You probably remember her as the red-haired girl from Superbad. I'm pretty sure I caught her styling some of her deliveries here off of Jonah Hill's performance in that movie, but she's hilarious.

Miraculous, to see a comedy -- a pretty good one, at that -- in which the male characters ...