Weekend in Reviews

A one movie weekend for me.

House Bunny - I really only watched this because I love Anna Farris so much. This movie was her creation and she was certainly very good in it, however, there did seem to be a pretty egregious lack of substance to some of the other characters and to a few of the plot threads. The movie is about Shelley, an ugly duckling orphan who grows up to be a beautiful Playboy Bunny residing at the mansion until a spiteful new bunny tricks her into leaving. When she suddenly finds herself homeless and in need of the sort of family she'd finally found at Hef's pad, she happens upon a Sorority filled with the saddest, most over-the-top nerds, dorks and outcasts I've ever seen. She becomes their house mother and transforms them into sexy and popular girls thereby saving the house from closure.

She also meets Oliver (Colin Hanks) on the street while he's trying to recruit volunteers for the nursing home he manages. Shelley is dressed in a bikini and is in the middle a car wash (read: moistened and suds-ed up) during their initial conversation and yet he never breaks eye contact and doesn't appear to care that she looks like she does. Then again, he also doesn't seem to notice she's as dumb as a box of hair. So what that all means when put together, I do not know.

The sorority girls are mostly caricatures: the butch, militant feminist (Kat Dennings); the scary, back-woods, trailer-trash (Dana Goodman); the pregnant hippie (Katherine McPhee); the girl with the back brace (Rumer Willis); the awkward, nerdy virgin with the crush on the frat rat (Emma Stone), while Oliver is a one-dimensional nice-guy that we want to believe Shelley could fall for but who never materializes into someone that makes that seem likely. There are cameos out the wazoo and the one I find most puzzling is the hefty one that Matt Leinhart gets. Shaq is in it for about 2 seconds and unless you're REALLY paying attention you might not notice it's even him, yet Leinhart got 5 minutes on screen with a line and everything. And let me be very clear about this - for a professional athlete, the man's working some serious flab. You can tell he's second string is all I'm sayin'.

Anyway, all those flaws aside, it's still an entertaining movie and Anna Faris really his funny, sweet and likable. Plus that woman's body is ridiculous. If my abs or butt looked like hers I would quite literally never wear anything but a bikini. EVER!