Californication
s2, e8
(last night)
Carla Gallo got her
top off again and got it on with the royal ugly dude.
Madchen Amick
looked great in a bikini.
The House Bunny
2008
Tweener entertainment by the numbers.
This film is about a castoff Playboy Bunny who helps the girls of the
nerdy sorority to become popular. Bunny girl takes over as their house
mother, re-makes them, and the increased popularity of their sorority
gains them enough pledges to retain their charter, despite the best
efforts of the snobby sorority down the street. It was written by the same
screenwriters as Legally Blonde and follows pretty much the same formula,
with just a hint of Revenge of the Nerds mixed in. The film's strength is
a note-perfect Goldie Hawn performance from Anna Faris, who managed to be
both funny and completely credible as a Playmate, right down to the killer
body in a PG-13 nude scene. (She doesn't have big breasts, but the
director worked around that.) The film's weakness is that Anna's character
is the only one developed at all. Her romance with the Colin Hanks
character is half-baked and Hanks is given virtually no character to work
with. The girls in Anna's sorority had no real back story at all,
and their pre-makeover characters are wildly exaggerated. The requisite
evil schemer from the snobby sorority is a one-dimensional cartoon
character. Meanwhile, back at Hef's place, the other evil schemer who got
Anna booted from the Playboy Mansion seems to have been left almost
entirely on the cutting room floor.
Irrespective of what I write here, your teen and pre-teen daughters
will watch this film, as many other daughters did. The House Bunny grossed
almost fifty million dollars and held its theater count for five full
weeks. I wish I could say that the message of the story was so redemptive
as to make you pleased that your daughters are watching it, but that's not
true. While the made-over girls did get a stern lecture when they turned
into clones of the sorority brats who had scorned them earlier, that was a
perfunctory effort, a complete throwaway in comparison to the film's
overall notion that acting artificial and slutty is the way to make a
girl's life richer. The difference between this film and the comparable
youthploitation films about male nerds is that the male geeks never have
to change their appearance or act like preppies to get their final
redemption. Nobody recommends that they start working out or wearing nicer
clothes or wearing contact lenses. The alleged losers end up triumphing
while retaining their nerdy appearance, by using their humor and brains
and innate moral superiority. On the other hand, the girls' version of
this fairy tale requires the losers to look hot before anyone will even
consider talking to them. I, for one, would like to see the female geeks
get accepted for who they are, just as the males do, instead of having to
act like superficial but attractive twits.
By the way, speaking of superficial things, Anna Faris, like her career
inspiration Goldie Hawn, has a great booty!
Film clip here, samples
below.
