The House Bunny

(2008) dir. Fred Wolf
viewed: 05/01/09

Not really on any list of mine until I’d been reading reviews of Anna Faris’ performance in Observe and Report (2009), mentioning her starring role here, suggesting that she is a great physical commedian, playing roles with the gusto and shamelessness of “guys”.  Well, the only thing was that I realized I didn’t really know her from a hole in the ground, so I thought I’d queue up this comedy about a Playboy bunny who gets kicked out of the Playboy mansion because she becomes too old, at age 27.

The film could have been quite the social critique with that scenario.  It’s not though.  She shows up at the lamest sorrority on campus (what campus?) and turns a bunch of geeky, ugly girls into sex-bombs.  It’s Animal House (1978) seriously “reduxed”.  In fact, there is plenty of feminist material here for a thesis in and of itself.  And I’m not so certain that the film ends up on the “good” side of feminism…okay, there is not really any way that it does.  It doesn’t fail to be moderately interesting in that perspective.

But honestly.  This film, without Faris, is pure dreck.  She is by and far the highlight, she gets the only amusing lines (e.g., “The eyes are the nipples of the face.”)  She’s kind of fascinating, with the figure to potentially be one of Hugh Hefner’s “girlfriends”.  But the bottom line is that there is a huge thing to critique therein, in and of itself, and since the film employs Hef and his trio of girlfriends, the film doesn’t go after them or that culture at all.  In fact, the exploitation show The Girls Next Door does it more ironically and unselfconsciously than this film even hints at.

And THAT is fucking sad.

However, Faris does redeem this film to an extent.  She’s very good, like Jaime Pressly on the TV show My Name is Earl, which I have seen little of but get the gist.  She’s got potential, certainly.  She’s more than anyone else in the film by double, maybe triple, maybe more.  Without her it’s pure shit, honestly, nauseating potentially.  Sickening.  It’s to her credit that I saw this film at all.  It’s to her credit that I’m still curious about her potential after having seen this film.