This film is about a castoff Playboy Bunny who helps the girls of
the nerdy sorority to become popular. She 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, the one 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. 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 the way to make
a girl's life richer is to glam up and act slutty. 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.
Bottom line: The House Bunny is not an unpleasant way to pass the
time, but it's tweener entertainment by the numbers, and has an
insidiously shallow point of view.
