The House Bunny
Rumor (Willis) Has It, This Movie Has No Hop
Trailers & Mo
Like the Playboy scented TV show
The Girls Next Door,
The House Bunny sends an awful message to young females that in order to succeed in this world you gotta be pretty and pretty dumb (even if they do try to say otherwise at the end of the film). If only
Bunny were anywhere near as entertaining as
Girls is (Holly, Bridget and Kendra + Hef appear in the film, along with some other pointless cameos like Dan Patrick, Shaq and Matt Leinart), let alone, was as short as a single episode of the giggle and jiggle fest. While the set-up about an expelled mansion bunny finding a new home as the house mother to a sorority of misfits certainly sounds like a perfect fit for
Anna Faris‘ brand of dopey humor (and
her Jennifer Coolidge wax lips), this ‘comedy’ turns out to be about as flat as the flat-chested women who get rejected by
Mosquito Bites Magazine. The two screenwriters behind
Legally Blonde attempt to strike the same women empowerment magic here (although luckily we’ve always been able to deflect their spells), but this thing is so terribly ‘vapid’ (the word people keep calling Faris’ character that she takes as a compliment) that it makes Elle Woods look like Thelma & Louise
One of the main things that irked us more than Urkel was the gaggle of girls in the sorority. They’re all such oddballs who loathe glamor and glitz that it’s hard to comprehend why they’d ever want to be in a sorority in the first place. There’s a nerdy one (Emma Stone in glasses, yum), a mute one, a dwarf, a pregnant one (Katharine McPhee, who woulda been better off starring in From Justin To Kelly 2), a tomboy hick (Dana Goodman, who eerily resembles Jeremy Renner), one covered in Joan Cusack Sixteen Candles-type protective metal (Rumer Willis, whose face scares us) and a goth with piercings everywhere (Kat Dennings, being annoying, juss like she was in The 40 Year Old Virgin). You juss knows they have inner beauty, in a She’s All That kinda way, and only Faris has they keys to unlock it. When she makes them over, Stone resembles a whored out version of Lohan and Dennings, Hillary Duff. Of course the girls have some lessons in humility to impart upon Faris’ empty mind, as she attempts to woo a normal guy (Colin Hanks… someone please explain why he keeps getting jobs, besides the fact that he’s Rita Wilson’s son). Oh yeah, and all of this shiz is goings on within the pseudo-plot about trying to raise money and find a new class of pledges before the Dean throws the sorority off campus. This could been the female answer to The Revenge of The Nerds, but instead it ended up being about as poopified as the straight-to-TV flick Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation. Lamar, stick a javelin in this one, please!
Pledge Pin-Ups: meat Rachel Specter & Sarah Wright (sometimes credited as Sarah Mason), two ladies in a rival sorority who have no purpose being in this movie other than looking fine!
Verdictgo: Slit Your Eyes Out Repoopulous
Hamlet 2
Something Is Rotten In Arizona
Trailers & Mo
Dana Marschz (
Steve Coogan) is at his wits’ end. Having failed as an actor, unless you count that Herpes medication ad he appeared in, he’s retreated to suburban hell in Tuscon, Arizona as a high school drama teacher. To make splatters worse, due to budget cuts, and the poor critical receptions of his last few plays based off of modern movies (his
Erin Brokovich was nowhere near as good as
Max Fisher’s Vietnam opus), the school has decided to shut down his class by the end of the year. Yet nothing will stand in Dana’s way of succeeding, even his giant lack of talent. He decides that Shakespeare’s
Hamlet tragedy needs a happy second life and drums up an abortion of a sequel complete with a rocking Jesus and plenty of
Grease lightening
A majority of the film centers on putting the play together, with the help, or lack thereof, from his rowdy class mainly consisting of a bunch of yo boys and girls, and is filled with some dreadful lame bits of humor as seen in the trailer (people running into things! gay jokes!). It almost feels as dead as The House Bunny, but as soon as the curtain rises on the actual production, the film comes alive and makes up for any shortcomings that came before it. Coogan’s manic energy (which reminded us a lot of Paul Dinello’s Geoffrey Jellineck character from Strangers With Candy) saves the production, both liguratively and fiterally. The rest of the cast try their best to keep up with him, but their characters are either underdeveloped (esp the students, but we didn’t let that stop us from continuing our rising love for Melonie Diaz, last seen in Be Kind Rewind), purposeless (Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler and David Arquette) or wasted (Elizabeth Shue… playing ELISABETH SHUE!), that this puppy is purty much a one man show. To see or not to see may be the question, but if you do go, juss remember the play’s the thing!
As We Like It: dude, Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, is so bangin
Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers
Henry Poole Is Here
Take A Dip In The Holy Water
Trailers & Mo
Henry Poole Is Luke Wilson, a mopey man looking to drown his sorrows with alcohol in the new sunny neighborhood he juss moved into. One day his nosy next-door neighbor Esperanza (
Adriana Barraza, returning from Mexico after almost killing Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s kids) notices the face of Jesus on the exterior wall of his house and all heaven and hell breaks lose. While she’s convinced that it’s a sign from above (muss be the blood dripping from it), Henry, who simply wants to be left alone, takes it a sign of annoying things to come. Soon the holy rollers start rolling in (including a priest understatedly played by
George Lopez), looking for a miracle (including
this girl, whose face is 80 zillion times scarier than Rumer Willis’) to cure all their ills. Some of dem ills do get cured, including the muteness of his other neighbor’s (
Radha Mitchell) daughter (
Morgan Lily, perhaps the mos adorable lil girl ever!), yet Henry remains unconvinced, even as he starts to fall for her (Radha, not the daughter you sick-o-phant). Why is he so against these possible acts of Gawd? It’s as if he doesn’t believe in hope and faith (no, not
that TV show that no one ever watched). OK, so the ploting and conclusion is quite obvious and is pieced together a tad too unevenly, and the soundtrack is beyond awkward (Blur’s ‘Song 2’, aka the Wooo-Whoo song, is played as Luke attempts to remove the Jesus face with a hose), but director
Mark Pellington (
Arlington Road,
Mothman Prophecies and
Pearl Jam’s ‘Jeremy’ video),
who’s using the film as therapeutic way to help get over the loss of his beloved wife, provides enuff spiritual enlightenment to earn our praise
Pareidoliamania!: now you can make your own miracles at home with the Jesus pan!
Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers
Bunny and Hamlet 2 join Henry P in theaters mos everywhere today
until next thyme the balcony is clothed…
05. Jan, 2009 
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