Movie Review The House Bunny

The House Bunny (2008)

Directed by Fred Wolf 

Written by Kristen Smith, Karen McCullah Lutz

Starring Anna Faris, Emma Stone, Kat Dennings, Colin Hanks 

Release Date August 22nd, 2008

Published August 21st, 2008 

Anna Faris is a terrifically funny actress. Her work in the first Scary Movie and a cameo in Lost In Translation each looked like star making performances but did not pan out. Faris did terrific work in the indie horror film May but was mostly relegated to small roles in other people's lame comedy efforts (Just Friends, My Super Ex-Girlfriend).

Now with the release of The House Bunny, Faris is getting her due as a leading lady. This vain attempt to recreate the pink hued magic of Legally Blonde is desperate and straining at times but in the end Faris rises above the lameness with a terrifically funny performance.

Shelly (Faris) has long dreamed of becoming a Playboy centerfold. After appearing in a few pictorials, including Girls of the GED, Shelly moved into the Playboy mansion and waited for Hef to make her a centerfold. On her 27th birthday, Shelly was given a huge, celeb filled party but the next morning she was out on her backside.

Kicked out of the mansion for being 27, that's like 50 something in bunny years, Shelly desperately needs a home. What luck then when she stumbles onto a college campus and discovers a misfit sorority house that desperately needs a house mother. The outcasts include Natalie (Emma Stone, Superbad), Mona (Kat Dennings, Charlie Bartlett) and Harmony (Catherine McPhee, American Idol).

The misfit girls and their shabby sorority house are about to be foreclosed on unless they can attract 30 new pledges in the next month. Shelly offers to help with makeovers for the girls and giant parties to attract attention. But, when Hef calls to give Shelly her dream centerfold, Miss November, will she leave her girls behind?

The House Bunny was directed by former SNL sketch writer Fred Wolf. In his directorial debut Wolf shows a near flawless command of the cliché. Wolf nails every well worn trope of the college outsider movie, tossing in a couple of rom-com clichés as well as Colin Hanks joins the cast as Shelly's mismatched love interest.

There is nothing new, original or slightly unfamiliar about The House Bunny. Thus, all of the film's appeal hinges on the star performance of Anna Faris. Lucky for those subjected to this tripe that Faris nearly makes the film watchable. With her stunning physicality, both comedic and otherwise, and her pitch perfect delivery of even the lamest blonde jokes, Faris manages the herculean feat of dragging laughs out from under the banalities.

The House Bunny is not insidiously bad, more innocuously bad. It's not good but not so bad that I can say I hate it. Anna Faris is such a winning presence, such a sunny personality that, for a time, I thought I could actually like the film. However, by the time we reached the obligatory speech to save the sorority house, I was off somewhere else in my mind.

Whether I was remembering an episode of The Office I had just watched or deciding whether to shop for groceries or go do laundry after the movie, I don't recall. Nor do I really recall much beyond the platitudes of The House Bunny.

Movie Review: Untraceable

Untraceable (2008)

Directed by Gregory Hoblit

Written by Allison Burnett

Starring Diane Lane, Colin Hanks, Billy Burke, Jesse Tyler Ferguson

Release Date January 25th, 2008

Published January 25th, 2008

In Altman's brilliant The Player you hear his many Hollywood players describe possible projects thusly "It's Terminator crossed with Lassie" or "It's Roots crossed with Rambo" or other such horrors. This is based on real Hollywood parlance and patois. Producers and studio execs actually like using this sort of shorthand as a way of describing a project without having to read a whole script or listen to some creative type prattle on about motivations and subtext and the like. This practice is exactly how we end up with movies like Untraceable. No doubt, in some producers office some exec said something like "It's Hostel crossed with Network and Seven".

Untraceable indeed carries elements of each, not much on the Network portion; though the allusion is there. And, while I know some of you are reading this thinking that combo sounds really interesting you are missing the point. That is all Untraceable is. Some idea of a movie that producers can describe but fail to create. Ideas lifted from other movies and grafted onto the Frankenstein's monster that is Untraceable.

Diane Lane stars as FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh, the bureau's top expert in cyber crimes. With her partner Griffin (Colin Hanks), Jennifer tracks down perverts and identity thieves with a few quick key strokes and a call to the local cops to pick up the bad guy. Her latest case however is something entirely different. At first KillWithMe.com seems like some twisted prank. A kid captures a kitten and allows visitors to the site to dictate the cats fate. The site warns, the more visitors to the site the quicker the cat will die. After several thousand visitors the cat does indeed meet an ugly fate.

Soon the web murderer escalates to humans and Jennifer herself is on the killers list of potential victims.

It's nice to comfort ourselves with the idea that we would never go to a website where our page views are the instrument of murder. But, ask yourself this, have you been to one of those websites where you can bet on when Britney Spears is going to die? That website is out there and it takes a little bit of our collective humanity every time one of our fellow citizens casts another morbid ballot. I can't necessarily say that a website run by serial killer is the same as the macabre sickos who wait for a celebrities death with such fascination. Ask yourself though, if you could watch a celebrity die on a website, would you watch?

Our culture is becoming a pretty sick place and in that sense Untraceable seems to be pretty on point. Unfortunately, the movie cannot live up to the ideas behind it. The film unfolds in typically thriller-ish fashion. The killer, what luck, happens to live in the same town as our heroic FBI team. He kills, he taunts the authorities, he kills again and all that changes is the method of death and the quickness of the mass murder. To separate it only slightly from other mainstream thrillers, director Gregory Hoblit lingers on the torturous murder scenes as if he were paying tribute to Eli Roth and his Hostel movies. Hoblit doesn't seem to get off on the torture the way Roth does but the homage is there.

Hoblit wants to ape the popularity of torture porn without committing to it completely. In some ways that is even scummier than what Roth does. There is much that is scummy about Untraceable. What keeps the film from becoming truly disgusting is star Diane Lane who gives an air of class to the proceedings. Hoblit can't compromise his stars innate strengths and Lane elevates her every scene even as she is saddled with the nerdy void of Colin Hanks and lumpy love interest Billy Burke as the aptly named detective Eric Box, he's as charismatic as cardboard, Box is a perfect name.

Without Diane Lane we are looking at a movie quite similar to Freedomland, one of the all time bad mainstream thrillers. A more apt comparison may be to anything Ashley Judd made where she stars as either victim or cop. Credit Diane Lane, most stars are victims of movies such as Untraceable. She manages to elevate the movie with her star presence. That says something for her talent as Untraceable would have left most other actresses unemployable.

Movie Review Orange County

Orange County (2002) 

Directed by Jake Kasden 

Written by Mike White 

Starring Colin Hanks, Jack Black, Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow, Schuyler Fisk

Release Date January 11th, 2002 

Published January 10th, 2002 

Jack Black is a star, anyone who saw High Fidelity and Shallow Hal knows it. The box office returns for Hal definitely show it, and the comparisons to John Belushi easily solidify his status. Like any star there are always missteps, films that were not quite up to par, anyone remember Saving Silverman I'm still trying to forget it. Orange County isn't nearly as bad as Silverman, it is in fact not that bad at all. But it isn't great either.

County stars Colin Hanks as Sean Brumder, a So-Cal surfer dude who after a friend's death finds his calling as a writer. Don't worry, the film isn't nearly as dark as the setup might lead you to believe. In fact the friend's funeral provides the visual joke of girls attending the beach funeral in black bikinis and the guys in black Hawaiian shirts. The scene also provides a glimpse into what director Jake Kasdan may have been going for as far as the film's tone. The rest of the story follows Sean's attempts to get into Stanford University to work with the writer who inspired him to write his first story.

Of course this won't be easy, if it were there wouldn't be a movie. Sean's attempts are foiled by his school counselor (the wonderful Lily Tomlin, always funny) along with his midlife crisis Dad (John Lithgow) and Mom (Catherine O'Hara) in drunken stupor mode. Again, somewhat dark but played lightly, and aided greatly by Jack Black as Sean's druggie brother who provides the film's biggest laughs with his amazing energy and comic timing.

Sadly, Orange County is yet another movie where the best jokes are in the trailer, especially Jack Black's jokes which seem on TV to have been censored but in the film are as tame as the commercials. It's all still funny but we've already seen most of them. Of course we've heard about the cast's pedigree. Jake Kasdan is the son of Lawrence Kasdan, Schuyler Fisk, Sean's girlfriend, is the daughter of Sissy Spacek and Colin Hanks is the stepson of Rita Wilson, oh and the son of the biggest box office star in the world Tom Hanks.

But even with a good cast and some solid laughs, Orange County is just a slightly oddly sweet film that longs to be edgy but ends up merely distracting. And If I may editorialize, I don't blame Jake Kasdan. Something about this film's marketing campaign and the fact that it is the product of MTV films leads me to believe there may have been some compromising. That is, for the sake of a more teen friendly PG-13 rating as opposed to the edgier R -rated film Orange County longs to be.