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There's more than meets the eye in 'House Bunny'

By Steve Persall, Times Film Critic
In print: Friday, August 22, 2008

Shelley, played by Anna Faris, schools sorority members in the ways of makeup and men.
	[Columbia Pictures]

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Anna Faris is lethally blonde, a knockout who can roll with the punches and leers that come with such beauty.

Faris is also a deft comedian, a modern Judy Holliday whose head can't possibly be as air-inflated as she plays in The House Bunny. Mixing metaphors like a Cuisinart and creating words like "skimplifying," Faris is a hoot. Only smart actors make dumb look so effortless and dawning cognition so adorably credible.

First you fall in lust with Faris. Then you fall in love.

The same thing happens to a degree with The House Bunny, with its premise that could've been dreamed up during a frat house drinking game. But there's more here than meets the roving eye, thanks to a script that initially delivers sexism then turns the tables just enough to be sexy.

Faris plays Shelley Darlingson, a Playboy model wallowing in Hugh Hefner's lifestyle. That is, until she turns 27 — 59 in bunny years, someone explains — and a message from Hef banishes Shelley from the mansion. She winds up as house mother for the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority, counseling bright but dowdy coeds in the ways of fashion and seduction.

The conclusion can be drawn that The House Bunny says that the surest way for women to succeed is without really trying, except in front of the makeup mirror. That conclusion would be wrong, thanks to screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who performed a similar stereotype makeover with Legally Blonde.

Those Zeta sisters go from notties to hotties, drawing male attention like never before. There's a price to be paid for that, which Lutz and Smith reveal ever so cautiously, with enough quasiraunchy jokes to mask the lessons formed.

Shelley's charges are a spunky bunch: encyclopedic Natalie (Emma Stone), punk and pierced Mona (Kat Dennings), hulking Carrie Mae (Dana Goodman), timid Joanne (Rumer Willis) and two (American Idol's Katharine McPhee and Kimberly Makkouk) who are pregnant. Their distinctive personalities keep The House Bunny interesting, even when cliches propel the plot.

Shelley also finds a boy toy, a nursing home manager named Oliver (Colin Hanks, who performs more like his father Tom each day). When she realizes the tricks she's teaching the Zetas don't work on nice guys, The House Bunny finds its rhythm of reversal, getting better than anyone who saw the preview trailers has a right to expect.

Steve Persall can be reached at persall@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8365. Read his blog, Reeling in the Years, at blogs.tampabay.com/movies.