Film

Anna Faris, last seen through a haze of pot smoke in Smiley Face, plays dizzy dolls as expertly as Lucille Ball and Marilyn Monroe. If Faris’s movies fail that total commitment, she can hardly be blamed for taking the work. So it goes with The House Bunny which, as scripted by the egalitarian minds behind Legally Blonde, thrusts a similar nincompoop into an atmosphere of snobbery only to have her turn the tables—and learn something too. Shallowness
becomes Faris as Shelley Darlingson, a wanna-be-centerfold suddenly evicted from Hef’s Playboy Mansion after turning 27—“like, 59 in bunny years,” a frenemy explains.

Wobbling in heels to a college campus, Shelley falls in love with a “mini Playboy Mansion,” a snobby sorority house. Shooed away, she ambles to the ratty domicile down the street that shelters a different group of homely but sisterly losers (led by the Lohan-like Emma Stone), who adopt the leggy alien as their house mother in order to win pledges. You can see where this is going, and the movie is uncertain whether to celebrate Shelley’s surfacey makeovers or indict them. But so long as Faris can sincerely offer wisdom like “The eyes are the nipples of the face,” you’ll be magnificently distracted.