"Being a centerfold is the highest and most prestigious honor there is," uber-blond Shelley earnestly declares. "It says, 'I'm naked in the middle of a magazine. Unfold me!' "
Such is the glazed-eyed charm of "The House Bunny," which is factory made, nothing new . . . and really funny.
The familiar plot finds a misfit sorority about to lose its house unless it can suddenly become popular. Enter Shelley, a sweetly vacant exile from the paradise called the Playboy mansion, who is just spunky and sexy enough to solve everyone's problems.
The movie benefits from a crisp script by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith ("Legally Blonde," the underrated "She's the Man") and a strong supporting cast. But the big rabbit in the room is star Anna Faris, who as the epically ditsy but good-hearted Shelley delivers a flat-out hilarious farce performance.
Sure, "The House Bunny" adheres to the rally-the-losers schematic of too many other movies. Sure, its tacked-on female-empowerment message is as half-hearted as a cheesy Valentine's card. But it's also among the sunnier, funnier films of the year, thanks largely to the zest with which Faris embodies a mental vacuum.
-- Michael Ordona
"The House Bunny." MPAA rating: PG-13 for sex-related humor, partial nudity and brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. In general release.
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Many 'Dreams' and many fears
In 1906, eminent novelist Soseki Natsume wrote to a friend saying, "I am an ambitious man who wants the people of 100 years hence to solve my riddle." A century later, the venerable and venturesome Nikkatsu Studio assembled 11 directors to film Natsume's "Ten Nights of Dreams." Each dream has been brought to the screen by a different director, with Yoshitaka Amano and Masaaki Kawahara teaming for the Seventh Dream, a dazzling, shimmering work of animation involving an ocean voyage into the afterlife.
The filmmakers don't solve any riddles but rather pose them in richly varied ways: "Ten Nights of Dreams" is in the grand, exquisite tradition of the Japanese cinema of the supernatural. Its filmmakers are unified in their stunning sense of the cinematic. Certain motifs run through the sequences, which are all really nightmares, and feature in several instances parents who turn into monsters and children who do the same. They are disquieting yet often amusing expressions of subconscious fears and guilt; sometimes the dreamer turns out to be the villain in his own dream. Sequences vary in the eras in which they take place, and the film has a splendid sense of period, with the everyday and the surreal flowing into each other with ease.
