The Spleenectomy
Whip It!
The House Bunny
10 Things
Legally Blonde
Ella Enchanted
She's the Man
In Development
The House Bunny
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Screenwriters Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith also penned Legally Blonde, and they once again weave together witty lines of dialogue, funny situations, and a suitable girl-power message. I laughed harder and more often than I expected to. And in the middle of it all are Anna Faris and Emma Stone, who take a potentially silly little picture and give it exactly the right kind of spunk.
From a screenplay by the writers of “Legally Blonde,” Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, “House Bunny” puts a cheerful spin on its many clichés. This particular wheel hasn’t been reinvented, but at least it gets a nice fresh coat of bubblegum-pink paint and a star to pilot it with aplomb.
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.
Consistently funny…The movie's script is by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, who — tiny surprise — also wrote "Legally Blonde." Like that picture — underestimated at the time of its release, but in retrospect a small classic — "The House Bunny" also contains, along with many laughs, a low-key message about the importance of being yourself, no matter how offbeat that self may be.
It's a little stroke of genius: Make a female-empowerment movie and cast it with Playboy Bunnies. Elevated via a strong script by "Legally Blonde" scribes Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, "The House Bunny" is a blissfully broad comedy that should catapult Anna Faris into a singular kind of stardom.
The screenwriting team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith are rather shamelessly aping their own Legally Blonde here, but they’ve written Faris some great, ditzy one-liners (“The eyes are the nipples of the face”), which she takes and runs with, occasionally tripping over someone or something along the way and landing a pratfall worthy of Olympic gold.
"The House Bunny" -- which was written by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith (who also gave us "Legally Blonde")… -- recognizes the limits of artifice when it comes to sexual allure… After a failed date, Shelley wails to her friends, "He didn't fall for any of my tricks."
That line right there may be the key to "The House Bunny": This is a cartoon fantasy of sorts, but it isn't a retrograde one. "The House Bunny" recognizes some of the hard realities of getting along in the bewildering world of men and women. Shy people can sometimes use a few pointers on how to flirt with the opposite (or the same) sex. But the movie also acknowledges the point where flirting turns into manipulation and game-playing. No one in "The House Bunny" is rewarded for using stock feminine wiles; the characters get by only when they use their heads and their hearts.
