The House Bunny

Starring: Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Emma Stone
Directed by: Fred Wolf (“Strange Wilderness”)
Written by: Karen McCullah Lutz (“She’s the Man”) and Kirsten Smith (“Legally Blonde”)

With drama happening in the real life Playboy Mansion (if you haven’t heard, word on the street is Hugh Hefner is moving in another bunny and his three girlfriends aren’t very happy about it), it’s great publicity for the new comedy “The House Bunny,” which is being released by Adam Sandler’s production company Happy Madison.

I bring this up because Happy Madison’s track record isn’t one to boast. “Strange Wilderness,” “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” and “The Benchwarmers” are just a sample of the refuse the studio has put out in the last two years. In “The House Bunny,” not much has evolved except for the addition of more T&A. And even then, the T&A we are talking about is attached to actress Anna Faris, who may look like a Playboy model, but can’t carry a film on her own – at least not with this material.

The story begins by introducing us to Shelley Darlingson (Faris). Once an unwanted orphan, Shelley grows up, gets boobs, and ends up living in the Playboy Mansion along with Hugh Hefner and the other Girls Next Door. Shelley isn’t quite centerfold material, although she has posed in a nude pictorial called Girls with GEDs, but she is happy just being part of the gang of blonde bombshells.

But when Shelley is booted out of the mansion for supposedly being too old (she just turned 27, which is “59 in Bunny years”), she turns to sorority life and tries to become a house mother for a group of unpopular and socially-awkward college girls, whose Zeta Alpha Zeta house is going to be taken from them if they can’t come up with 30 new pledges before the start of the semester.

Cue the predictable and formulaic montages beginning with Shelley teaching the girls about style, how to apply makeup, and how to get guys to notice them. The so-called ugly girls are actually pretty ones hiding behind thick glasses, baggy clothes, and/or any other number of distracting props a la Rachel Leigh Cook in “She’s All That” or Lindsay Lohan in “Mean Girls.” The girls return the favor in a medley of ridiculous scenes by showing Shelly that while boys might be into looks, some, like Oliver (Colin Hanks), a guy who Shelly is crushing on, like girls with a little smarts, too.

It’s no surprise that writers Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith of “Legally Blonde are behind this cinematic travesty. While “Blonde” had its moments, “Bunny” is a bad rehash of the same story this time with a bit more skin. In it’s basic form, it’s a 97-minute long blonde joke without a noteworthy punch line.

Untraceable

Starring: Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks
Directed by: Gregory Hoblit (“Fracture”)
Written by: Robert Fyvolent (debut), Mark Brinker (debut), Allison Burnett (“Autumn in New York”)

Not everything about the new tech-thriller “Untraceable” is ridiculous and worthy of deletion, but most of it is. If there is a saving grace it must be Diane Lane, who could thrive in this genre if there was a workable screenplay to match what the classic beauty can do as an actress.

It happened in 2002 when Lane was nominated for her first Oscar in the dramatic thriller “Unfaithful.” In that film, Lane peeled back the layers of Connie Sumner, a wife and mother emotionally torn between her family and her lover.

In “Untraceable,” it’s the screenwriters (three of them to be exact), who are doing most of the cheating. Two newbies and the writer behind the sad and sappy film “Autum in New York” is an unusual combination that falters around the time the picture should kick into high gear.

It’s simple enough to guess from the title of the movie that either someone or something can’t be found. Turns out the missing link is a murdering computer geek who has created a Web site (killwithme.com) where visitors can assist in the killing of one of his victims by simply logging on.

It doesn’t seem like much to worry about at first for FBI Cyber Crime detective Jennifer Marsh (Lane) and her team of Portland-based Internet-browsing personnel. The killer makes his presence known by offing a kitty (don’t all serial killers have a history of animal violence?) on the World Wide Web. But when he starts kidnapping actual humans and rigging them to his computer system, Jennifer must do everything she can to find the whereabouts of the sadist before he broadcasts another death.

Where the film could have possibly made some sort of statement on the media’s influence on society and the curiosity the everyman has with violence (they mention the video of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, which made its rounds on the net back in 2002), “Untraceable,” instead, goes for basic clichéd scenes where FBI agents knock down doors and come up empty. Why not just call it “CSI: Portland” and save us a trip to the theater? Plus, once the identity of the killer is revealed fairly early in the film (and you realize that, in fact, he is as dorky as any stereotypical computer programmer with an evil grin), there’s no reason to invest in the film especially if you’re the type of moviegoer who craves the unobvious.

Transparent and less shocking than the film thinks it really is, “Untraceable” is nothing more than a high-tech torture flick that’s heavy on the gore and light on the logic.