Women troubles

A survey of a thin summer for women at the movies; there's not much work for actresses amid all the superhero stomping around. Manohla Dargis does throw some well-deserved love to Anna Faris, whose trailer for The House Bunny made me laugh this weekend. (NY Times)

And in August, Anna Faris stars in a comedy called “The House Bunny,” in which she plays a Playboy Bunny who is ejected from the Mansion because she’s too old. In a trailer for the movie Ms. Faris’s pretty-in-pink character responds to her firing with surprise. “I’m 27!” she yelps. “But that’s like 59 in Bunny years,” a male friend explains. In Hollywood years too, he might as well have added.

I admit that I laughed at the 59 line, mostly because Ms. Faris — who could be the next Judy Holliday but without the right material will, alas, probably end up the next Brittany Murphy — tends to do the dumb-blonde thing with sizable quotation marks. But I also winced. You can’t judge a film by its trailer, so I won’t boil this bunny sight unseen. I’ll just point out that it looks like a clone of “Legally Blonde” (meaning, yet another iteration of “Pretty Woman”), one of those aspirational comedies in which women empower themselves by having their hair and nails done. In this case Ms. Faris’s character takes charge of a sorority of unkempt brainiacs with boy troubles. Cue the group makeover and pop-tune montage.