The House Bunny

All of the new DVD releases hit stores (and Netflix) on Tuesdays. So each week in What to Netflix: New DVD Tuesday, I sort through the best of the batch and tell you what to add to your queue.

Mamma Mia!
Mamma Mia is a lot of things: fun, sparkly, full of handsome middle-aged men, kind of a hilarious hot mess, etc. It's also now a Golden Globe nominee, which is not something I would have imagined possible for this movie but there you have it! Still, a lot of people will be excited to add this one to their Netflix queues (or to receive it as a gift) to sing along and dance to in the privacy of their own homes (I'm looking at you, Mom).

The special features are totally what you would expect to accompany this musical on DVD. They include — what else? — a sing-along that includes onscreen lyrics for 22 musical numbers, as well as a deleted musical number titled "The Name of the Game." There's also commentary from director Phyllida Lloyd, a featurette on the making of the movie, and some deleted scenes and outtakes.

Two more releases up next so read more

The Coen Bros. helped give the box office a needed Autumn boost with their comedy Burn After Reading, which debuted at No. 1 with an estimated $19.4 million. It was a lucrative weekend overall, actually, with many of the week's new releases doing better than expected despite a "crowded marketplace for adult-skewing films."

In second place came Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys earning $18 million, followed by the Al Pacino-Robert De Niro reunion, Righteous Kill. And despite unflattering reviews, even The Women did alright over the weekend, coming in at No. 4 with an estimated $10 million followed by The House Bunny in fifth place.

Alan Ball's Towelhead also opened and "nabbed the best per- location average of the weekend." Finally, for those of you keeping track, The Dark Knight is up another $4 million, putting its total domestic gross so far at an estimated $517 million.

Photo courtesy of Focus Features

Well, the Fall movie season came in with a whimper. According to Variety, "The first weekend after Labor Day is always sluggish, but this year the frame was affected by the start of the NFL football season and was particularly dreary." Bangkok Dangerous came in at No. 1, but it only earned an estimated $7.8 million and narrowly beat Tropic Thunder, which earned an estimated $7.5 million.

The House Bunny came in third place, followed by The Dark Knight in fourth and Don Cheadle's thriller Traitor in fifth place. Interestingly, Hamlet 2, which received major buzz at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is not doing too well in theaters and has only grossed an estimated $4.3 million over the two weekends it's been out.

Kind of a bummer of a weekend, but don't worry—next week The Women and Burn After Reading hit theaters! Who's excited?

Photo courtesy of Lionsgate

Labor Day weekend officially signals the close of the Summer box office season, and this year's ended on, as Variety described it, "a whimper" as opposed to a bang. Tropic Thunder landed in the top spot for the third weekend in a row, pulling in an estimated $14.3 million over four days. The second spot went to Babylon A.D. which earned an estimated $12 million. The Dark Knight came in at No. 3, surpassing the $500 million mark on Sunday.

Traitor starring Don Cheadle and Guy Pearce opened this weekend and came in fifth place with $10 million, just behind The House Bunny, which came in No. 4 with $10.2 million.

Photos courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder won the top spot at the box office for the second weekend in a row, earning an estimated $16.1 million. This makes Tropic Thunder, Iron Man, and The Dark Knight the only movies to have stayed at No. 1 for two consecutive weeks this Summer (so that's two major box office winners for Robert Downey Jr.!).

Following closely behind in the No. 2 spot was The House Bunny, which earned an estimated $15.1 million its first weekend out. Coming in third was the Death Race remake with about $12.3 million. In fourth place was The Dark Knight, followed by Star Wars: The Clone Wars at No. 5.

I didn't think the Rainn Wilson comedy The Rocker would do very well, but I'm surprised to see how badly it did. The comedy failed to crack the top 10 and only earned about $2.7 million.

Hamlet 2, which was all the rage at Sundance this year, had a limited release and brought in an estimated $435,294. The offbeat comedy will have a wider release this Wednesday.

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

To be honest, I really wanted The House Bunny to be great. I didn't expect it to be, but I wished it would surprise me and turn out to be fun and hilarious. Amidst the constant comedic bombardment from the Ferrells, Stillers and Apatows of the world, I wanted there to be a totally kickass, stand-out female-led comedy. And while Anna Faris is endearingly goofy, the movie overall is just another manufactured cookie-cutter cutout of the same ol', same ol' (not unlike an actual Playboy bunny, come to think of it).

You can glean pretty much all the necessary information about the plot from the movie's trailer. Playboy bunny Shelley (Faris) learns that she's been kicked out of the Playboy mansion after her 27th birthday. She wanders around until she spots a row of houses that look like miniature Playboy mansions: frat and sorority houses. Shelley ultimately finds herself at the Zeta Alpha Zeta house, thus far led by the adorably nerdy Natalie. ZAZ is the place where the "misfit" sorority girls go (you know, ones who have piercings, or a back brace, or were raised on a farm). The girls need to get at least 30 new pledges in order to keep the ZAZ house, so Shelley appoints herself as the sorority's housemother and gets to work changing around the sorority's reputation. For more on how she goes about doing this, read more

It was a family affair for Rumer Willis at The House Bunny premiere at Mann Village Theater in LA last night. Ashton, Bruce, Demi and the rest of the gang came out to support her new movie, proving once again how close the whole family is. Her parents weren't the only ones with dates on their arms, Rumer brought her boyfriend Micah Alberti to pose for photos and see the film. Also out on the pink carpet, Anna Faris looked great in her white gown, Emmanuelle Chriqui was stunning as always, and the man himself Hugh Hefner brought his girls to watch the film. It was quite the star-studded carpet last night, but do you think you'll check out the movie?

Tons more photos of Rumer's family plus Ashley Tisdale, Justin Long, and many other so just read more

It's like Legally Blonde meets The Hottie and the Nottie, with a dash of The Girls Next Door tossed in. The House Bunny follows Anna Faris as Shelley, a Playboy bunny who finds herself "too old" to be a bunny anymore. Thrown out of Hef's mansion, she wanders onto a college campus where she discovers a sorority of "nerdy girls" and she becomes their housemother. From the trailer, it looks like she teaches them how to put on makeup and short skirts (the keys to success, apparently?) though by the end of the trailer Shelley herself seems to have learned about the benefits of being a "smart girl."

Though aspects of this movie make me cringe already, I found myself laughing out loud a few times at the trailer, despite Faris' weirdly slurry speech (anyone else notice this?). The House Bunny opens August 22. To check out the trailer, read more