Anna’s latest movie, The House Bunny, won the box office on it’s opening day with $5.9 million, and finished as number two in it’s opening weekend. As a surprise-hit (according to the critics), the movie earned a solid $15.1 million from 2,714 venues. It even had a venue average of $5,564 - the best in the top twelve!

While The House Bunny came in at only 42% fresh at RottenTomatoes, Faris got good reviews, and despite the low score, it ties Death Race as the best reviewed opener of the weekend. This is great news for both Anna and The House Bunny! Below follows some tidbits from various reviews.

Not only is Anna Faris one of the more brightly gifted comediennes working today, she’s some sort of miracle worker. How else can one explain the ability to sit through something that emerged from Fred Wolf and not have the urge to run screaming from the theater? That Anna Faris is amazing.

The House Bunny repairs some of Wolf’s damaged reputation, but that’s only because Anna Faris is there to bail out his pedestrian moviemaking skills.

Faris is such a wide-eyed wonder of giggles that it seems unfair to watch as she’s paired up with movies that don’t fully comprehend what to do with her. The House Bunny isn’t her first starring role, but it represents a critical step to longstanding fame, and she aces the character like a total champ. Clad in little more than high heels and a smile, it’s an atypical role for the actress, now asked to balance out her natural bubbles with a candied sexuality, to better match the platinum-blonde build of the aspiring Playboy starlet.

Faris is rarity in the industry: a legitimately hilarious performer with a virtuoso sense of timing and screwball articulation. Faris refuses to make Shelley the joke of The House Bunny, only its clueless ambassador, stumbling through a wonderfully oddball courtship with an idealist (Colin Hanks) during her time turning geeks into goddesses.

Source: Oh My News International

Years of scene-stealing in both indie movies and lowbrow comedies have refined Faris’s approachable goofiness, and she finds an original, star-quality approach to playing a cheesy sex bomb. As Shelley, Faris widens her eyes (or as Shelley refers to them, “the nipples of the face”) as if she’s struggling to see through her own blissful daze, and speaks with a breathy, earnest tone. She’s superficial and bubbleheaded, but doesn’t have a malicious bone in her toned body; Faris finds comedy in her innocent belief in the healing togetherness of the Playboy fantasy. Shelley’s attempts at sexiness are so goofy that they go back around and become sexy again.

The best you can say about The House Bunny is it gives Faris a character and a framework and gets out of her way. In this case, that nearly qualifies as high praise. The bare-bones story: Shelley wanders into a run-down sorority house and offers her services as “house mother” to the misfit Zeta girls, whose lack of pledges threatens their chapter’s survival. Makeovers, house parties, revenges of nerds, and lessons follow.

Source: FilmCritic.com