What’s Your Number?
Regal, October 4, 2011
Movie #73 for 2011
Mindy Kaling (from the Office) wrote a little article in last week’s New Yorker giving a chuckle-filled explanation of what we already know: the lead actresses is romantic-comedies get a bum deal: they’re always short-changed to be non-threatening in some way (like being klutzy, or work-obsessed) or at 40, are playing the mother of the 30 year-old male lead.
Around the same time as Kaling’s article, ANNA FARIS (Observe and Report, The House Bunny, but who I will always remember as the "Evelyn Waugh" actress in Lost in Translation) was talking the same talk about making romantic-comedies that are more honest about women, and - she hoped - funnier and ruder, too. I applaud her sentiment, but I think she only got partially there with What’s Your Number? (which she produced).
Faris is Ally, a newly-fired heroine who reads in a girly magazine that she is unlikely to get married (that being the be-all-and-end-all of hetero-girl life) if she has slept with more than 20 people (which she has). She goes on a mission to see if any of her exes are marriage material, enlisting the help of struggling-musician, boy-slut, son-of-a-cop neighbor CHRIS EVANS (Captain America, pictured with Faris) to find them with a little more investigative know-how than Google can afford. Although there are shades of a bunch of other rom-coms in this premise, including Runaway Bride and a mangled High Fidelity, I’m not yet that disappointed.
What I’m most disappointed in is the writing. Although some of it is actually quite good and some of the lines the women are given are refreshingly real, the rest is conventional, derivative and drenched in cliché (emotional climax at a wedding? Really?) It’s a step in the right direction though, and Farris and Evans make it more tolerable than anyone else I can think of would have.
