What's Your Number: A Woman, Doing Comedy?
Here's a trailer for What's Your Number?, a comedy movie starring a woman who has had lots of sex. Pretty scandalous! Will it work? Can anything like this ever work?
This was the question posed, in slightly more graceful fashion, in a recent New Yorker profile of the film's star Anna Faris. After achieving box office success with The House Bunny and earning comedy nerd praise for her daring work in Smiley Face and Observe and Report, Faris is poised to become a comedy movie star in the way that men become comedy movie stars. Meaning people be willing to pay $11 to see her drink and fart and fuck up, even though she has breasts and a vagina. It'd be pretty amazing, if it happens.
But will it actually happen? This trailer is pretty funny and, hopefully, is broad (heh, broad) and bawdy enough to appeal to menfolk as well as their women, so it definitely seems possible. If this movie is a hit, it could very conceivably launch Faris into a whole new stratum of Hollywood Power. Which would be a good thing. Poor Tina Fey is probably pretty lonely up there. Sure she's got occasional visits from Amy Poehler and might be getting one soon from Kristen Wiig, but for the most part Fey is the only woman on that particular tier. Faris would be good company, I'd imagine.
It's too bad the plot features the creaky romantic comedy cliche of a woman desperate for a husband, but I'm sure Faris and the filmmakers found ways of subverting that. And hey, doesn't dear old Boston look pretty? What's Your Number?: See it for the Boston scenery, stay for the oddity of marketable woman-based comedy. Unthinkable! Hopefully she at least doesn't wear trousers in the picture.