At least from the looks of its trailer, What’s Your Number? — the not-your-average-rom-com rom-com spotlighted in The New Yorker’s recent Anna Faris feature about the lack of opportunity for funny women in Hollywood — isn’t trying to completely burn down the genre-trope farm. (Wait, is “burning down the farm” an expression anywhere other than in our heads? Sorry, let’s just move on.) For one: You know in the first ten seconds whom Faris’s unlucky-in-love character will end up with, and that person is a flawed-but-easily-redeemable really, really handsome guy with a big heart. But mostly everything else about this, admirably, feels new, most of all that Faris comes off as truly odd; not cutesy and appropriately eccentric, but fully weird in an occasionally unsettling way (as in: “My British accent was rusty and I went full Borat”). More important: This thing is actually funny! So funny, in fact, that we’re going to try to figure out a way to work “I’m marrying a scientist, too; he doesn’t look smart either” into casual conversation by this afternoon. And most important: If this thing makes Anna Faris a big-time star, are we retroactively forgiven for totally loving both Scary Movie 1 and 2?
