Ratings
The Daily: 1.5 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 32%
More on 'What's Your Number'
IMDB
Official Website
There is apparently a much repeated adage in Hollywood that men are not the intended audience for romantic comedies like “What’s Your Number?” We would rather watch football. Or at least, we used to prefer football, before a string of investigative reporting revealed just how barbaric the game really is — an ongoing parade of savage concussions, lifelong brain damage and 35-year-old washouts without health insurance who cannot walk. The immorality of the game — to say nothing of those of us who watch and so make football such a profitable business — once highlighted, can never be unseen.
Perhaps we will one day say the same thing about romantic comedies like “What’s Your Number?”, a movie that so consistently humiliates and degrades its lead actress, Anna Faris, that it might as well just call her a jobless whore and be done with it. In fact, “What’s Your Number” does exactly that — the above epithet is the screenwriters’, not mine.
The line is uttered in the context of Ally Darling (Faris) finally embracing who she is, I guess, and is supposed to be liberating. Perhaps it would be, too, if the film didn’t spend so much of its time putting Faris through situations that are anything but. Unless you happen to think there is something liberating in a portrait of attractive grown-up who makes massively consequential life decisions based on the advice of women’s magazines, whose former partners are depicted as one long string of bartending magicians and gasping teenagers in braces, and who can relate sentiments like “I am running out of time, money, and viable eggs” with a straight face.
“What’s Your Number?” opens with the humbling of its main character — Ally, getting broken up with by a casual hookup; Ally getting fired from her marketing job by her smarmy boss; Ally hanging out with her younger sister, who is contentedly planning a wedding even as Ally, inspired by an article in Marie Claire, begins a list titled “People I’ve slept with.”
The conceit, in an inspired bit of lady-mag junk science, is that 96 percent of women who’ve had more than 20 partners end up unmarried and alone; when Ally realizes she’s at capacity, she decides to revisit her old boyfriends and one-night-stands in the hopes that there is a marriageable man among them. She does so with the help of her “rapey” neighbor from across the hall, Colin (Chris Evans), who offers to help her track down her old flames in exchange for being able to come over in the morning and hide out in her apartment from the nameless women he’s brought home the night before. Faris and Evans' on-screen chemistry is one of the few redemptive aspects of the film.
Their cosmic slutty suitability for one another thus established and left to percolate, Ally sets off on a harrowing journey through a dispiriting procession of puppeteers, sleazy gynecologists and a young Republican whom she apparently turned gay. So stingy is director (“Entourage” veteran) Mark Mylod with details that might assuage this character’s dignity that the closest thing Ally finds to a normal, handsome former fling in her romantic history is the jerk boss who laid her off. His seduction of Ally — it’s this final one-night stand that puts her at 20 — is achieved with nothing more than a quote from “Casablanca” and a bottle’s worth of shots.
Many of us have been rooting for Faris to get a lead role vaguely approximate to this one for years. After surviving the “Scary Movie” franchise and “The House Bunny,” stealing scenes in “Lost in Translation,” and proving her weird, idiosyncratic version of humor in lesser-seen films like “Smiley Face” and “Observe and Report,” Faris seemed due for her own movie, one built around her peculiar but transfixing strengths.
It’s hard to tell at times whether “What’s Your Number?” simply isn’t that movie — there are hints, in some of the film’s bawdier lines, of a much raunchier and more adventurous original script — or whether Faris isn’t actually that actress. A New Yorker profile by Tad Friend earlier this year suggested that Faris and her collaborators were under intense pressure to make “What’s Your Number?” more "relatable"; movies with female leads and female concerns, Friend quoted multiple studio executives as saying, don’t get made unless they kowtow to the formula, which is to relentlessly shame the top-billed star in an attempt to make her less intimidating and more pitiable.
If that was the intention with “What’s Your Number?” it certainly worked. Faris is alternately spray-tanned, shoved into an Ann Taylor pantsuit, and forced to play a game of one-on-one basketball while wearing only lingerie. There are a few redemptive moments — in particular one date, on which she feigns an English accent that tumbles over time from Eliza Doolittle to Borat to the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.
In what feels like a particularly cruel running gag, Faris’ character is repeatedly forced to confront an uninterested ex, whom she once knew by the sobriquet “Disgusting Donald,” but who by now has lost weight, gained a beautiful fiancée, and become sure that pathetic ol’ Ally is stalking him. In real life, the actor who plays Disgusting Donald, Chris Pratt, is married to Anna Faris. It’s supposed to be funny, husband recoiling in horror from wife, but it reads more like wishful thinking. What if we could make reality exactly as shameful and degrading for this woman, “What’s Your Number?” seems to suggest, as it is on onscreen?
The Daily: 1.5 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 32%
More on 'What's Your Number'
IMDB
Official Website
There is apparently a much repeated adage in Hollywood that men are not the intended audience for romantic comedies like “What’s Your Number?” We would rather watch football. Or at least, we used to prefer football, before a string of investigative reporting revealed just how barbaric the game really is — an ongoing parade of savage concussions, lifelong brain damage and 35-year-old washouts without health insurance who cannot walk. The immorality of the game — to say nothing of those of us who watch and so make football such a profitable business — once highlighted, can never be unseen.
Perhaps we will one day say the same thing about romantic comedies like “What’s Your Number?”, a movie that so consistently humiliates and degrades its lead actress, Anna Faris, that it might as well just call her a jobless whore and be done with it. In fact, “What’s Your Number” does exactly that — the above epithet is the screenwriters’, not mine.
The line is uttered in the context of Ally Darling (Faris) finally embracing who she is, I guess, and is supposed to be liberating. Perhaps it would be, too, if the film didn’t spend so much of its time putting Faris through situations that are anything but. Unless you happen to think there is something liberating in a portrait of attractive grown-up who makes massively consequential life decisions based on the advice of women’s magazines, whose former partners are depicted as one long string of bartending magicians and gasping teenagers in braces, and who can relate sentiments like “I am running out of time, money, and viable eggs” with a straight face.
“What’s Your Number?” opens with the humbling of its main character — Ally, getting broken up with by a casual hookup; Ally getting fired from her marketing job by her smarmy boss; Ally hanging out with her younger sister, who is contentedly planning a wedding even as Ally, inspired by an article in Marie Claire, begins a list titled “People I’ve slept with.”
The conceit, in an inspired bit of lady-mag junk science, is that 96 percent of women who’ve had more than 20 partners end up unmarried and alone; when Ally realizes she’s at capacity, she decides to revisit her old boyfriends and one-night-stands in the hopes that there is a marriageable man among them. She does so with the help of her “rapey” neighbor from across the hall, Colin (Chris Evans), who offers to help her track down her old flames in exchange for being able to come over in the morning and hide out in her apartment from the nameless women he’s brought home the night before. Faris and Evans' on-screen chemistry is one of the few redemptive aspects of the film.
Their cosmic slutty suitability for one another thus established and left to percolate, Ally sets off on a harrowing journey through a dispiriting procession of puppeteers, sleazy gynecologists and a young Republican whom she apparently turned gay. So stingy is director (“Entourage” veteran) Mark Mylod with details that might assuage this character’s dignity that the closest thing Ally finds to a normal, handsome former fling in her romantic history is the jerk boss who laid her off. His seduction of Ally — it’s this final one-night stand that puts her at 20 — is achieved with nothing more than a quote from “Casablanca” and a bottle’s worth of shots.
Many of us have been rooting for Faris to get a lead role vaguely approximate to this one for years. After surviving the “Scary Movie” franchise and “The House Bunny,” stealing scenes in “Lost in Translation,” and proving her weird, idiosyncratic version of humor in lesser-seen films like “Smiley Face” and “Observe and Report,” Faris seemed due for her own movie, one built around her peculiar but transfixing strengths.
It’s hard to tell at times whether “What’s Your Number?” simply isn’t that movie — there are hints, in some of the film’s bawdier lines, of a much raunchier and more adventurous original script — or whether Faris isn’t actually that actress. A New Yorker profile by Tad Friend earlier this year suggested that Faris and her collaborators were under intense pressure to make “What’s Your Number?” more "relatable"; movies with female leads and female concerns, Friend quoted multiple studio executives as saying, don’t get made unless they kowtow to the formula, which is to relentlessly shame the top-billed star in an attempt to make her less intimidating and more pitiable.
If that was the intention with “What’s Your Number?” it certainly worked. Faris is alternately spray-tanned, shoved into an Ann Taylor pantsuit, and forced to play a game of one-on-one basketball while wearing only lingerie. There are a few redemptive moments — in particular one date, on which she feigns an English accent that tumbles over time from Eliza Doolittle to Borat to the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.
In what feels like a particularly cruel running gag, Faris’ character is repeatedly forced to confront an uninterested ex, whom she once knew by the sobriquet “Disgusting Donald,” but who by now has lost weight, gained a beautiful fiancée, and become sure that pathetic ol’ Ally is stalking him. In real life, the actor who plays Disgusting Donald, Chris Pratt, is married to Anna Faris. It’s supposed to be funny, husband recoiling in horror from wife, but it reads more like wishful thinking. What if we could make reality exactly as shameful and degrading for this woman, “What’s Your Number?” seems to suggest, as it is on onscreen?
