March 13, 2012

Looking for the best ex of her life...

As doing nothing is a perfect weekend plan, we spent a snowy Sunday curled up on the sofa with the world's cutest canines watching What's Your Number? And while this flick was astonishingly not even mentioned at the Oscars (kidding, not a chance), it was a fun two-hour escape.

The razor-thin plot: Ally comes across a Marie Claire article which asks the reader to calculate how many people she has slept with and tells her what her number means. Reading that her number of 19 is double the average, and that if she hits 20 she is unlikely to find a husband ever, Ally decides to track down all of her ex-boyfriends in the hope that one of them will have grown into the man she wants to marry, so the number of men she has slept with will never increase. And in case none of the exes work out, she will save herself so that "Mr 20" will be her future husband.

With the help of her womanizing neighbor Colin, played by an often shirtless Chris Evans, Ally manages to find all of her exes, but things do not quite work out the way she had expected.

Ally's exes range from married to engaged to gay to missing to puppeteer to perfect-but-boring. And sometimes Mr Right is the guy next door... okay, so we all know how we this is going to play out, but when the jokes are funny and the leads are charming, what does it matter? In What's Your Number the playing-out is fun.

Beware prudes, this raunchy movie references penises and vaginas with reckless abandon. But despite the obviousness and crude language of the screenplay, there is real romantic comedy here. Chris Evans is hunky and charming as the Twitter-loving matchmaker, and there is something really attractive about Anna Faris as loveable klutz Ally. Think of a young Goldie Hawn in a lighter-than-air Bridesmaids.

This is not a deep flick; it is an endearing fast funny sex comedy. However as I am prone to over-thinking every damn thing, there are some real questions there if you really want to think about them...

... How many lovers is too many? In today's world are people still counting? How much of yourself do you give up to date someone else? Does it matter how many people you have slept with? Why wasn't this charming romantic comedy a bigger hit? Is there a double standard men vs women? What about us gay guys, do we even keep track of our numbers? Why isn't Ana Faris a bigger star? ... and... with Chris Evans being so damn attractive, why does he bother to wear clothes at all?