Film Clips 

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THE HOUSE BUNNY According to the Internet Movie Database, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has appeared as himself in over 150 movies, TV shows and video productions, including episodes of Laverne & Shirley, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Sex and the City. Personally, I don't think he'll ever top his cameo in the Roman Empire segment of Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I, but he does enjoys more screen time in The House Bunny. The 82-year-old Hef serves as a father figure of sorts to Shelley Darlingson (Anna Faris), a Playboy Bunny who lives at his legendary mansion. But right after her 27th birthday (59 in Bunny years, she's told), she's kicked out of the house, although it's not long before she finds herself with a new gig: serving as a house mother to the socially awkward girls from the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority. Soon, she's instructing them on how to attract boys while they're teaching her how to depend on more than just her looks. This was co-written by the same women (Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith) who penned Legally Blonde, and their roots are clearly showing. This is basically an inferior version of that Reese Witherspoon hit, and it isn't even up to the standards of Amanda Bynes' similarly plotted Sydney White. But Faris, a talented comedienne, strikes the proper airhead notes, and Lutz and Smith take care to feed her some funny lines now and then. Incidentally, Hefner was 27 – the same age as Shelley in the movie – when the first issue of Playboy (featuring Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold) hit the streets. Apparently, 27 is 59 in Bunny years, but, considering the man's still-swinging ways, 82 is 27 in Hef years. **

THE LONGSHOTS Make no mistake: We've seen this exact same "root for the underdog" sport movies countless times before. But we haven't seen them starring rapper Ice Cube. And we certainly haven't seen them directed by Limp Bizkit frontman (and Gastonia native) Fred Durst. But the presence of this pair has absolutely no effect on the end product in terms of making it fresh or vital. None of the scenes snap, crackle or pop, and, truth be told, Durst's staging of the football games displays a noticeable lack of imagination. On the other hand, it's hard to completely screw up this sort of formula film, and while its claim of being based on a true story should (as always) be taken lightly, it occasionally works because of the two charismatic actors at the helm. Ice Cube, who has successfully molded his limited thespian abilities into an agreeable screen persona, stars as Curtis Plummer, just one of the many unemployed men in the struggling blue-collar town of Minden, Illinois. With nothing better to do with his time, Curtis reluctantly agrees to look after his withdrawn niece Jasmine (Keke Palmer, building on the promise of Akeelah and the Bee) while her mother (Tasha Smith) works double shifts. As expected, Curtis and Jasmine have nothing in common – at least until the day he discovers she has a formidable arm when it comes to tossing the pigskin. Curtis then sets about training her for the institution's pathetic team, which hasn't enjoyed a winning season in ages. Jasmine makes the cut and begins to turn their season around, but is she good enough to take the outfit all the way to the Pop Warner Super Bowl? What do you think? **

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR 1999's The Mummy was a barely passable Indiana Jones rip-off, while 2001's The Mummy Returns proved to be rather dismal. This one, though, is the worst of the lot. In the China of 2,000 years ago, a sorceress (Michelle Yeoh) places a curse on an evil emperor (Jet Li) who can now only be awoken by a drop of human blood; cut to 1946, where retired adventurer Rick O'Connell (series star Brendan Fraser) and his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, replacing Rachel Weisz after the latter declared, "Screw this; I have an Oscar now!") mope around their English estate while son Alex (Luke Ford) is off digging up the emperor. Plot contrivances reunite all of them – plus Evelyn's brother Jonathan (returning stooge John Hannah) – in Shanghai, and from there, the gang is forced to fight the now-revived emperor. The sloppiness of the entire enterprise is immediately evident by the fact that the 27-year-old Ford looks nowhere near young enough to be playing the son of 39-year-old Fraser and 41-year-old Bello. From there, the movie only gets more absurd; for example, do the O'Connells really encounter abominable snowmen who, based on the employment of a field goal signal, must subscribe to DIRECTV's NFL Sunday Ticket package? And do scripters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar think that audiences will be impressed by dialogue that basically consists of variations on Rick yelping, "Well, here I am fighting mummies again!"? This manages to make even an epic battle between armies of the undead a dull undertaking. Clearly, here's a perfunctory franchise which needs to take a long-overdue dirt nap. *