What's Your Number (2011)

  Believe it or not, this is not the Christy pick of the month.  (I actually didn't get to her Feb pick, Bird Box, because of all the Oscar shenanigans. I'm hoping to get to it this weekend.)  This rom-com nonsense comes to you courtesy of the random shit on my inherited server.

Ally (Anna Faris) is young and struggling with her identity after losing her job.  On the subway, she reads a magazine article stating that if a woman has too many sexual partners, she'll never find a husband and that the magic number is 20.  Ally does some counting and realizes she's at 19, so she vows to not sleep with anyone else and to go back over all of her exes to see if one of them was actually Mr. Right.  To this end, she hires her commitment-phobic playboy neighbor, Colin (Chris Evans), to help her track down all her missed opportunities.

Here's how this is going to go.  First, I'm going to discuss the (very short list of) things I liked about the movie and then I'm going to dive in with the things I hated about it and rom-coms in general.

Faris and Evans are actually really good together.  I'm so used to Evans as the rather dour Captain America that I had forgotten how good he is in a comedic role.  Faris has never been one of my favorite actresses.  I particularly loathe her open-mouth dumb blonde routine but she has the kind of sparkly joy with Evans that shows they are a particularly good pairing.  Also, about half the cast are straight out of a Marvel movie so it's kind of hilarious to pretend they are all undercover.  Chris Pratt, Anthony Mackie, Martin Freeman, and of course Evans, appear, as well as a bit from New Spock, Zachary Quinto, Joel McHale, and a voicemail from Aziz Ansari, who I only know as Tom Haverford at this point. Bitch might be dumb but she's got great taste in men.

That was all the positives.

I probably shouldn't have to tell you why romantic comedies are horrible.  You already know that they are soulless, by-the-numbers slogs lacking in originality that promise specifically white upper-class women the kind of rose-tinged future that comes from adhering to rigid, controlling social norms.  Telling a woman that her value hinges on some arbitrary number of sexual partners is demeaning and plays into a host of patriarchal propaganda regarding the myth of purity as a tool to keep women subjugated.

Ally and Colin are both cowards in their own way and the movie vaguely tries to show some vulnerability but can't escape the tropes of the genre.  Colin realizes that he really likes Ally because she's the only woman he's talked to for more than a day, you know, like a real person with thoughts and feelings, without sticking his dick in and Ally realizes she likes Colin because he's the only man that lets her have her own personality rather than pressuring her to subsume her interests to his own.  That's not a great basis for a relationship but it's a start.  Unfortunately, the movie just kind of brushes off its hands at that point, slaps a "Happily Ever After" sticker on the side, and walks away secure in the knowledge that the pretty people have found each other and that's all the audience ever wanted anyway.  It's lazy and reductive but it's also not the worst one I've ever seen.