Sometimes I get a little tired of the harem fantasy. I suppose this is only natural, because I happen to be a young woman and I don't often hear or read about a film featuring my sort living in a Victorian manse with a stableful of men. Maybe if I did-maybe if we all did-"The House Bunny," set to be released on August 22, wouldn't bother me as much as it does.

The premise is hardly original. The information that follows is gleaned from the film's trailer, so please bear with me if some of these facts turn out to be inaccurate. A Playboy bunny named Shelley Darlington, played by Anna Faris, gets kicked out of Hef's mansion because she's too old (or, as the trailer says,"59 in bunny years"-I'll bet the 59-year-old movie-going demographic is going to be thrilled to hear that one).

She has nothing to do, nowhere to go and, apparently, no one to talk to besides a parking lot valet. She stumbles upon a university's Greek scene and adopts the Christian Bale Batman Voice, thereby endearing herself to a houseful of awkward sorority girls. The reason she has to gravel her speech to remember a name is inexplicably ridiculous, as is the premise that a bunch of nerdy weirdsters would think to rush a sorority in the first place, but "The House Bunny" isn't exactly "The House of Yes." Anyway, a broad kind of subintellectual madness ensues. The bunny pretties up the outcasts; they teach her to speak multisyllabically. I'm sure, at the end, every woman gets her man.

There are a lot of obvious issues one could have with such a plot. Why, for example, must a girl look like a bimbonic Playboy bunny to get some loving? Why do the characters find it shocking that, as the trailer informs us, Shelley's love interest Oliver "doesn't mind a smart girl"? And why do Playboy bunnies have to be sweet, blonde and patently moronic? Can't they be well-endowed and well-read at the same time? But none of these questions are really imported or foreign. They all seem very much at home on American soil.

My main problem with "The House Bunny" is that this plot line isn't even fundamentally original. Those of you who've been following along (all four of you) might remember a previous column I wrote about Federico Fellini and the Berkeley World Music Festival. If you happened to have read that piece, you may suspect that Fellini is not one of my favorite auteurs. You would be right. But what's fair is fair, and even I have to acknowledge that Fellini should get some kind of story credit for the essential thrust of "The House Bunny."

A few of you have been subjected to Fellini's masterpiece "8 1/2." If so, and this is where the "import" comes in, a relatively well-known scene might ring a few bells. Protagonist Guido dreams of a harem, much like Biscein does in "Amarcord" and Wanda does in "The White Sheikh." But unlike these other two mirages, Guido's is not all-inclusive. Jacqueline Bonbon, a showgirl who's supposedly 26, is banished to the second floor because she's too old to stay downstairs, just like Shelley is too old to stay in the Playboy Mansion. Shelley, however, is kicked out at age 27. It's nice to see the age cutoff has advanced with the times, because the rest of "The House Bunny," depressingly enough, has not. And, frankly, I didn't really enjoy watching the harem drama the first few times around, so I don't know why I (or anyone else, really) would pay to sit through it again.