What’s Your Number? (2011)

(On DVD, October 2016) Slightly raunchier than the usual romantic comedy, What’s Your Number? works best as a showcase for the comic charm of Anna Faris and Chris Evans rather than anything worth pondering too deeply. Once again straddling the conflicted attitudes toward sex in mainstream American comedy, the titular number refers to the total number of sexual partners for any given person. Our protagonist tortures herself in implausible plot twists in an effort not to shamefully exceed a total of twenty—meanwhile, the male romantic lead is never questioned for whatever exponentially higher number he has. But delving under the hood of romantic comedies never works in their favour, so the point here is rather to see Faris and Evans develop an easy chemistry, waiting for the lies to catch up to the protagonists and seeing the amusing episodes in which the lead character reconnects (or doesn’t) with her ex-boyfriends. It ends pretty much as expected fifteen minutes in, which isn’t necessarily a compliment (even for someone with a high tolerance for romantic-comedy conventions) given the unbelievable contortions the third act has to undergo in order to prevent it from happening too quickly. The rest of What’s Your Number? is mildly amusing if you’re in the mood for such things. And if that sounds like faint praise, well…