Easy A - Movie Review

Directed by: Will Gluck

Written by: Bert V. Royal

Olive is a social ghost at her California high school. She is never invited to parties and chooses to make up fake boyfriends to spend the weekend with and be dormant at home rather than spend time with her best friend Rhiannon, who badmouths her all the time and whose parents happen to be nudist hippies.

Suddenly, while Olive (Emma Stone) is being interrogated by Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) she utters the biggest lie of her young adulthood – she finally lost her virginity to her fake boyfriend. Through the split-second magic of texting and social websites, Olive has become one of the most popular women at her high school’s dating market. Olive does herself no favors when she begins accepting requests and gift cards from socially inept teenage boys who ask her to admit to having some type of sexual escapade with her. As she does this, her friendship with Rhiannon is fractured and Olive becomes the target of the overly zealous Christian school group led by her one-sided nemesis Marianne (Amanda Bynes) who wants her run out of town. So, Olive figures that if everyone thinks that she is such a whore, she’ll act like the greatest whore known throughout a state known for some of the best whores, both figuratively and literally. But then Olive learns that being thought of in such a light and being the most popular girl in school makes her lonelier and much more miserable than she ever could have been when she only had one friend.

Her only roads of hope are her charismatically liberal parents Rosemary (Patricia Clarkson) and Dill (Stanley Tucci), her eighth grade crush known to the school as Woodchuck Todd, her English teacher Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), and her own wits, which she is losing more and more of by the day.

I fell in love with Emma Stone’s character. She is the kind of female (especially teenage female) that Hollywood needs more of; she is intelligent, humorous, and does not need acceptance from any social clique other than her family and the friends she cares about, but she’s still a teenager and human, even though science still has yet to prove that teenagers are indeed human at all.

Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson portray the kinds of parents that any teenager could hope to have. They steal the scenes that they’re in. Thomas Haden Church continues his coolness as the untypical English teacher Mr. Griffith, and it was a sweet surprise to find out that Lisa Kudrow portrays his wife in the film and they’re characters become relevant to the story during the middle of the film.It was a treat seeing Amanda Bynes returning to an abnormal character, which is how she got her break into entertainment in the first place.

However, as witty and charming as Easy A begins, shortly past the halfway point the film becomes a bit disjointed and I found myself looking for laughs instead of being pummeled with them. There is a nice tribute to the late great John Hughes that Olive enacts but after that it seems like the movie is relying on pop culture references to deliver the jokes rather than the smart characters that had been created and established before. And every teenager in California appears to be thirty years old or older. I’m not sure if that is serious miscasting or too much time spent in the tanning bed.

Easy A is definitely a “chick flick,” in nearly every sense of the word, and that is definitely a good thing; especially when considering all of the social horrors teenagers, the girls especially, are forced to endure. Olive is a wonderful onscreen role model and even though the movie loses steam after the midway point it is a movie I would recommend to anyone, regardless of age and gender.