Reviewed by Melissa Garza
One of the best things in the world is when you’re flipping through channels, settle on a film you’ve never heard of and find it to be fantastic. Such was the case with Easy A.
Starring The Amazing Spiderman’s Emma Stone, Olive is a teenage girl in high school who has a great reputation. She lies to her best friend Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) and says that over the weekend she went on a date. Rhiannon takes it wrong and believes she lost her virginity. An overly-religious teen Marianne (Amanda Bynes) overhears and soon it’s all over the school.
Olive ends up getting detention and needs to clean the school. There she begins talking with Brandon (Dan Byrd), a gay teenager who is relentlessly bullied. Later, Brandon begs her to pretend they are dating so he can deny being gay and stop getting beaten up. At first she declines but when he says he doesn’t know what he’ll do, she relents.
They go to a party where everyone from high school is and slip into a bedroom where they pretend to have sex. When word gets out they start looking at her as a tramp. This heightens when she ends up helping others in trouble.
One camp that outright hates her is the religious bunch run by Marianne. Marianne is so out-there that she had the school change their mascot from the Blue Devils to The Woodchucks. Her focus shifts to Olive branding her a whore. Instead of cowering, Olive starts wearing altered corsets with the letter “A” attached as a reference to The Scarlet Letter which is currently her assigned reading.
Things get out of hand when a classmate says he obtained chlamydia from Olive when in fact it was from a married guidance counselor. She covers for them both and is ousted even more from everyone including her best friend.
The only person who doesn’t judge her or believe the rumor-mill is Todd (Penn Badgley) the boy she’s liked since 8th grade. Back in junior high, she covered for him when he wasn’t ready to kiss her. That in mind, he figured she was doing the same for everyone else at the school.
This is one of the only modern teenage movies that understands how to deliver. It shows appreciation for John Hughes movies by not only showing clips from the productions but paying homage to it at the end as well. It’s comedic, intelligent, and makes fun of itself enough to stay away from being pretentious.
The parents, Rosemary (Patricia Clarkson) and Dill (Stanley Tucci) were hilarious and wonderfully performed. Malcolm McDowell portrayed the principal and as always stood out even in the smallest of roles.
Watching Stone’s performance makes me even more excited about seeing the new Spiderman. I am looking forward to seeing her in versatility as Olive was such an eccentric character that she did so well with.
Though romance fills the film, there is a strong message to it as well. As the current generation tends to be open about everything and displays everything on networking sites like Facebook, it is important to understand the signficance of privacy as well.
Scared Stiff Review 8/10
