Easy A [2010]

High school girl, Olive, tells her friend a lie about losing her virginity – the lie is overheard – overblown – and suddenly everyone thinks Olive is a slut and ostracized like in The Scarlett Letter. Olive embraces the persona – allows others to “use” her and brag that they slept with her to hide various issues (homosexuality & feeling undesirable) – until this backfires in a huge way.

What I really liked about EASY A was the idea that “it’s none of your fucking business when and if I lose my virginity” – which is something I quite appreciate because there are too many films that revolve around teens losing their virginity and the glorification of it.

I liked Olive’s family, Thomas Hayden Church as the aloof teacher and Emma Stone as Olive. The writing was pretty solid for a teen flick – though it was a bit thin and cliché – it wasn’t bad.

What I didn’t care for was the webcam self-aware narrative aspect – Olive claims that she’s invisible – and writes it off as not being cliché high school girl film – but the entire film even when she was getting all the attention – she was still not listened to and not cared about for herself. It may have been me – but it seemed like almost every time she spoke – she was interrupted or ignored. Even when she embraced her bad girl persona – she found a certain level of self-respect – but no real respect from others.

I didn’t like how some of the characters were razor thin - even Olive was a bit thin. It took her no time to invent the persona and just accept and act the part. I would assume more outrage and denial would’ve gone on in real life before the embrace and full turn into the mega-slut persona.

Also, I know that 80’s romantic comedies and John Hughes films are ingrained in certain people’s hearts – but the references in this film were unnecessary. Yes, an acknowledgement of those films is fine – but you should create your own memorable scene instead of co-opting a famous previously used scene – you may think you can’t do better than what has been done – but you’ll never know unless you try. Just try.

[Guess it showed back up again - - so here you go]

Overall – it sounds like I have more complaints than love for this movie – but I really liked it for what it was. It was cute and fun at times – though it was flawed – I can appreciate it.