Easy A

This is one of those cutting edge comedies about high school where the students look mature-age and the sassy heroine finds herself standing on the outside of the system, Easy A is an upfront update of The Scarlet Letter where Olive (Emma Stone) is a senior student accused of sluttiness despite actually being a virgin. She goes along with the misunderstanding as an experiment in reputation vs. truth, but soon the lies spiral out of control and she finds herself increasingly osctracised as we take a jolly rollercoaster ride through high school cliques and school scandals.

I really wanted to like Easy A but there was a lot in it that I found annoying. I can handle self-consciously hip dialogue and characters talking directly to the camera, but when you're trying to tune into today's youth it helps to employ some degree of realism. The whole film is naively built upon the supposition that hardly any high school students have sex, and works off this in a fairly hysterical and melodramatic fashion. It also does that irritating self-reflexive thing where the film constantly has to remind the audience how clever it is by saying it directly in the dialogue, which ironically renders all its cleverness null and void.

For instance, it's cool that Easy A wants to avoid the cliches of the teen movie genre but calling attention to said avoidances just doesn't do the trick. I found Olive's parents to be particularly groanworthy... there seems to be this ongoing assumption on Hollywood's part that people from California are the wackiest and most interesting people in the world. Another appalling facet of the film is the convenient exposition that it spoonfeeds to the audience... the moment that Olive's black younger brother is introduced, the kid and her dad play out a droll exchange that explains it just for our benefit. Furthermore, the film relies on the plot point of all these lies about Olive's reputation getting out of hand but the numerous reasons given for why she goes along with it are never watertight enough to be all that convincing. A lot of it is just a plain old cop out.

It's not all bad... Emma Stone is charismatic, and Thomas Haden Church has a good role despite having some godawful dialogue where he references all the 1980s film-teacher cliches. The lip service Easy A pays to John Hughes films is welcome, as is its subversion of great American literature (The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) for the purposes of creating something akin to new pop art. It's just a shame that the film didn't think highly enough of its audience to tone down the fourth wall breaking footnotes. I'm quite enthusiastic for Hollywood to make these clever, satirical and thought-provoking high school movies... they just need to be a bit more subtle about it.

DIRECTOR: Will Gluck
WRITER: Bill V. Royal, drawing inspiration from the novel The Scarlet Letter.
KEY ACTORS: Emma Stone, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Malcolm McDowell, Lisa Kudrow, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Penn Badgley, Alu Michalka

RELATED TEXTS:
- Loosely based on the classic novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. Bill V. Royal had/has plans to also similarly update the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand and The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens.
- Gluck's next film is Friends With Benefits, featuring some of the same cast.
- The most obvious comparison to make with Easy A is Juno, both have post-modern senses of humour and breakout performances from young female leads. Assassination of a High School President also deals with themes related to cliques and social outsiders.
- Also see the TV series Veronica Mars.

AWARDS
Golden Globes - Best Actress - Musical or Comedy (Emma Stone).