Chances Are

Rating: 6/10 (9 June 2018)

Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is a high school student who lies to her best friend Rhiannon that she has lost her virginity. The lie goes round the school and quickly she is regarded as a slut and soon Olive dresses like one.
To prevent her gay friend Brandon from bullying, they pretend to have sex at a party while the others listen to their screams from outside the door. Later Olive helps out a fat friend by letting him say that he went out with her in exchange for some gift vouchers. Pretty soon a student who gets Chlamydia tells everyone he got it off Olive as it was the easier thing to do.
However Olive's life spirals out of control as nobody sees the real her. Men just want to use her. Even her easy going parents are concerned about her.
Easy A is the epitome of efficient writing. If you are a budding screenwriter or want to make your own movies, just make a careful study of it. It even wears its influences on its sleeves. Everything referenced to in this film, it will come back to later.
As an example Olive is studying the book The Scarlet Letter at school. Well Olive gets branded as a harlot and she plays up to it by wearing even more revealing clothes with a big label A. Olive mentions 80s brat pack movies of John Hughes. At the end of the film there is a pointless song and dance number just like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I did like the reference to Huckleberry Finn that would later come back like a boomerang.
Easy A is fresh and amusing with charming performances from the cast, especially Emma Stone. However it is not as clever as it thinks it is and the wheels fall off as the film goes along. For a start I find it hard to believe that Olive is the only high school student who has had sex!
Many of the characters are paper thin and one dimensional. There are lazy stereotypes of Christians but the worse is the one Indian high schooler who speaks with an Indian twang.
So Hollywood film studios cannot have a second generation character of Indian origin who was born and raised in America in this day and age?