"Easy A" gets an "A" for effort...

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2010)

(John Hughes would be proud with "Easy A.") Oh, boy, where to start with this movie, hmm? Well, for one, Will Gluck's "Easy A" provided me with a brief respite from the day-to-day insanity that is my life. The last movie I saw in theaters was "Predators" and that was back in July; that's three months of not having to pay the inflated ticket price of $8.75 to see a movie. But my self-imposed moratorium on not going to the movies was well-worth the wait with "Easy A." The script shines in delivering a fast-paced, laugh-a-minute screenplay with a story vaguely paralleling "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (which I never read in high school); Olive Pendergast (Emma Stone, the husky-voiced redhead from "Superbad" and "Zombieland" whose career has just been made with this film) is a social nobody at her shiny, pristine Southern California high school. But that changes when a little lie to get out of spending time with her best friend's weird family somehow explodes into a huge, school-wide rumor about how she allegedly lost her virginity to some made-up college hunk. A la Hester Prynne in "The Scarlet Letter," Olive becomes the talk of her high school rumor mill, with boys approaching her left and right to help them with their reputations around campus. So she decides to embrace her newfound infamy (complete with a telltale "A" pinned on the shoulder of her new wardrobe), much to the chagrin of the high school queen bee (Amanda Bynes, fresh out of her retirement) and the mascot of the basketball team (Penn Badgley), with whom Olive shares an unusual romantic past with. And we all know how one lie leads to an even bigger lie and how that bigger lie leads to an even bigger lie and so on and so forth. "Easy A" is a brilliantly acted teen comedy with nods aplenty to the work of the late John Hughes (1950-2009), "Can't Buy Me Love" (1987) with Patrick Dempsey, and Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything" (1989). Stone is a star; she's not just a pretty face. She's spunky with an incredibly razor-sharp wit, and a heart to boot, even as she must face the music and try to put the wrong things right in her chaotic life and improve her high school reputation before it's too late. She's intelligent, easy on the eyes, and proves with this movie that she has a bright future ahead of her in the movies. "Easy A" is an easy movie to like. In a wasteland of instantly forgettable and stupid teen movies, "Easy A" is one teen flick you can pay $8.75 to see in the theater, and not kick yourself for doing so in the morning...
10/10