Easy A, a grade of A.

Rating: 9/10 (6 February 2011)

The movie, Easy A was an incredibly good movie. The movie is about a young woman named Olive, who is pretty much unnoticeable to everyone in her whole school. She tells a lie to her friend in the girl's restroom, but she doesn't notice that there is another girl in one of the stalls. Well, the rumor gets spread throughout the entire school and all of a sudden, Olive (Emma Stone) is noticed by all. It just so happens that in her English class they are reading the book The Scarlet letter, which I'm wondering didn't help Olive come up with her idea to blow the entire rumor out of proportion. Anyways, Olive gets this reputation for being a whore, so she plays this role and boy does she play the role and play it well. Then it gets complicated when people who also are not known or are known for things that make their lives bad, convince Olive to "say" they did stuff to make the other people look better. For an example, a homosexual boy in Olive's class convinces Olive to help him by pretending to have intercourse with him at a very large party. People no longer thought he was gay because of Olive's lie. OK, no more examples now. The theme of the movie is pretty apparent, Olive told all these lies to help people and in the end it turns around to bite her in the rear. In the end she regrets her decision to play on the rumor that was spread about her. It is rather easy to feel for Olive and to relate with her and her reasoning. The movie has many familiar faces in it including Emma Stone as Olive, Amanda Bynes as Marianne, Lisa Kudrow as Mrs. Griffith and Patricia Clarkson as Olive's mother, Rosemary. The actors and actresses did a great job, making it easy to believe the plot and just the overall ride of watching the film. The movie features high key lighting with all the sets being rather bright, except of course for night shots. I noticed too that when Olive is faced with these dilemmas to help people, the camera tends to view only Olive and her face as she makes these decisions. One of my favorite parts is towards the end of the movie when Olive is sitting with her mother after everything unfolds, all you see is the stars and the calm night sky, but you hear Olive explaining everything to her mother, but you don't see either of them on the screen. In this moment looking at the stars you sense Olive's calmness. You can just sense that she has come up with a plan to make everything better, and you can sense her calmness, it's not so stressful in this point in the film. Another film I have seen that has a similar theme is that of the film The Outsiders. The two boys make a split decision and killed someone and it changed their entire lives. However after the regrettable act, they are given the opportunity to redeem themselves and they save a bunch of little kids in a fire. Similar to that is Olive who makes a decision to be labeled and then helps people and then it turns around to bite her in the butt. After watching the entire movie, though I was still left wondering why she would even go through all the trouble of making the rumor stick. She changed her entire wardrobe to fit the label she was given, she even went as far to put an 'A' on her shirts in reference to the book her English class was reading. Either way, it was a very good movie and I would recommend it to anyone. The grade I would give this move would be an A.