Pretty good, as a long as you don't seriously compare it to John Hughes' 80s teen comedies

Rating: 6/10 (25 January 2011)

This smart and charming film self-consciously invokes the John Hughes teen movies of the 1980s, but Easy A is a little too pat and plastic to rank alongside those classic flicks.
Olive (Emma Stone) is the good girl nobody pays attention to in her high school, until the day she lies about having a date with a college guy to avoid spending the weekend with her inexplicable and insufferable best friend (Alyson Michalka). That lie eventually expands to include Olive having sex with the non-existent college guy, a fib that spreads like wildfire thanks to it being overheard by school Jesus freak Marianne (Amanda Bynes). Olive is both horrified at her new reputation and enticed by the attention her new identity brings her.
Things get more complicated when closeted gay teen Brandon (Dan Byrd) asks Olive to pretend to have sex with him in order to convince the rest of the school he's straight and spare him any more homophobic torments. Olive agrees, and that leads to her becoming the pretend tramp for a string of school outcasts and losers, leaving Olive with a more and more scandalous reputation which she becomes more and more fond of.
Eventually, the downside of being thought the class whore comes crashing down on Olive's life, forcing her to take to the internet to try and clear her namewhich always works so well in real life.
Easy A is clever and fast-paced with an adorable star in Emma Stone and some funny supporting performances from Thomas Haden Church as Olive's favorite teacher and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci and Olive's uninhibited and omni-supportive parents. It's a pleasant enough diversion but you can't ignore how the movie as a whole is about as thin as butcher's paper.
Everything in this film is too perfect and too obvious and toowell, easy. Take Olive and her best friend as an example. As these characters are presented, it doesn't seem to make any sense that the girls would even hang out together, let alone be best friends. They don't have anything in common. The don't act the same, talk the same or think the same. The story simply needed Olive to have a best friend and these storytellers simply decided to make her as colorful as possible, without any thought as to how and why she fits with Olive. All of Easy A is like that, with pieces that stack one on top of the other like children's blocks instead of fitting together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
It's a mild complaint about a good production, but it's a weakness that's highlighted by explicit references to John Hughes' teen movies filled with a messy humanity that's nowhere to be found in Easy A. It's like these filmmakers created something good and then convinced themselves it was much better than that.
Easy A is an entertaining piece of work that no one's going to remember 20 years from now. If you demand more than that from a filmyou really need to get over yourself.