Not what I expected from a Teen Comedy

Rating: 8/10 (7 January 2012)

It is difficult to say whether this book is a modernised version of Nathaneal Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' set in a American highschool, especially since I have not read the book, but it is a good movie nonetheless. The story is about a small lie and how the small lie gets blown out of proportion. The movie is centered around an innocent woman named Olive who decides that she does not want to go on a camping trip with her friend's hippie parents so says that she has a big date that weekend. However, after the weekend, her friend believes that she finally got laid, and then the rumour spreads.
It doesn't end there because some of the guys learn that she really did not get laid, and her homosexual friend, who is persecuted because of his homosexuality, convinces her to pretend to sleep with him at a party, and of course this also spreads like wildfire. However, it spreads in two ways. Among most people it is that she slept with him at the party, but among others, it is because she is willing to say that she slept with somebody when she actually did not.
As such this movie is about a lie and about how lies can spread and how they can ruin somebody's reputation, and that once the lie has taken hold it becomes very difficult to then bring the truth to light. Most movies about lies are about how lies never actually hold true. This movie is different, but in a way it is the same. Lies never really help anybody, even the simple 'white' lies. This white lie seemed innocent at first, but in the end it was because nobody wanted to know the truth, and for those that did know the truth, because it benefited them, they did not want to truth to become known.
As with most modern movies, everything does tend to turn out okay in the end, that is for those whom we want it to turn out well. For those that we begin to dislike we finish the movie glad that they have been punished. However, life is never like that, and that is the case with lies. We all lie, and there is no way to get around that. I myself try not to lie, and I tend to feel repugnant when I do lie, however the temptation is always there. Moreso, we want to lie to make ourselves feel better than we really are, or to impress people that we want to impress. Obviously it is easy to tell people not to lie, but in the end, what we need to realise, and experience, is that lies always end up backfiring.