The pitfalls of high school

Rating: 6/10 (7 January 2012)

Easy A was one of the big comedy hits of 2010, a film with a low budget that made a healthy profit and earn a lot of critical acclaim. It was also a film that helped confirm Emma Stone's raising star and let Will Gluck wash away the nasty film Fired Up from our collective consciousness.
Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) is a 17-year-old high school that is invisible in her high school in Ojai, California. Her life changes when a rumour spreads like wildfire that she lost her virginity and many forms of the tale emerge. Her gay friend Brandon (Dan Byrd) asks her if she pretends to have sex with him so that would end all the bullying he suffers. Soon Olive embraces her new identity as the school slut and turns it into a parody and gets paid to pretend she sleep or committed other acts to people who need to enhance their reputations. But soon everything starts to spiral out of control, including being the target of fundamental Christians led by Marianne (Amanda Bynes).
The big positive of Easy A is Emma Stone is a natural comedian, delivering her lines with expert timing and just seemed so natural and real in the role. She is a character is wise beyond her years and is a very smart and self confession character, willing to take on the rumours head-on. Will Gluck has a moment of directional flashes with slowing how the rumours spread around the school. Bert V. Royal also does deliver a witty script with good lines throughout.
My big problem with Easy A is a lot of the characters felt like over-the-top characterchures what they are meant to be. We got a fundamentalist Christian that runs her sect like a cult, who dresses in stereotypical female preppy way who thinks everything that does not stay in line to her narrow world view then it is a sin and that everything was God's will: if the character was Jewish or Muslim it would be considered highly offensive. I cannot picture a character like that being liked or popular or influential in any way and if anything would have been told shut or simply ignored by most of the students. As well this is a film set in California, where even Republicans tend to be are socially fairly liberal. It would have made more sense to set Easy A in a more typically Republican/Socially Conservative state like in the Bible Belt or in the Mid-West. Olive's parents are actually very annoying with their banner and interaction and it really did not feel like a real parent-daughter relationship. They just seem too causal about what was going on with their daughter.
Emma Stone is meant to be playing a character that is an outsider, a character who is ignore by the majority of her peers. Stone is a glorious, striking red hair, how could boys not interested in her? She would easily be a popular girl and in any reality Olive would have lots of friends, whether she was a cheerleader or a alternative click. This clique system that is shown in films does really exist and it would be a much more mixed picture of friends. Plus the rumour that spreads and mutates is that a 17-year-old girl looses her virginity to an older man, woo: like that has never happened before. If it turned out the girl was only 14 then I think her year/grade would be talk or if the girl had a more down to earth look and a quiet personality. A character like Olive in reality would not care, she would just carry on with does would not worry about what people think about her because she knows the truth.
I believe that the double standard the film show is true, that if a boy has sex in high school he is a stud, become popular but if a girl has sex she is a slag, someone who become a source of notoriety. But most of the time boys lie and big themselves up.
Stone also uses the word 'twat' and I was annoyed because I though if they use the word at least pronounce it properly. And I question why is Malcolm MacDowell in this and why does the school have a English principal? Were there no American/Canadian actors available or even an actor that could do an American accent? Overall Easy A is a decent film, it does have good dialogue and it funny, but it is not the great comic masterpiece some critics seem to think it is. It is a fantasy world, not a real picture of what high school life is like.
6.5/10