Easy A is a fine social lesson for the post-pubescent crowd that is packaged in a delightfully smart rom-com.

Rating: 8/10 (7 December 2010)

Easy A is easy to like and gives ninety minutes of light-hearted entertainment that fans of romantic-comedies would enjoy with their peers. Aimed at the under-18 crowd, the film stars Emma Stone (Superbad, 2007; Zombieland, 2009), an up-and-coming screen queen (of the post-teenage universe), who gives a star lead performance that would raise the eyebrows of critics who deem her as only capable of supporting turns in films of this genre.
Any college guy (nerds and geeks excluded) would give anything to date Stone. She is blessed with natural beauty and an attractive figure – two attributes that suit the role of Olive, which she plays convincingly. In the film, Olive is very talkative. But that is because she leads a rather lonely college life (hard to believe), and thus needs to wax lyrical about her "vibrant" social life outside to her friends. This concept essentially becomes the film's main narrative.
In order to gain the envy of her friend, Olive tells her that she had sex with a guy over the weekend. This is overheard by another girl in the toilet and the school's rumor mill starts to spread the juicy news to almost every student. Soon, Olive's peers see her as a slut, but enjoying a rare moment in the limelight, she reciprocates by behaving like one. In one of the film's most hilarious scenes, she helps a gay boy to appear straight to his peers by agreeing to "have sex" with him behind closed doors, imitating sex noises and what not.
Olive achieves notoriety in her school, but she soon becomes disillusioned with herself, as she begins to realize that her artificial actions are not representative of her natural character. Easy A's fresh approach to the rom-com genre is quite engaging, with a notable emphasis on presenting college life not as a series of hormone-raging boy-girl relationship pursuits, but rather a time when self-identity is molded and individualism is expressed.
Director Will Gluck's easy-going style makes this a pleasant watch. The film gets a fair share of laughs from both its situational humor and the quite witty dialogue that questions the nature of college life, which I feel represents a microcosm of the "celebrity-obsessed" world of gossips and scandals that we live in today. Taking a small leaf out of John Hughes' book, Gluck brings us down to the perspective of a college girl who finds that being socially visible for the wrong reasons entails more alienation from her peers, which in turn leads to an ever escalating cycle of loneliness and self-doubt.
In a nutshell, Easy A is a fine social lesson for the post-pubescent crowd that is packaged in a delightfully smart rom-com.
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