Review: Easy A

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Easy A

Easy A (directed by Will Gluck, written by Bert V. Royal, starring Emma Stone, with Malcolm McDowell as the principal) is a surprisingly well-written and intelligent teen comedy with oh-so-many inside jokes and film references.

A high-school girl decides to pretend she and a gay male friend had sex at a party so her friend will stop being beaten up at school. However, her plan backfires when her reputation as a "loose lady" spreads all over. Soon, she is making money off her bad reputation by letting loser high school boys spread rumors of her various sexual exploits with them for varying retail gift card amounts -- $50 at Home Depot for saying there was a grope session behind the athletic field, $250 at Office Max for saying the deed was done in the back of Mom's car, etc.

Coincidentally, the protagonist Olive (Emma Stone) has a slight crush on her English teacher Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden Church), who is teaching The Scarlet Letter in her class.  He is rather paternalistically enamored of her as well, believing she is the one person in her class who has actually read The Scarlet Letter, although we see in various montages of clips from the silent movie version of The Scarlet Letter that Olive has only watched the oldest movie version of the book she could find.

Mr. Griffith is married to the school's guidance counselor (Lisa Kudrow), which provides nice plot twist fodder and subplot for Easy A. Olive's best friend Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka) adds plenty of sass and nice comic relief. Each kid is quirky and their parents as well. Rhiannon's parents are pot-smoking nudist hippies. Olive's parents consist of an older fading beauty (Patricia Clarkson) who seems to have been trained in dance (and who moves with more vitality than her daughter) and her younger husband (by about 5 years), Dill (Stanley Tucci). Husband and wife have great rapport, being very witty on the draw when confronting the problems of their children.

The high school kids are foul-mouthed and obsessed with sex (just like I remember them), except for the Jesus freaks, who constantly demonstrate on school grounds, preaching abstinence and belief in the Lord as the Way to Salvation. These young religious zealots truly are thorns in our young protagonist's side.

"This is the first time I ever really knew what it felt like to be an outcast," Olive says in her webcast expose of the whole story, a sort of online confessional that serves as a wonderful contemporary framing device for Easy A. The framing device is mirrored in miniature when Olive goes to a Catholic confessional (even though she's not Catholic) and we see a beautifully-lit, noir-ishly shot medium close-up of her face with lattice shadows and light streaming over while she recites her sins to a closet sans priest.

The sweet film-school touches in this movie are really endearing, such as the quote from The Glass Menagerie that Olive does at the top of the stairs when her gay date shows up, her rumination about men only being chivalrous in '80s movies (complete with short and quick montage of John Hughes teen movie clips) and the scenes of family movie night where Olive's dad quips on The Bucket List. These touches give Easy A a feeling of timelessness, sort of like a Shakespearean comedy. The characters are real, although contemporary, and I could see myself watching this little gem years in the future and still enjoying it without feeling it was too dated. This is one teen movie that parents and teens and non-parents will all genuinely enjoy.