Review: Easy A

Emma Stone plays Olive, a smart and pretty, but socially invisible girl at school, whose status suddenly changes when she lies to her best friend (Aly Michalka) about having lost her virginity. An ‘innocent lie’ overheard by bitchy Marianne (Amanda Bynes), an uber-zealot of the Fundamentalist religious kind, Olive’s faux sexual escapade soon becomes the talk of the school. Then a gay friend (Dan Byrd) asks Olive to help him out by lying about having sex with him so everyone will think he’s straight and stop picking on him. And that’s when things start to get out of control, when just about every loser and geek in the school wants to employ Olive’s fake services, and Olive starts to get a reputation. Eventually, she just embraces it, adorning a big letter ‘A’ on her clothing as some way of aligning herself with the heroine of “The Scarlet Letter”, a book she’s studying in class. Penn Badgley plays a former childhood friend who re-enters Olive’s life as a possible suitor. Thomas Haden-Church plays Olive’s favourite teacher, Lisa Kudrow is his wife and the school guidance counsellor, whilst Malcolm McDowell is the school principal, and Cam Gigandet is Bynes’ dumbski boyfriend. Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci turn up as Olive’s former skank mother and understanding father, respectively, and Fred Armisen plays the local priest who also happens to be Bynes’ father.

 

Everyone seems to rave over this 2010 teen comedy from director Will Gluck (subsequent writer-director of “Friends With Benefits”) and writer Bert V. Royal (a first-timer), but I actually found it an irritating and unconvincing experience. I won’t deny laughing at some of the lines, but it’s all very smug, snarky, and pretentious in that “Juno” way, except unlike that film, I at least made it to the end of this one.

 

You know you’re in trouble when you’re watching a harmless teen comedy and you think about all the unlikely things and things that don’t make sense, whilst you find the lead character nauseating in the extreme. Such is definitely the case here. I did not like Emma Stone’s character in this one bit, and found her actions implausible, deplorable, and stupid right from the basic premise. She’s meant to be a smart girl and yet when her vapid best friend refuses to believe she was joking about losing her virginity, she barely protests before simply going along with it. Why lie in the first place? I’m not stupid, I get that ‘losing it’ is a big deal for teenagers, but this character to me didn’t seem like the type who really gave a crap what others think. And when all of a sudden she’s branded a ‘slut’ (and I’ll buy that, someone can easily be branded as such in fickle high school for just one sexual indiscretion. Teens are real shits) she decides to literally wear it like a badge? What? That doesn’t even make a lick of sense. What statement is she making? It can’t be the same statement being made in “The Scarlet Letter”, because that chick didn’t like being called an adulterer (or at least, she isn’t lying like Stone is), so why is Stone so damn proud of it? Is it meant to be a kind of female empowerment thing? ‘Coz there’s better ways of achieving that, I’d think. Her decision not to really protest the misconceptions about her and then to flaunt it for some reason, just turned me right off. High school is tough enough, you don’t really need to make it even tougher for yourself by passing yourself off as ‘Easy A’ (Not that I think anyone who has sex should be perceived as easy). Worse still, she delivers this tale via webcam, blabbering on and on like what she has to say is like totally, the most profound thing ever. It’s not, you’re just a douche in a film full of really douche-y people. You say your virginity is no one’s business? Then why in the holiest of hells did you spend the previous 80 minutes making it everyone’s business? You may not have spread the lie initially, but you could’ve stopped it quite easily. Mind you, given the guys who approach her are aware of the lie, how in the hell has this little charade managed to stay a secret? Or come to think of it, how in the hell do all these guys find out that she helps perpetuate lies? Think about it, it makes no sense.

 

Stone says at one point that her life wasn’t written by John Hughes. Well, no shit, Sherlock. All it does is make one think that Gluck and Royal have basically just admitted via the main character that their film is inferior, as we’re being made to sit through a film that apparently isn’t even worthy of John Hughes. The film is full of supposedly cool references like that which make everyone look like fools. The “Say Anything” moment, for instance, is botched by having Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ on the boom box instead of Peter Gabriel’s ‘In Your Eyes’. Perhaps someone was afraid that kids won’t have seen that film or heard the song so they just went for another John Hughes film instead. Fine...except “Say Anything” is a Cameron Crowe film, so that theory doesn’t work. Meanwhile, referencing a previous film version of “The Scarlet Letter” other than the Demi Moore version and calling it the original, just makes you a dumb arse when in fact the 1934 version is not the original film version. Dude, go on IMDb next time before writing in something like that. It just reinforces the fact that you’re watching a film where the characters are at the mercy of a writer who just doesn’t know his shit (And no that is not what the ending of “The Breakfast Club” meant you moron! He doesn’t even get that right!). Then there’s the “Ferris Bueller” moment, where Emma Stone’s character gets to have her impromptu dance moment...for no other reason than to reference “Ferris Bueller” having its own such random musical interlude. It wasn’t remotely necessary, and Stone’s deliberate decision to dress in her raunchiest available outfit for the routine is further perplexing. She’s not being ironic, she’s being moronic. Her idiocy is confirmed when in the midst of all the fake sex stuff, she’s asked out on a date by a cute guy and then is surprised and offended that he wants her to go along with the lie that they went to ‘second base’ or something. Has she not been reading the script to her own damn movie? I mean, my God girl. Stop blaming the guys for your own stupid, douche-y decisions. Grow up! I get the feeling that we’re meant to sympathise with Stone (well, obviously since she’s the protagonist), but she’s actually not a nice person. In addition to being snarky with everyone, she has a superior air about her, looking down on the people whose bribes she takes in exchange for fake sexual exploits. The guys are all painted as losers, and they’re certainly taking advantage of Stone, but isn’t she taking advantage of them too? And she’s a big, big douchebag herself, not to mention the fact that she started the film as a virtual ‘nobody’, so shouldn’t she be nicer to fellow misfits?

 

Another huge issue here is the overall flippancy and snarky attitude of many of the characters, principally the main character. Sure, I like to be snarky sometimes, and I constantly reference films and such, but this film overdosed on the combination to nuclear levels of irritation. Her ‘Oooh, burrrrn!’ line towards her best friend that she’s having a serious argument with springs to mind. That’s a sad situation and I doubt she’d be so callously sarcastic about it, not to mention Stone delivers the line unconvincingly. I was one of the defenders of the sophisticated (and film reference-heavy) dialogue on “Dawson’s Creek”, but this is just too much. “Dawson’s Creek” at least could be excused for the writer simply writing what he wishes he’d have said all those years ago, in a kind of nostalgic sort of way. Here, Stone is recounting a story that is far more immediate, so there’s no excuse. It’s just bad writing. It’s not just the Stone character that bothered me here. Everyone is either douche-y (have I set the record for using that word yet?) or snarky, or both. The religious characters are douche-y with their over-the-top, saccharine sing-songs and judgemental attitudes on issues that are none of their business. Yes, there are people out there like that, but hopefully a lot more three-dimensional than the ones here. I mean, when Bynes says to Stone in reference to her underachieving boyfriend ‘If God wanted him to graduate then God would have given him the right answers’, it isn’t as funny as Royal thinks it is because no one in reality would say that, and being a comedy is no excuse. I did appreciate the line about ‘Religion of Other Cultures’ class, though. That one I believe is a valid criticism of some people, especially on the Religious Right in the US. Amanda Bynes is well-cast as the pious bitch, even if she’s ripping off Mandy Moore in the slightly better “Saved!”. Lisa Kudrow is another culprit, playing a guidance counsellor...but playing her with all of Phoebe’s mannerisms and her vocal inflections. I know by now that Kudrow (like Jennifer Aniston) can really only give the one performance, but she’s wrong for this role. Playing the role in such a bubble-headed yet self-absorbed manner makes one think that her character is on a different plane of existence to everyone else. See, nothing and no one here convinces, even in the realm of a comedy. Then we come to Stone’s calm and understanding parents, played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson. I wanted to strangle them, Clarkson especially. All of their dialogue is jokey, that is instead of being parents they come off as stand-up comedians. At one point, Tucci turns to his adopted black son and asks ‘Where are you from originally?’. He’s joking of course, but why remind an adopted child that they are adopted? I like to joke that my brother is adopted but he’s not, this kid really is. It didn’t come off as an attempt at normalising it for the sake of the kid feeling better (not that there’s anything remotely wrong with being adopted), it came off as Stanley Tucci trying out his best Jay Leno. It got annoying very quickly, as no parent could possibly be so quick-witted and calm all the damn time. A little would’ve been fine, but not this much, and not that line about the adopted kid. Clarkson has it even worse because her character has absolutely no filter whatsoever and constantly recounts her wild sexual experimentations to her horrified teen daughter. It was creepy, but more importantly it was unfunny and unbelievable. No parent that I’d ever want to meet would dare share such personal and intimate details to their own children. Mind you, given her daughter’s behaviour, perhaps it explains a few things.

 

The film isn’t awful, let me make that clear. I actually laughed at some of the snarky lines, and I thought Thomas Haden-Church gave a really nice performance as Stone’s favourite teacher. Malcolm McDowell, despite being an odd presence here, has the best line in the entire film when he says; ‘This is public school. If I can keep the girls off the pole and the boys off the pipe, I get a bonus’. That was pretty hilarious. It’s just that the film is really irritating and unconvincing. It’s completely mediocre, not even attaining a “Mean Girls” level off near-passable, let alone reaching the heights of John Hughes’ best films. I didn’t get this film, it made me feel rather uncomfortable to be honest. Perhaps you will disagree, it’s certainly got a lot of admirers.   

 

Rating: An Easy C