This is Epth Nation 3.0

She's fierce like my miniature american eskimo was fierce

Ellen Page is quickly becoming the female Michael Cera — someone the audience can identify with no matter what’s swirling around her.  Just like Cera, she grounds every movie she stars in and gives it enough soul to be good.  We like her and care about her, and we see ourselves and our struggles inside hers.

Yeah, so it’s a good thing she’s directly in the center of Whip It, because this is some by-the-numbers Hollywood moviemaking right here in your face.  The stock characters swirl around her — domineering mother, aloof father, cute little sister, wisecrackingly smart friend, cinematically crazy roller derby girls, cute boy/rock star, etc — and it kinda works because Ellen Page is all vulnerable and stuff.

What director Drew Barrymore has done is made a movie about roller derby that is as safe as humanly possible.  There’s no real danger, no real surprises, and unless this is your first time in a cineplex, you’ll be able to pretty much figure out the ending after about a half an hour.

For example, Ms. Barrymore cast herself as Smashley Simpson, a total psychotic who gets thrown out of every roller derby match she’s in because she can’t resist the urge to beat up girls.  That character should have some edge, right?  Well, this psycho has been covered in a shellac of extreme non-threateningness that’s so pervasive, it makes her vicious attacks seem cute.  I realize the point of a movie like this is to make us like and identify with the characters, but does all the menace have to be removed and replaced with cuteness?

That’s not to say that everything besides Ellen Page was bad.  A couple of the other performances — most notably Andrew Wilson (the lost Wilson brother) as Page’s oft-ignored roller derby coach — were top-notch, and the roller derby action was pretty exciting without being unrealistic or stylistically distracting.

Also, the film did remind me of Texas, with its beauty pageants and crazy moms with misplaced priorities.  It got a lot of the details of that right.  And its message of “be yourself,” trite and safe as it may be, did come through in a positive and not totally trite way.  In a way, it reminded me of the Lyndsay part of Freaks and Geeks, where a small brunette girl discovers a new world she likes that doesn’t quite fit with the world her parents have created for her.  Don’t let anyone tell you not to play roller derby or hang out with stoners, small brunette girls.

Tomatometer rating: 84%

What it should have been:  75%

I have Mark Zuckerberg to thank for lots in this world.  He posts pictures of funny things on my wall.  He comes up with funny and/or poignant status messages that interest and entertain me.  He provides me with up-to-the-minute information and opinions on things that matter to me and my many, many acquaintances.  And he does this for me and 500 Million other people across the globe.  Because of this, and the fact that he is awesome, he has made billions of dollars and everyone cares what his opinion is on everything.

OH WAIT THAT’S RIGHT HE DID NOTHING BUT START A WEBSITE AND MANAGE TO BE SMARTER THAN MYSPACE (WHICH, WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, WASN’T THAT HARD).  HE DOES NOTHING ON A DAILY BASIS EXCEPT ACT SMUG AND LIVE OFF THE STATUS UPDATES AND MEMORIES OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HE DOESN’T KNOW.   HE IS A VIRTUAL ZERO IN THIS SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD, AND IF HE DIDN’T EXIST, SOMEONE ELSE WOULD HAVE MADE A FACEBOOK AND BECOME A BILLIONAIRE INSTEAD.  HOPEFULLY SOMEONE LESS SMUG.

Forgive my all-caps newbie-style rant.  It’s just that The Social Network is about Facebook, which I think is pretty cool.  But actually, it’s about the guy who takes credit for creating Facebook, which is also a pretty cool story but kind of besides the point.  Put it this way — every time Michael Jordan won a championship, did Dr. James Naismith get credit for creating basketball?  Did the media go on and on about the greatness of Naismith and how Michael Jordan wouldn’t be possible without him?  No?  Then why, every time I post a brilliant status message, does Mark Zuckerberg feel like he deserves any credit?  He’s a billionaire — isn’t that enough for him?  What happened to the idea of the recluse?  Did Howard Hughes and Michael Jackson kill take the luster off Reclusivity forever?

But then there’s the actual movie, which is entertaining.  It tells the story of the beginnings of Facebook and the overprivileged white people who stole the idea from other overprivileged white people.  The dialogue is snazzy, the story is intriguing, and the performances are great and often really funny.  Go see it.  I’m totally not interested in talking about it.

The Zuckerberg was reportedly kinda scared of how he would be portrayed in the movie.  Should he have been?  He comes off pretty well, as a really smart and friendless psychotic who wins in the end because he’s smarter than everyone else, but is still deeply sad.

Eduardo Whats-his-face (his original partner, who ended up suing him after being tricked out of his agreed-upon money) comes off pretty well, too.  The actor who portrays Eduardo Whats-his-face channels Hayden Christiansen in Shattered Glass, and is all vulnerable and soft-spoken and skinny and high-voiced.  It works for him — he ends up being the protagonist because he seems like the person the audience least wants to punch.  So good for him.

And then there’s the Winklevoss twins, both portrayed by Armie Hammer with understated hilariousness.  I loved every scene they and their little friend were in, even if their “you stole my idea” lawsuit seems a little silly in the context of their already multi-million-dollar Olympics-filled life.

Finally, you have Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker.  Mr. Parker founded Napster, and if The Social Network is to be believed, he is responsible for two decisions that ended up contributing mightily to the ascent of Facebook over its pathetic social media rivals:  he pushed the Zuckerberg to avoid advertisements on the site; and, he offhandedly suggested they drop “the” from “thefacebook.”

I’m telling you, if Facebook had embraced ads, it would have been another Myspace, and nobody would know the Zuckerberg from the Zuckerman*.  He would have merely been another standard American internet millionaire — which, due to Bush-Obama inflation, now are worth 1 dime per dozen.

But still, Sean Parker did cocaine, and therefore ended up with only like 7% of Facebook’s billions.  There’s a lesson there for all of us.

Tomatometer Rating: 96%

What it should have been: 96%

*If you don’t know the Zuckerman, clearly you need to brush up on your 90210.  And not the newer version, either.  That thing is death.

She seems nice

Let’s go through the possible ways in which a teen movie can suck, and see if any of them apply to Easy A:

Most of the characters are even-more-exaggerated-than-usual versions of typical false Hollywood teen-movie archetypes?  Check.

Authority figures are divided neatly into “Liberal/Cool” and “Conservative/Fascist” camps?  Check.

It’s a comedy that’s not very funny?  Check.

You can see every plot twist coming an hour before they arrive, turning them from plot twists into a lock-step march into averageness?  Check.

…So we can see that Easy A has a an insurmountable set of problems that prevent it from being good.  This doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable, however, and not just in a unintentional comedic sense.  It has some charm, largely from having its insane Christian-hating heart in a pretty good place, and placing Emma Stone in virtually every scene.

Stone plays Olive, that girl in high school that nobody notices.  This all changes, however, when she decides to tell her best friend Rhi (Disney teen veteran Aly Michalka) that she had sex with a college guy, and the school’s head Christian bitch (Nickelodeon teen veteran Amanda Bynes) overhears.  Rumors of her sexual escapade quickly spread through the school, and before long she’s having fake sex with a gay kid to keep him from being bullied by evil jocks and wearing hooker clothes emblazoned with a literal scarlet letter.  After making several gift-card-for-reputed-sexual-act trades, things play out as you’d pretty much expect, if you’ve ever seen an angsty teen movie.

Some of which is by design, by the way.  Easy A tries to be a sort of combo-homage to both 19th century American Lit and 80′s John Hughes films.  What it actually is:  An attempt to copy Juno‘s formula of “compelling female lead + her one blonde outspoken friend + the one cool boy who understands her + high school sexual politics + snappy dialogue + cool parents + adults having mid-life crises = sweet and funny.”  In this it fails spectacularly, largely because nobody in the film besides Emma Stone acts anything remotely like a real-live human being.

i.e., In Juno, there’s a Christian girl carrying a protest sign who meets the title character as she’s on the way to the abortion clinic.  She tries to convince Juno not to have an abortion, and eventually succeeds by pointing out that the baby in her stomach already has fingernails.

In Easy A, there’s a group of Christians carrying protest signs who try to convince the school to expel Emma Stone for being a slut.  And oh, by-the-way, they’re all total hypocrites.  Betcha didn’t see that one comin’.  Ahh, those Christian teens.  Always so cartoonishly evil.

Or take Emma Stone’s cool parents, played by that woman from The Lonely Island’s “Motherlover” video and the increasingly not-dead Stanley Tucci.  Where Juno had parents who were relaxed and not terribly authoritative, they were at least, you know, parents.  Motherlover and Tucci, however, represent some sort of Berkeley fantasy parenting ideal where acting as chill and hip as possible at all times will create well-adjusted, whip-smart, and caring teens.  Because people are basically good, and the only thing that can screw them up is the System’s rules, man.

And I mean, you could find an antecedent in Juno for just about everything in Easy A, and the Juno version is always 10 times better.

Even with all its problems, and the fact that the movie actively hates me for believing that Jesus was who he said he was, I enjoyed Easy A. Emma Stone is believable, and kinda funny, and has the same breezy charisma that she had in Superbad and Zombieland.  She really lifts the thing from 1-star territory into a solid 2.  Also, I approve of any teen entertainment that sides with the underdogs and downtrodden, which Easy A does at every turn.

The moral of the story?  If you want to see Easy A, go see Juno again.  But that’s probably always the moral.

RottenTomato Meter: 85%

What it should be: 45%