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%
