Monday, January 24, 2011

Movie – Easy A (2010)

Even though this is a recent movie you may not have heard of it.  It didn’t get much advertising support and it was released in the latter part of September, where movies go to die.  If you did hear of it you might have dismissed it as a chick flick.  I'm here to say that it is an all around enjoyable movie; a delight to watch.

The lead is Emma Stone in what is a star making performance, if only more people had seen this movie.  She's been in other movies (most notably Zombieland), but in this one she carries the whole thing herself and she does a great job.  She was recognized with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy for this performance.  I especially liked the way she used body language in several scenes. 

There are some familiar faces among the adults, with Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson especially doing a great job as her loopy, but loving parents.  Their performances show you exactly where Olive came from.  By the way, for a little joke pay attention to the names of the members of Olive’s family.

The premise is that a high school girl makes up a lie about having 1. a boyfriend and 2. sex with him, in order to shut up her nosy friend.  This spreads like wildfire through the school and she becomes someone who is finally getting noticed and she kind of likes it.  She then does a couple favors for guys wanting to improve their "manly" reputations by pretending to sleep with them, too.  Things snowball from there.

They are reading The Scarlet Letter in English class.  Several parallels are drawn between it and her situation and there's a great scene where she decides to embrace the whole Scarlet Letter thing for herself.

Another standout scene is one where it shows how she spends a weekend with a musical card her grandmother sent her.  Natasha Bedingfield, the artist that did the song used for this, tweeted that she loved this scene.

The movie is narrated by this main character, with the premise being that she is doing a live web cast explaining her side of the story.  I found her character to be very likable and charming, which is one of the reasons I liked the movie so much.

The movie is also done somewhat in the style of the Hughes movies from the 80s (i.e. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, etc.) and it makes several references to them.  It also has jokes ranging from the subjects of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, to Sylvia Plath, to the Kinsey Scale.  There are multiple callbacks on jokes done earlier in the movie, including the “musical number for no apparent reason.” The lead character is very witty and she gets a lot of great lines in the movie.  So do her parents, and the guy who's obviously perfect for her.

I rarely do this, but I actually looked up who the writer was for the movie so I could see what else he had written.  This appears to be his first real film.  In the Extras on the disk they mention that the writer originally conceived of three stories all taking place at the same school, and all of them based in some way on a piece of literature.  Here’s hoping he gets to write the other two.

Unless you hate the 80s Hughes movies I highly recommend this film.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

           DVD                      Blu-ray

1 comment:

  1. Thank you Chip. I totally agree with you. This was a great movie. Kind of a Hughes-style movie for the next generation. Both the kids liked it as well.

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