Easy A

So i finally went and saw a new movie in theatres and, whaddaya know, it was a movie called Easy A.  When i first heard the title, i assumed it was dramady about academic life in university and the pressures of making the grade.  I also assumed it would have some tacked on life-lesson about plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty and that that "Easy A" isn't as easy as it may seem.  You know, standard dramady fare.

While being the only 28 year old male in the predominantly teenaged girl (and occasional teenaged boy) audience should've clued me into what was going on, it actually wasn't until the movie started that i sensed something was amiss.  By the time main character Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone) started talking about her "below average breast size" i knew i had (let's say "accidentally") walked into a romantic comedy aimed at teenaged girls.

Now, there are exactly two things i know about women: they are all emotionally insecure (yes, all of them) and they all think i'm a jerk (and if they didn't before, they certainly do now).  How did i come to these two conclusions?  Partially real life experience, but partially from how they're portrayed in romantic comedies (or so i heard).  So i thought i knew what i was in store for with Easy A.

But it turns out, i was only half prepared.  Easy A is not exactly a typical romantic comedy aimed at teenaged girls (or so i heard).

Staring 21-year-old Emma Stone as "so plain she's average" high-schooler Olive Penderghast (yeah i know, just suspend your disbelief), Easy A is about Olive's attempts to become popular by playing the role of the town bicycle; not actually being the town bicycle, just saying she is.  How pretending to be easy when not actually putting out makes a girl popular in high school on any planet, i won't know, but that's the plot.  Deal with it.

Of course, Olive never actually planned to play this role, it just sort of happens after a lie she tells gets spread around the whole school.  The entire school, which is populated entirely by gullible morons (as most high schools are), of course believe the lie in its entirety simply because if they didn't there really wouldn't be much of a movie.

Of course, this isn't so much a bad thing for Olive as she turns her new-found, er... "fame", into a business and starts to sell off tales of steamy sexual encounters to an assortment of male classmates hoping to buy their way out of the shitty lot in life that is going to high school with a bunch of gullible morons.  For the most part, it works.  That is, it works until it doesn't and Olive finds herself struggling to cope with all the problems she's created for herself.

At this point, you may be thinking, "what the hell, Tipz!?  You're supposed to rip into movies and call them all kinds of bad names, safe in your knowledge that no one's reading this!"

So, why have i, to this point, failed to bring and really harsh criticisms?  It's not that Easy A is a good movie, it's just not that bad a movie, either.  It is The Dark Knight of romantic comedies for teenaged-girls (that's right: come get me, Dark Knight fans!).

Sure, it's not all that funny and the story's a little cliche, but it's good at what it's trying to be.  That is, it's good at being not all that funny and a little cliche (at least, not all that funny to embittered movie reviewers).

But, seeing as i am an overly embittered movie reviewer, i suppose i owe it to you to spell out why this movie is less on the side of good than the side of bad.

So let's talk characters:

Olive herself is supposed to come off as charmingly witty, but she's really something more of a wannabe snarker.  The best insult she can dish out is "twat" which isn't even racy enough to net this movie anything more than a 14A rating, let alone rile anything more than confusion in the victim.  She really only comes off as snarky to her insanely religious enemies who are just as likely to be offended at being mistaken for a Lutheran or Roman Catholic or some other denomination of christianity that they are not.

Olive's overly wacky parents are certainly trying to be funny (oh god are they trying!), but it all just seems a little forced.  Not just in movie forced (which it seems is supposed to be the case), but real-life forced.  Nothing they say is funny because they're trying too hard to be funny.  The comedy of their routine is very much in line with the kind of comedic situations you might describe to a friend only to end your anecdote with some paraphrase of, "i guess you had to be there".  For a movie, that's really a sad statement.

Then of course there's Todd (Penn Badgley), Olive's shallow love interest.  You can tell he's Olive's shallow love interest because a) you never learn anything about him (incidentally, neither does Olive... not that that's a stumbling block for romantic comedy relationships), b) whenever he is on screen he's either topless or saying nice things to the Olive (you know, setting himself up as the only reasonable character Olive could possibly get with in the end).  It's odd they'd even bother hiring an actual actor for this role.  Any of the extras would've done just as well.

There's also a whole slew of background characters who play roles that never stretch beyond the importance of a single plot element.

The Christian Club of the high school are supposedly the main antagonists, but nothing really happens to them to make you feel like justice is done.  Their leader spends the whole movie being a bitch to Olive (with the sole exception of one fickle day).  But the last you ever see of her (or any of her goon squad) is them scowling at Olive during the climax of the movie.  That's it.  No comeuppance, no cosmic karma, no verbal dressdown, no mudbased catfights.  What the hell kind of movie ends like that?

I'll tell you what kind of movie ends like that: a depressing one.  That, or a movie clearly not aimed at embittered male movie reviewers.  You be the judge.

Anyway, that's Easy A.  The writer brags to have written the script in 5 days (presumably after which he said "easy, eh?") and i can believe him.  There really isn't much substance in it beyond a slightly different take on the same old cliched story.  I wasn't all that enthralled, but it's certainly not all that bad, especially when compared to other romantic comedies aimed at teenage girls (or so i heard).

This movie gets an easy A C.