Imdb Rating: 7.3/10
Easy A is about a girl who pretends to get around in order to boost her reputation and financial standing, thus leading to all sorts of complications and the problems that come hand in hand with being thought of as a whore. It was based loosely on The Scarlet Letter, which I thought was pretty clever, and stars Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, among others including Stanley Tucci, Amanda Bynes, and Malcolm McDowell.
The acting was pretty good, with the exception of Bynes who I've never thought was good at acting. Emma Stone was fresh and effortless as a snarky, drawling comedic yet dramatic high schooler who's going through a major overhaul of her clean-cut image. The only thing that bugs me is that I have a hunch that this is how Stone is in real life, and type-casting is something of which I am not a huge fan. Stanley Tucci is spot-on as the eccentric, funny dad and has great chemistry with Patricia Clarkson. Penn Badgley is adorable as "the guy," the one the audience (should) knows from the beginning is going to be Olive Penderghast's knight in shining armor, or in this case a Woodchuck costume. Side bar: Badgley always seems to play "the guy" in conjunction with the "hip, gentlemanly guy that takes everybody's shit and is so laidback that he just takes it in stride and that's why we like him." My ex looks a lot like him and actually acts like him, too. It makes me wish I hadn't broken up with my ex. Maybe he wouldn't have gone full-fledge hippie on me. ANYWAY.
The plot is easy to follow and enjoyable as well. It's a little predictable but not so much that it makes everything boring. The dialogue is sharp, but in a good way. The movie is set in the beautiful city of Ojai, where I actually almost went to boarding school. I love Ojai, and the little small-town feeling it gave me with their famous orange groves and what-not.
The one kind of unnecessary aspect was the Indian Guy, who I can't even find in the imdb cast list. One of the guys who pays Olive to pretend to have hooked up with her is this Indian guy who pays her with a Bath and Body Works coupon. He is the stereotypical Asian nerd, who dresses badly and can't speak English without an accent. How unnecessary! Do they think they've covered all the "can't get some" bases by including this in the list of guys who pays Olive??? Besides the Indian, there are two other Asians in the cast and I didn't even see them while I was watching. Asians are basically represented in this movie by one Indian guy, which I think is a valiant effort to include Asian Americans in film more....but at the same time, Ojai is a city with an Asian population so small that they don't even bother calculating a percentage for it on some census websites. This is definitely a Caucasian movie, which is why I won't give it anything over a B-, however, in the curve of how Caucasian movies are rated, it got an A+. If it weren't for that stereotypical Indian guy.
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