Easy A

I do enjoy a well-told teen angst story, here is a film in that mould with a bit of a difference. Emma Stone plays Olive, an ordinary high school girl who apparently makes no impact on the social map and has never been noticed by the boys. Let's get out of the way how ridiculous a premise this is early on in the review. If Emma Stone was a student at my high school she would have been the hottest of the hotties hands down. I guess that teenage boys in California are spoilt for choice.

We can brush over this fairly easily, after all it's not as if the Californian film industry doesn't have a history of casting attractive people as 'nerds' (Buffy the Vampire Slayer anyone?), and enjoy what is a film that displays its message in big neon letters over its head. Olive narrates the film from the future and seems to play the part of the film's writers, overtly pining for the golden age of 1980s teen cinema where Judd Nelson was a rebel, Ferris Beuler had musical numbers and John Hughes was in charge. Olive has amazingly liberal parents and is reasonably happy with her teen high school existence, but to make herself seem cool she pretends to have had sex on a weekend away. Rumours of her promiscuity travel around the school like wildfire, which she then fans when she realises she can pretend to have had sex with guys for money. Having made her bed she now has to lie in it when she turns into a hate figure for almost everyone at the school, but a hate figure whom people want to be seen with none-the-less.

The film heavily references 'The Scarlet Letter', in which an adulterous woman is hounded by her own community, and is eager to comment on the hypocrisy between how teenage girls and boys are perceived throughout school and the rest of their lives. It is emphatically not another 'teen movie' or a series of bawdy gags about teenage promiscuity. It's much closer to something like Juno, in that the main character is a confident young girl with supportive parents trying to work out what her own boundaries are in the modern world (also she has excellent and witty scriptwriters helping her out by feeding her lines).

We get a couple of strong supporting performances (especially from Thomas Haden Church and Patricia Clarkson), a song and dance number, a bit of God-Squad bashing and an ending that's nothing less than all fuzzy and warm - in a good way. It's a film that I think quite a lot of people could enjoy if they're willing to think of it as a throwback to 1980s teen movies as opposed to a lot of the modern flesh-fests that seem to be out there.