EASY A 3 stars
Screen Gems, Rated PG-13
Turning the tables a bit on teen rebellion by getting subversively judgmental about them, the matriculated satire Easy A earns just that. Provocatively scrutinizing pubescent mating habits and heresies with nearly anthropological gusto even when bordering on silly, the movie is likewise an easy award worthy follow-up to Juno (minus the baby bump).
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Taking simulated sex to brand new places in a movie, Emma Stone shocks and amazes her nosy eavesdropping suburban California classmates as Olive Penderghast, an insatiable self-promoting sex maniac reputed to excel as an erotic scream queen without ever removing a stitch of clothing. It seems that in high school these days, having a reputation for sleeping around, even if you’re a fake nymphomaniac, is much less a source of teen torment than sitting home over the weekends with no dates in sight.
When male students in need of a little help in propping up their own sagging reputations want to solicit—and even purchase— make-believe trysts from Olive, she succumbs to the peer pressure. Borrowing from an English class lesson about Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and its protagonist Hester Prynne, Olive, with her trash-talking dirty mind, finds herself the most popular coed on campus. Cue a peeved, pubescent posse of jealous virgins and religious right nuts determined to destroy Olive if not cleanse her of her out-of-control libido sins.
Emma Stone stars in Easy A
Easy A goes to sextra-curricular extremes in goofing around about the obsessed YouTube generation’s red state/blue state turf wars which, who knew, even exist in high school. Props are especially earned by some post-grad collaborative adult minds, including director Will Gluck and devilishly eloquent playwright turned screenwriter Bert V. Royal, who both excel at tapping into genuine teen angst, as well as Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, upstaging just about everybody with their off-campus antics, as Stone’s sexual revolution vets too much information from her radically non-traditional parents.
