Rating: 4/5
In 2009, with the death of John Hughes, the Generation Xers lost a beacon from their teenage years. With the release of Easy A, it’s comforting to know that Hughes is alive and well in the cinema. The influence of John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) on a generation of teenagers, combined with equal parts angst and apathy, is as present in Easy A as it is in any of Hughes’ classics.
Olive (Emma Stone) is a nobody at her school, that is, until she gets a reputation as a slut. A reputation that is unwarranted. Between lying about losing her virginity and convincing her friend Brandon (Dan Byrd) that it may be better to act straight through high school to avoid the daily gay bashing, Olive unwittingly finds herself in the business of not having sex for money as every nerd and unknown approaches her to do the same for them. Meanwhile, the rest of the students, especially Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and her cronies, who want Olive removed from the school, taunt and tease Olive while trying to get a piece of her action. The film is narrated by Olive, via web cam, as she tells the story of her (mis)adventures. Olive learns life lessons as she fake rocks the worlds of her fellow students, the audience may learn a thing or two as well, like the difference between a lemon squeeze and a backwards melon bag. Read the rest of this entry »
