After The Movie Reviews

Director:

Will Gluck

Cast:

Emma Stone            

Penn Badgley         

Amanda Bynes     

Thomas Haden Church

Lisa Kudrow

Rated: PG-13

Trailer

Well it looks like I was pretty right in my expectations of Easy A that I wrote about the trailer.

Easy A follows the character Olive (Stone), a girl who is a social outcast at her high school with no real identity. However that begins to change when she does a favor for a friend to help out his level of popularity at the school. She tells others that she slept with him. This causes many of the other boys in her school with low popularity to seek this out as well.

As this happens Olive becomes the most talked about girl in school, and she puts a red A on her shirt to represent what she's doing after reading about a simmilar case in school. At the same time though, it also brings a lot of hatred from a very religous girl (Bynes) named Marianne. As Olive goes through the days she continues to learn that maybe this wasn't the best idea.

The film is told through Olive giving a narraration of the events through a series of flashbacks. The way it's done is witha webcam, becoming a bigger part of the movie later on. For the most part, I really couldn't get into any of the story though. It was predictable and at the same time unbelievable. As I said in the other article I wrote, it's crazy to think that a girl with the looks of Emma Stone would be so unpopular. At the same time the antagonist, Marianne, was taken to a level so over the top. I understand that this is a high school fantasy but it was just a little to over the top for me.

I'm not saying these characters were performed badly, I think Emma Stone is a great actress who when given really great material can really make a great character, I just didn't think this script was very powerful in terms of comedy. One character that I also wish was in the film much more was Mr. Griffith played by Thomas Haden Church. He was one of the more enjoyable characters there.

The rest of the adult characters were also over the top adding reletivly nothing to the story and weren't that funny. They were characters where it feels that you could replace the actors with anyone and it would still work. Lisa Kudrow for example, who seems like she always plays the same character in her films. Another waste here was Olive's love interest Todd (Badgley), who is really underplayed for most of the movie.

Overall I just couldn't get into this film. A lot of it was just to over the top for me, especially the characters. However there were just enough humorous bits in there to warrent a 2 out of 5.