When A Good Girl Does A Small Favour

EASY A (Blu-ray)
Sony 

Release date: February 28th 2011
Certificate (UK): 15
Running time: 92 minutes

Director: Will Gluck

Cast: Emma Stone, Cam Gigandet, Amanda Bynes, Lisa Kudrow, Stanley Tucci, Malcolm McDowell, Patricia Clarkson

Have you ever had a fake girlfriend? It can do wonders for your school credibility. One minute you can go from being the geek version of the plague to the guy all the girls are talking about.

Of course, this all depends on the girl you get to play your fake girlfriend.

If she’s easy on the eyes and has some popularity of her own, then no doubt your existence will start to register on other people’s radars.

The important thing to remember is the fake girlfriend is not the same an imaginary girlfriend. This was the mistake I made I made in high school, but that’s a whole other story. This is isn’t about my mistake, it’s about Olive Penderghast’s (Emma Stone). She’s the fake girlfriend in Easy A who goes from being perfectly wholesome to town floozy in one fell swoop.

It all starts when she tells a lie to her best friend Rhi (Aly Michalka). Rather than spend the weekend with her and her nudist parents, Olive makes up a story about spending it with an imaginary guy called George. Having to maintain the lie the next week, it leads to rumours that she lost her virginity. The rumours spread around the school gaining the attention of teachers and a militant Christian group of students lead by Marianne (Amanda Bynes) who want to see her kicked out.

After confessing it was all a lie to her gay friend Brandon (Dan Byrd), he asks if she could tell the same lie about him as it would put an end to his daily harassment at school. Olive eventually agrees but then the lie snowballs and soon every guy at school is offering her money to agree to more rumours.

Olive ends up seeing similarities between her life and that of Hester Prynne’s in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter‘, so much so that she revamps her wardrobe to reflect the reputation which now precedes her, complete with a red ‘A’ on her chest.

Often there are hilarious scenes such as when Olive and Brandon pretend to have sex, but any scene with Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s free-spirited parents make the film really fun.

Emma Stone as the confident teenager who doesn’t give a damn what others think reminded me of lot of Jodie Foster in her younger roles while Lisa Kudrow more or less retains her Phoebe-istic qualities from Friends.

In many ways Easy A does for Hawthorne what Clueless (1993) did for Jane Austin’s Emma. They both took a literary classic and placed them in contemporary settings. The result is a film which is fresh, entertaining, smart and witty.

The story does wander off the path a couple of times and there’s a weak subplot with Olive’s oddly cast favourite teacher but its homage to John Hughes’ high school movies of ‘80’s really hits the right spot even if the final moments seem bit forced.