Film: Easy A

American high school movies are like Doctor Who episodes; you watch them because you feel you should, but every now and again, one of them comes along that is so awesome, it makes you realise how painfully average all the others have been. Easy A is one of those high school movies.
For your delectation, here is the IMDb page, and the TV Tropes page.

(Disclaimer: mainly I liked/loved/had a massive girl crush on Emma Stone, but that's not really relevant to the story. Possibly worth bearing in mind though.)

Again, the brilliance of this film lies in the fact that it shamelessly takes the piss out of all the other cheesy high school romances with searing wit. John Hughes, Judy Blume and Mark Twain are all sacrificed on the alter of Funny, and it's the combination of shrewd observation and clever satire that makes this film brilliant.

The main character, Olive Penderghast, aside from having a vampire-romance-novel name, is a perfect example of a Teenage Everygirl. Loads of stories try to achieve this, so that the reader can 'connect' to their protagonist, but painfully few actually succeed. So often the Everygirl is secretly lusted after by all the beautiful men (not a feeling most real-life Teenage Everygirls are probably familiar with), are actually really popular and just don't know it, or are so perfectly Girl-Next-Door-esque that you actually just want to punch her. But Olive genuinely isn't very cool (see the "I've Got A Pocketful of Sunshine" sequence), and we like her all the more because of it.

The actual romance scenes, disappointingly, managed to be every bit as cheesy as the stories the film was taking the piss out of. In particular, any scene with Woodchuck Todd is eye-rollingly predictable. I think it's really hard to have your audience support a romance without making it cringe-inducingly corny, and I was a bit gutted that this film didn't manage it.

****

Initially I wanted to start my film reviews with some burningly intelligent, intense, indie flick that would make you think I was clever. But then I had a bad day, and I thought Easy A would cheer me up. But you know, it definitely worked.