A

Advertisements and plot synopses I read online told me that Will Gluck's new high school-set comedy Easy A is a modern take on Nathaniel Hawthorne's English class staple The Scarlet Letter. Having enjoyed both the book and the film, I'm wondering in what ways they are similar at all, apart from each work's respective protagonist donning the crimson "A". In The Scarlet Letter, the "A" stood for "adulteress"; In Easy A, I have no idea what the fuck Emma Stone is wearing it for, except as a way of showing that she feels ostracized. This "A" ended up being more of a problem for me than maybe it should have been. She's clearly wearing a huge, red "A" on her chest to school everyday. No one finds this odd, or even seems to notice, except for the tragically hip English teacher responsible for the reading assignment (Thomas Hayden Church).

Surprisingly, this is one of my two major problems with an otherwise very witty, and funny movie; I'll get to the other one in a moment. Emma Stone is particularly great as socially invisible highschooler, Olive Penderghast, who suddenly finds notoriety as a "slut" after she fibs to her best friend (Ally Michalka, currently on CW's "Hellcats") about losing her virginity to a college boy while Christian do-gooder Amanda Bynes eavesdrops in the girls' room. She uses this notoriety to fake sleep with other socially inept males in exchange for gift cards, thinking no one will get hurt, all the while waiting for long-time crush Penn Badgley to make a move.

The initial premise is a bit too much "only in the movies" for me, but the film goes way out of its way to stress its connections with the '80s high school classics of John Hughes to almost justify it. The best friend arc is eerily similar to the one shared by Lindsay Lohan and Lizzy Caplan in Mean Girls, but feels forced, as though the writer didn't know what to do with Michalka's character after the intitial set-up. Stone's relationship with her parents (Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) is always a delight, but the characters straddle a thin line between charmingly funny, and bat-shit quirky. The only other important adult is Church's guidance counselor wife, Lisa Kudrow, who acts way more Phoebe from "Friends" than her serious arc could handle.

On the plus side, Will Gluck proves he can actually direct. I was worried Fired Up! was just a weird fluke of stupidity that somehow was very enjoyable. Nope. He even has some nice tricks that exaggerate the immediacy and fickle nature of adolescent emotions. I think it is no accident that the events can seem long-developing and epic, but all take place within a time-span of two weeks. That revelation felt almost brilliant to me. And again, I can't stress enough how great the whole cast was. Thomas Hayden Church's deadpan cracked me up every time he opened his mouth; Amanda Bynes takes on the Mandy Moore role in Saved and more than makes it her own; and Emma Stone owns every second of the movie with her wise-cracking, steely demeanor. She has given what is easily one of my favorite performances of 2010.

But here's the real issue with the film; why it can't be a teen movie classic. It brings up serious high school issues like gender dynamics and double standards, hypocrisies found in any given high school, and then it abandons them. It merely skirts the surface of the real world problems it wants you to think it's addressing. And it doesn't avoid its issues with more humor or general levity. Instead it takes a dark turn towards the serious; a move that almost kills the whole experience. Serious is fine, but this twist, involving infidelity and venereal disease, felt like it was from a different universe. It also became just another subject that writer Ben V. Royal felt the need to quickly get out of. It's a shame,too, given that other components of Easy A really hit right on the money.

Easy A: 7.3/10

Also, one serious character oversight. Emma Stone's Olive is very familiar with Victor Sjostrom's 127 version of The Scarlet Letter, one of the most beautifully filmed silent films I've ever seen, but when one of the boys gives her a giftcard to the local foreign theater, she scoffs at the idea of foreign cinema.

Silly