Easy A (2010)

Even as a teenager, I was never very interested in the genre of the “teenage coming-of-age comedy”. That hasn’t changed in the years since. To this day, I have not seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and can count the movies of this type that I can remember having watched in the past five years or so on one hand (among them Superbad, which left me unimpressed, and the mildly enjoyable parody of the genre O.C. and Stiggs by the always interesting Robert Altman).

So I likely would never have bothered with Easy A if several things hadn’t caught my eye:

• a funny trailer;
• a fairly clever concept;
• the classic literature tie-in;
• the surprisingly rapturous reviews;
• Emma Stone, whose career I have semi-followed since I first saw her in the sadly short-lived television series Drive (and who, incidentally, was one of the bright spots of Superbad).

My interest was piqued, and I picked up the Blu-ray when it was on sale a little while ago. The verdict: Easy A is a pleasantly watchable film. It’s not anywhere near being a masterpiece, because despite everything I’m about to list in its favour, it has a fairly conventional structure and ending. And the actors are a) too old for their roles and b) too pretty/handsome on average, but those are general Hollywood problems I could fault almost any film for.