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Taking a deeper look at current and past films and how they relate to the world today.

Jonathan Kim is an independent film critic who writes and produces film reviews for Uprising and other outlets. He is a former co-producer at Brave New Films.

Read his reviews online at ReThinkReviews.net. Watch his videos at www.youtube.com/user/jsjkim, and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ReThinkReviews. ReThink Reviews’ theme song is by Restavrant.

Easy A Review

Sexual politics in America’s high schools can reach levels of predatory cruelty that would make even the most hard-boiled congressman cower, especially when you consider that the US is the most religious developed nation in the world, and texting and the internet have accelerated the transmission of gossip to warp speeds.

In the new comedy EASY A, Emma Stone plays Olive Penderghast, a bright but largely ignored teenager at a California high school. But when Olive makes up a story to her best friend about losing her virginity, and that tall tale gets swept into the rumor mill by the school’s champion of conservative Christian values, Olive gets a first hit of the most intoxicating and addicting of high school drugs: Recognition.

When a gay classmate asks Olive to fake a one-night stand with him to get bullies off his back, Olive sees a way to use her new powers for good while advancing her bad-girl reputation. Soon, the ranks of the school’s downtrodden begin approaching Olive to fake flings with them so they can escape the social cellar. So with sympathy for the losers’ plight, plus some gift cards, Olive allows her name to be used in even more hook up rumors. But at the speed of text, Olive’s bogus promiscuity metastasizes, and instead of abandoning the charade, Olive fights back by embracing it.

She starts dressing the part, and inspired by her English class’ reading of Nathanial Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER, sews a bright red letter A on her risqué new clothes.

Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci play Olive’s exceedingly cool and supportive parents. When you see them with Olive, it makes sense how she turned out so sharp and funny. At the same time, Olive is reluctant to confide in them about what she’s going through — not out of fear, but from the common teen desire to figure things out on her own. Olive is intelligent and eloquent beyond her years, but she still seems like a high schooler, unlike Ellen Page in JUNO, who always sounded to me like a college kid or a hipster intellectual, and to which EASY A is bound to draw favorable comparisons.

But Olive is going through an American rite of passage — discovering the awesome power sex wields in our schizophrenically puritanical culture, where the grisliest gore is acceptable in primetime on CSI Wherever, yet a few milliseconds of Janet Jackson’s exposed breast during the Super Bowl is treated like the 9/11 of broadcasting. Where younger and younger girls are told to flaunt their sexuality before they can understand it, yet a single sexual encounter, or just the rumor of one, can classify a kid as a slut or a prude, a stud or a loser, straight or gay. Kids get bullied to death over stuff like that.

And these mixed messages do our kids no favors. Despite our moralizing, America has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the industrialized world, and abstinence only education has been blamed for the first rise in teen pregnancies since the late 80s. While Olive loves the attention, the venom from her school’s conservative Christians intensifies, and she begins to learn the difference between popularity and infamy. More cool adults like Thomas Haden Church as Olive’s English teacher and Lisa Kudrow as her guidance counselor warn her that by risking her reputation, Olive is playing with napalm.

To call EASY A a teen comedy is doing it a disservice. This is a movie that can be enjoyed by both genders, teens and adults, complete with a discussion of how the John Hughes movies of the 80s are so awesome they’ve warped our ideas about teen love. But EASY A is no throwback, with its rapid-fire, reference-heavy dialogue and firm footing in the internet age, including being structured around the modern replacement for the diary: the webcam confessional. EASY A is a major star turn for Emma Stone, who owns every scene she’s in, and a reminder that sexual politics in America’s high schools is still a minefield, and when done right on film, still hilarious. EASY A is rated PG-13 and is in theaters now.