Easy A: Screen Gems Comes Up with a Real Gem with 'Easy A' | Teen Ink

Easy A: Screen Gems Comes Up with a Real Gem with 'Easy A'

October 29, 2010
By Amanda Blachorsky BRONZE, New City, New York
Amanda Blachorsky BRONZE, New City, New York
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Let me preface this review with this; ‘Easy A’ should not be on your must- see list. However, it is easily one of the most entertaining movies of 2010. Like many movie goers, I was under the impression that this movie would be heavily based on The Scarlet Letter. The film is filled with unexpected little surprises that bend the story in new directions and keep us giggling while keeping one eye on the 17th century. The movie gets us to wonder what Hester Prynne would have done. Do you need to read the book before going to the movie; no. The movie’s title refers to both the easy A that student Olive Penderghast hopes to score on her paper about Hawthorne’s 1850 literary classic “The Scarlet Letter” and the rumors that swirl around her after a little lie told in secret takes on a life all its own. The lie grows bigger and bigger and bigger, like Pinocchio’s nose, turning Olive’s once boring life into a scandalous one, that becomes Topic A at her high school. The director definitely had his pulse on the horrors of high school living while making this film, but also got a few things incorrect. One thing that really bothered me in particular was the way; Brandon (the main character’s best friend) was portrayed. Brandon has always known he was gay, but he was often mistreated for this fact in school. During the course of the movie, Brandon convinces Olive to pretend to have sex with him making it known to the whole school that he was not in fact gay. This seemed to work out for everyone until it snowballed out of control and Olive realized how terrible it was to have a reputation such as that. At the end of the movie, when Brandon comes out entirely, he is shown running away with another man. In the last scenes, Brandon is shown cuddling almost naked with his ‘lover.” Not only is this ridiculous, because he is only about 17 years old and threw away his entire education, it also made fun of Mark Twain’s book, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” where Huck runs off with a slave named Jim. This aspect of the movie also showed gay love as love based on lust and not anything else in comparison to the trueness and beauty of the love between Olive and Todd.


The author's comments:
I wrote this review for English extra credit at 3:00 A.M.

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