Climbing Higher Pictures

After my unabashed love for Superbad and Zombieland, it’s hard not to admit that I really enjoy Emma Stone as an actress. She has the looks, the comic timing, and the talent to become a really big star. Because of this, I’ve been looking for her to get her own starring vehicle for a while now, and though it took longer than it probably should have, she’s finally arrived as a leading lady. Will this be the one that breaks everything wide open?

Easy-A Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie Grade: B

Watching Easy-A is an exercise in tolerance and sustained suspension of disbelief, not because anything happens that you can’t see coming, but more because the way it plays out stretches a lot of the norms we accept when electing to watch a romantic comedy. In brief, the script is on a different level than what most will anticipate for the genre, yet the film itself doesn’t really live up to the words on the page.

With a movie like the upcoming Edgar Wright masterpiece Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, you have an extremely stylized universe that allows the characters to say and do things in a heightened and inevitably more interesting manner than they could in real life. The reason such interactions work in that film, is because the movie is visually distinctive and vibrant enough to create a world where the dialogue and the characters all seem to belong. The quirkiness isn’t out of place, and the lighting fast retorts are met with laughter instead of wonderment. With Easy-A, everybody is running on a premium grade of gasoline, and it would work really well, if only the world could mimic the energy level of the words. Characters say things that are funny, charming, and often endearing… they just always seem a little less than genuine. It’s a type of writing that has a lot of character, and hits more than it misses, but could be unsatisfying for many people.

Despite all of this, Emma Stone proves once again that she deserves quality starring vehicles of her own. After her breakout role in Superbad and her solid leading lady turn in Zombieland, it’s clear the girl has the chops for comedy, and looks awfully good doing it. Here, she’s joined by an impressively diverse supporting cast, who each, due to the tenor of the script, have plenty of chances to demonstrate their various comedic strengths. Stanley Tucci, in particular, steals almost every scene he’s in, and delivers some of the movie’s most hilarious diatribes. Thomas Hayden Church also acquits himself very well, and it becomes very easy to root for the people we want to see come through the story unscathed.

If you haven’t seen any of the advertising campaign, the basic gist is that a teenage girl, after having read “The Scarlett Letter”, becomes a perceived class slut and responds by willingly sewing a red A onto her clothing. She doesn’t actually sleep with people, you see, just pretends to so that they are able to get over various stereotypes and bullying due to their sexuality, or their general attractiveness to women. The unjustified attention, and the way it affects the world around her, makes up most of the primary narrative and thematic structure. The rather unorthodox approach will undoubtedly leave the viewer feeling refreshed, and the originality makes it worth seeing just to break the cycle of paint-by-the-numbers teenage romantic comedies. However, as was discussed earlier, the tone may in fact be the movie’s biggest weakness when it comes to connecting with its target audience, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people simply don’t wind of “getting” it. Sad as it is, there might not be a market for progressive storytelling in this day and age.

Should you let a little R-rated teenage angst scare you? Not at all. In fact, coming from a male perspective, this falls into the decent-to-great date movie category, in that you won’t be bleeding from the ears or trying to gouge your eyes out with any available sharp object. Discussions about lies and their consequences may even follow you out of the theater, and that’s a lot better than most of the movies I’ve seen so far this summer. Sure this one doesn’t come out until September 17^th, but I’m sure you’ll be able to wait a little while.