Easy A

This movie came via Netflix last weekend and my wife and I watched it Saturday night. Emma Roberts plays Olive a high school girl that feels invisible. She has a good friend, Rhi, who acts further advanced than she is.

In Olive's English class they are doing a section on The Scarlet Letter and unlike most of the students who have just watched the movie and relate it to Demi Moore she has to, embarrassed almost by it, admit to her teacher, played by Thomas Haden Church , that she has read the book. The Scarlet Letter becomes the backdrop in a literary sense of the movie that follows.

Trying to avoid a camping trip with her friend Rhi, and her friends hippy parents, she lies and says she has a date. This lie later manifests into that she had sex with the college boy she had a date with. This conversation is overheard by a young Christian girl who is overzealous to say the least. She ( played by Amanda Byrnes) spreads the rumor like wildfire and soon everyone is assuming she Olive is a bad girl.

A gay friend asks her to pretend to have had sex with him so that he can escape the rumors about his sexuality. She agrees to do so, at a party they go into a bedroom and make all the requisite " sex" noises and the rumor is sealed.

The story takes off from there with the ramifications of an ever expanding series of lies and exaggerations until Olive giving in to the ludicrousness of it all starts wearing a Letter A on her clothes to identify with Hester from the Scarlet Letter.

At times I commented that the movie was stupid and it was not really even that good. Still by the end of it the story did come full circle with some cute eighties flashback references and the tie to Scarlet Letter was clever.

Worthwhile but do not have too high an expectation.