Easy A by Bert V. Royal - 8.3 out of 10

Easy A by Bert V. Royal

8.3 out of 10

Emma Stone had been a remarkable actress, long before she has won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role – and then, by mistake, because her name appeared on the Best Motion Picture envelope, we would have one of the most notorious errors in the history of Oscars, La La Land enjoying the supreme title for a few minutes.

She plays in this amusing, good film the main character, a teenager named Olive, brave, intrepid, generous and creative.

Her favorite teacher in school is Mr. Griffith, the wonderful Thomas Haden Church, married to a psychology, played by Lisa Kudrow.

The cast is resplendent, for we have more of the crème de la crème: Patricia Clarkson as the mother, Rosemary, Stanley Tucci as the always amusing, wise, restrained – in so many ways the ideal parent – Dill, the father and Malcolm McDowell – part of cinematic history with A Clockwork Orange, directed by one of the best five directors of all time, Stanley Kubrick – as the Principal Gibbons.

Olive feels that she can gain prominence, play the bad girl, advertise her qualities in a rather original manner.

She is more than daring – we could probably call her adventurous – when she decides that she would pretend to be a “whore”, a girl that sleeps around and is paid for it, starting with Brandon.

This is a colleague who has his own issues – even today, in many places, being gay would attract condemnation, mockery and often abuse and he wants to avoid that, staging a fake intimacy.

They arrive at a party, where the heroine and her “sex partner” expose their bond and intimacy, asking for a room where they could have a “good time” – albeit, she probably used another word.

The astounded host and the shocked guests – although we are told that the girl whose parents own the house party tends to find them having sex and thus she gets to throw a gig almost weekly.

When they retire to the room, Olive takes her panties off, to the perplexity of her would be lover, but she tells him not to worry and then they start acting the part of two wild people having coitus.

She slaps the boy, because he is unable to fake and produce the proper noises and finally he gets it right and they start jumping on the bed, to provide of course the needed anticipated noises.

Meanwhile, all the guests – let us say almost all of them – are gathered and crowded in front of the door, trying to look through the key hole, but the panties that the protagonist placed there cover that.

Finally, Brandon would get them as a trophy, for the imaginative teenager places them in one pocket of his trousers, to add a new element to this farce that has the public flabbergasted.

She would open a business, because of this reputation, which encourages a friend of the boy to come and offer one hundred dollars for a narrative in which he would have had some erotic encounter with Olive.

In the first place, she is offended and appalled by the proposition, but kind and empathic as she is, seeing the flustered, deflated ample boy, she decides to offer him some cover, albeit they would have not gone all the way.

Others line up to enjoy the pretense that they are grown, mature, accomplished, macho individuals, with the help of fabricated scenarios in which some will have had sex and others came close.

This would border abuse – or, actually with the standards of the present, surely passed it gravely – in the case of one of the apparently gentle, handsome ones, who invites the heroine to dinner.

There are some amusing occurrences, when she does not like the fact that some of her adversaries are there – she has become in the meantime very unpopular and hated by girls, one of them a fundamentalist Christian Trump voter surely – and tries to find an escape from the restaurant and the boy becomes aggressive, a small replica of that Supreme Court judge, when he had his barrels of beer.

A dramatic incident takes place, when the boyfriend of the fundamentalist discovers – well, the doctor informs him – that he has chlamydia and he blames it on Olive, the infamous girl who has an awful reputation.

She has done a lot to advertise this image, for she has come to school with an A embroidered on her provocative clothes, in keeping with the wanted effect, inspired by The Scarlet Letter and especially the book and the oldest cinematic version, not the terrible – as she emphasizes – modern adaptation that has benefited from a rather flawed Demi More performance.

The crisis is augmented when we find that one of the adults working at the school had actually infected the man – this personage is actually 22 years old and has failed to pass the exams repeatedly – and marital relationships are threatened – details are not presented to avoid spoilers.

Easy A is an amusing, easy entertainment.