8 May - "my God! The illusion is shattered!"

Easy A (2010)

dir. Will Gluck

CAST

Emma Stone - Zombieland (2009)

Penn Badgley - John Tucker Must Die (2006)

Amanda Bynes - What A Girl Wants (2003)

Thomas Hayden Church - Sideways (2004)

Patricia Clarkson - Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Cam Gigandet - Pandorum (2009)

Lisa Kudrow - Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (1997)

Malcolm McDowell - A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Stanley Tucci - The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Fred Armisen - Anchorman: the Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Whoosh! That took a little while. Here is a long cast list of folks I recognized in this movie. But as I'm sure you're all well aware, a shitload of cameos does not a better movie make.

Amanda Bynes played the same character as Mandy Moore in Saved!, which was also better than this movie. I've always felt a little bit bad for Amanda because I don't think she's very funny, but she seems like she's trying really hard to pull it off. Her movies and sitcoms have consistently been seriously lame, and I didn't even like her bits on that Nickelodeon sketch comedy show, All That.

Notable mention: I think the best friend character is one of the Cheetah Girls (that's a super-dorky Disney channel reference, but I'll confess I'm sort of fascinated by [That's So] Raven's career development)

The saving grace of this movie is Stanley Tucci and Patrica Clarkson, who do a fabulous job playing Emma Stone's parents. They are hilarious and awesome and I want them to be in every scene. Let's have a spin off just about them and not this contrived teenager shit.

I'm starting to think that they stopped making good movies in the early 90s. This movie, which had an arguably clever premise (at least as good as Mean Girls, and that was only a pale homage to Jawbreaker), decided to cheapen the whole affair by shoving brat pack movie references down your throat the whole time. Yeah, I know Ferris Bueller's Day Off was a good movie. You are not Ferris, Emma Stone. Stop trying to be Ferris. Reminding me about movies I've enjoyed in the past isn't going to trick me into liking your movie too, gosh.

I don't know if anyone would agree with me. Or if anyone cares. Because we aren't talking about a classic 1980s movie or something that was black and white. But maybe in ten or twenty years someone will be thinking about cinema in the twenty-tens and try to derive some sort of doggy-bag message. And this is what I think of that:

The difference between Easy A and a really good Brat Pack movie is that if this movie had been made in the 1980s the main character would actually have been sleeping around, not just lying about it, and it still would have been just as funny. Remember Fast Times at Ridgemont High? There was an abortion in that movie! And society didn't crumble, we dealt with it! Because what all those movies had in common was a very shameless and dark sense of humor. I think they could have pulled that off here but it would have been a little harder. But not that much harder. And think of how much more poignant the story would have been with Emma Stone really hitting rock bottom but managing to rise above, still cracking jokes, and learn something from it.

I just worry sometimes about what they're teaching the kids these days.