2. About the film ‘Easy A’
• Directed by: Will Gluck
• Starring: Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes,Thomas
Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Cam Gigandet, Lisa Kudrow
• Distributed by: Screen Gems
• Released: September 17th 2010
• Running time: 92 minutes
3. What the film is about
Easy A is a 2010 American teen comedy
film written by Bert V. Royal, directed by Will
Gluck, and starring Emma Stone. The screenplay
was partly inspired by the novel ’The Scarlet
Letter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The film was
shot at Screen Gems studios and in California.
Screen Gems distributed with a release on
September 17, 2010. It was released
on DVD and Blu-ray Disc December 21, 2010.
The film was met with positive reviews, and was
a huge financial success.
4. How is it postmodern?
This one isn’t as well known as a postmodern film but it’s got some great
postmodern elements in that I thought were worth mentioning. The best
one by far is the reference to Can’t Buy Me Love, a well known 80′s romcom with Patrick Dempsey.
In it there’s quite a famous scene where Dempsey‘s character stands on his
ride-on lawn mower under the window of the object of his affections with a
pair of speakers to play her a song and get her attention. In Easy A they
replicate this scene and Emma Stone‘s character talks a lot about various
rom com films.
5. Olive (Emma Stone) jokes about having some integrity because she watched the original
movie of ‘The Scarlett letter’, but her English teacher Mr. Griffith (Thomas Haden
Church) knows that she's read the book. Once Olive accidentally launches a rumour
that she's slept with a college student the previous weekend (even though she hasn't),
soon, thanks in part to the speed of texting, everyone on campus knows about it.
When she stokes the rumour mill by pretending to sleep with a gay friend Brandon (Dan
Byrd) so that he can avoid getting beaten up every day, she decides to embrace her
shame, as it were, by sewing a red A on the front of a black bustier and strutting
around campus flaunting her new reputation. (She also wears black Wayfarers,
aligning her newfound bad name with Madonna in her seminal video "Lucky Star.")
7. Mean Girls (2004). Another witty, well-written film that comes to mind
in part because Emma Stone closely resembles Lindsay Lohan. Both
movies feature a highly marginalized heroine who looks around for a
way to stand out in a new high school, only in this case a group of
"Plastics" is the source of all the friction instead of a Christian group
run by Amanda Bynes (Marianne). Both films feature unusually
sympathetic adults, with Tina Fey playing the "cool" teacher as
Church does in this film.
