Penland: Easy A

Although Easy A borrows from other teen movies, it still manages to come off as an original. The film begins with highschooler Olive talking directly to the audience via webcam, explaining “her side of the story, the right one”. The film’s editor, Susan Littenberg uses this as the basis to tell the story. The clever use of the webcam throughout this movie appeals to the generation of teens who are obsessed with posting pictures and videos of themselves on the Internet via Facebook and YouTube.

Olive pretends to lose her virginity to help out a gay student, Brandon, who is being bullied and soon her life spirals out of control, imitating Hester Prynne’s in The Scarlet Letter, which she is studying in school. The scene is set at a wild party, where Olive takes her friend into the bedroom. As the other partygoers are listening on the other side of the door, Olive and Brandon jump up and down on the bed, laughing and trying to make it sound like they are having sex. The editing in this scene is great – going back and forth between the two kids in the bedroom to the “audience” of the kids in the hallway and kitchen listening in.

Word gets out among the geeks that Olive will pretend to have sex with them, thus boosting their unpopular status at school. The editing in the scenes where Olive negotiates with a series of boys is funny, as the camera flashes to various boys approaching her, each one offering something different.

Finally, Olive has such a reputation at the school that she gives up trying to fight the rumors and brands her clothing with a Scarlet “A.” There are some well-edited scenes of her walking into the school with the ensuing shocked reaction she gets from students and teachers.

The film imitates and actually pays homage to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: Olive takes a shower and forms her shampooed hair in a Mohawk as Ferris does and Littenberg edits in a scene from the St. Patrick’s Day parade where Ferris is singing “Twist and Shout”.

Easy A is also reminiscent of Mean Girls, and a bit like Clueless, where the heroine, a nice, conventional girl caught up in the horrors of high school, changes to something outrageous. And although it is used in many movies, there is even a scene where her boyfriend, Todd, holds up a radio like John Cusack in Say Anything.

This scene does a great job in editing-showing how Olive doesn't do anything over the weekend except get this song stuck in her head.