Easy A (2010)

Tags

Alyson Michalka, Amanda Bynes, Comedy, Dan Byrd, Easy A, Emma Stone, Lisa Kudrow, Movie, Patricia Clarkson, Penn Badgley, Romance, Stanley Tucci, Thomas Haden Church

look, honey, we're not always going to be there to carry the movie. at some point you're going to have to find some other interesting characters to hang out with...

PG-13

Emma Stone, Penn Badgley, Amanda Bynes, Dan Byrd, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Alyson Michalka, Lisa Kudrow

Random Guy: Hey Olive, how’s it going?
Olive: I’m swell…guy I’ve never talked to before.  Thanks for asking.

Olive (Stone) makes up a story about losing her virginity in order to shut up a friend who’s asking about it, not realizing that somebody else was listening to their conversation.  When this rumor spreads like wildfire, Olive embraces her new image as school tramp and even finds a way to make some money out of it.  Of course, things start to go too far, get out of control, etc, etc.

Okay, I have several problems with this movie.  Some are minor, nit-picky things, and others are larger, more important issues.

I’ll start with a couple nit-picky things.  First, if Olive is so invisible (which I find hard to believe in the first place) at school (as she states in the opening voice over), how is it that this rumor about her spreads so quickly to everyone?  I know if a similar thing had happened to me in school, most people’s reaction would be “who is this person, and why do I give a crap about their sex life??”  Yet, we see this rumor spreading around to people like they just found out Justin Bieber(yeah, I went there) is going to start attending their school.  It’s a California high school, nobody would care.  Maybe if it was middle school, then it would be more understandable, but…well…that would be a whole different kind of movie.

Second nit-picky thing: eighth grade Olive looks nothing like high school Olive.  How hard is it to find an actress that at least looks somewhat like Emma Stone?  Nobody shapeshifts that much between eighth grade and high school.

Now on to the bigger issues.  Why is it that the adult characters are so much more interesting than the high school kids.  Only Olive has any sort of intelligent dialogue written for her.  Everybody else is just a stereotype.  The dumb jocks, the ditzy blond, the nutty Christian kids, the put-upon gay character, and on and on.  Nothing nuanced here.

As I mentioned, though, the adult characters, specifically Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as Olive’s parents, shine much brighter than anything else in this movie.  Every time they were on screen, my interest picked up.  I could have watched an entire movie about them and it would have been much much better than this one.

The other big issue:  I just didn’t find it that funny.

I like Emma Stone, and I think she can definitely carry a movie, but she deserves better than this.  There are a few funny moments outside of the scenes with the parents, but for the most part it’s just another shallow teen comedy going for easy laughs via cliches and low-brow humor (gee, a scene where two people go into a room and loudly pretend to have sex in order to trick people…how novel).

Check that all the stalls are empty before you start confessing things (whether true or not) in the bathroom.

10 – 2 for so many poorly written characters – 1 for too many unbelievable plot aspects – 1.5 because it’s just not that funny + .2 for Tucci and Clarkson = 5.7

Kabluey (2007)

Tags

Christine Taylor, Comedy, Conchata Ferrell, Drama, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kabluey, Lisa Kudrow, Movie, Scott Prendergast, Teri Garr

wipe that smile off your face, mister!

PG-13

Scott Prendergast, Lisa Kudrow, Conchata Ferrell, Christine Taylor, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Teri Garr

Brad: Leslie, call the police, we’re being attacked!!
Elizabeth: By cheese!!  And that blue thing is trying to kill us!!

While his brother is away in Iraq, Salman (Prendergast), a rather dimwitted fellow, comes to stay with his wife and 2 kids.  This doesn’t work out too well, and the wife, Leslie (Kudrow), wants Salman to leave.  He doesn’t have enough money for a bus ticket, so he takes a job as a corporate mascot, standing on the side of the road trying to hand out fliers.

You know, I’m starting to think that the term “quirky”, as I saw this film described as, is basically a way of saying that it tries to be funny, but fails.  Maybe that’s not always true, but it sure seems like a word that’s thrown around a lot these days with hopes of excusing the more annoying aspects of a movie.

If that’s the case, then I’d say this movie is quite quirky to begin with before transitioning into more sentimental, and somewhat more successful, territory.  Lisa Kudrow is generally likable, and she can deliver a comedic line pretty well, but her character is sort of horrible.  Her children are demon spawn nightmares that run around screaming and breaking things all the time, with seemingly no disciplinary action taken by mom.  I guess their behavior is supposed to have something to do with their dad being gone, but the movie doesn’t really explore that very well.  I guess Leslie has just given up on parenting, but again, that isn’t tackled head on.  Instead, the movie focuses on Salman standing out in the middle of nowhere, in a cumbersome blue outfit, hoping that cars speeding by will stop and take a flier advertising space for rent in an office complex.

These scenes just go on and on, and include several odd and annoying appearances by Teri Garr as a former employee of the company that Salman’s costume is the logo of.  She basically just screams, blows her car horn, and tries to run him over.

There’s some good imagery at times, and a few funny lines and interesting plot developments here and there, but for the most part, it all seems pretty pointless.  Plus, it never really takes on the main issues at hand.  The child actors aren’t good enough to really show realistic effects of having a father away at war for over a year, so that issue can’t really be explored.  We start to get into what’s going on with Leslie a bit deeper, but suddenly everything is resolved and the movie ends, and it doesn’t seem like it earned the final feel-good scenes.

Mascot costumes should have fingers.

10 – 1.5 for some failed comedy attempts – 2 for just glossing over the possibly interesting story elements – .9 for the boring stretches in the middle = 5.6