Movie Reviews, “Easy A” and “Everybody’s Doing It”

Wow, there’s only two entries under this tag?? Thanks to netflix, the past few months I’ve managed towaste tons of time catch up on lots of movies I hadn’t seen or even heard of, but have completely neglected to blog about them! I have been SLACKING! Which would be forgivable if I just simply wasn’t watching movies that had any relation to sex or feminism. (How that would happen, your guess is as good as mine. Anyway.) To try and catch up without creating a veritable deluge of movie review posts, I’m gonna try to bunch similarly themed movies together for a few group posts.

Easy A (2010) 
One of the more recent films I’ve seen, Easy A, follows a pretty traditional “high school coming of age” setting for the teen comedy flick genre at PG-13, which makes it only mildly embarrassing to admit that I’m really kind of totally in love with this film. Released 2010, stars a spunky and witty Emma Stone, and a really amusing casting of Amanda Bynes (of Nickelodeon’s All That fame) as an ultra-conservative jesus-freak preacher’s daughter.

The reason I love this film is it’s ironic twist on the “slut” motif/archetype, and how poignantly it illuminates the fallacy of believing the labels thrust upon teens by their peers. Emma’s character, Olive, is possessed of a strongly defiant sense of personal integrity and self knowledge, which is refreshing in a genre so over-saturated with teens in identity-crisis mode “acting out” as a way to find themselves. Emma, in fact, knows herself quite well, and has the resilience to remain self-confident in the face of teasing, jeering, rumors, and ultimately a bad “date” that invites consideration of how boys treat girls with bad reputations.

This level of sophistication in a teenager seems only believable due to the unconditional support from her wildly unconventional and loopy parents, and maybe I adore this movie in part just because it reminds me of myself in high school. But also, it’s a beautiful statement of teens’ abilities to successfully and confidently decide for themselves how to handle their sexual awakenings if given the tools and freedom to do so. It also inspires questions about sexual ethics, drawing boundaries, and of course a favorite trope of the teen comedy, the nature of lying. Added bonus: Olive’s parents are not forced into an unrealistic “asexual” box, instead managing to maintain a respect for their humanness as sexual beings without being blatant or inappropriate in front of their children. (Requisite teenaged “gross-outs” not withstanding.) 

The end of the movie shows Olive giving a symbolic “Fuck You” to the lascivious and voyeuristic impulses of both under-age boys and adult men towards young women’s sexuality, offering a very well grounded, “I really like this boy. In fact, I might even lose my virginity to him. Maybe tonight. Or, next week, or next month, or next year. But regardless of when, it’s nobody’s damned business.”

The only minor flaws with this movie are, the “plain girl nobody pays attention to who turns out to be a babe,” isn’t really all that “plain” even in the beginning, and the diversity of beauty and ethnicities is your typical Hollywood standard (i.e., really low to non-existent.) Also the “blonde best friend who is kind of a tramp” archetype makes an appearance, and the lack of character development mostly just leaves her stuck in the “blonde with big boobs” role in the eyes of the audience as well as the characters in the film.

Some parents might feel like the parent characters in this movie take way too hands-off of an approach to Olive’s hints about what’s going on in school, but personally I really like the message of confidence that manages to be “I believe in you” without being that overly cheesy and sappy kind of I-believe-in-you that makes every teenager cringe in embarrassment. For parents with young adolescent girls, this could actually make an awesome companion movie to a reading of Packaging Girlhood by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown, a book about consumer culture, the shaping of femininity and selling of faux-“empowerment,” as a lead in for family discussions about cultural pressures on girls in general. Other book recommendations are Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum and/or The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti, great fodder for budding feminists.

Everybody’s Doing It (2002) 
A far less serious take on high school and sexual youth, the MTV spoof-like comedy Everybody’s Doing It from 2002 tackles the flaws of abstinence-only education policies in a very over the top way. Dripping with cheese, the viewer is invited to co-miserate with the main character in eye-rolling and/or gagging over “idiotic administrators” and type-A classmate(s). A reviewer on netflix said the best part of this film was the musical number with dancing STD’s in the middle of the film. 

But, I would go with the, again, strong individualist female lead who pushes to demand respect for her own boundaries, both in private with her boyfriend of a year, and also in public when challenged to “defend” herself against an inquisition-like abstinence-pledge enforcement. Angela maintains a strength of will and self-confidence that is maybe a bit surprising in a made-for-MTV comedy, of all places. My favorite part is Angela’s insistence that whether she has sex or not is nobody’s business but her and her boyfriend, and she refuses to budge on the point, not even with the seemingly “harmless” insistence that she make a public statement that she hasn’t had sex. Personal integrity and sexual ethics in the face of peer pressure are strong themes in an otherwise really dopey teen flick.



Would you like to be part of this segment? OR DO YOU WANT TO DONATE TO SUPPORT,??

Please contact us via our email: blog-apps@hotmail.com   for procedures to follow.

 Thanks for stopping by! Your feedback keeps me going. Do follow on  Twitter: @oatzeal

ALWAYS CHECK BACK FOR NEW POST, WE WILL ALWAYS UPDATE SOMETHING NEW EVERYDAY