Easy A ***

Director: Will Gluck
Cast: Emma Stone, Alyson Michalka, Penn Badgley
Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson
Stanley Tucci, Lisa Kudrow, Cam Gigandet, Malcolm McDowell
Dan Byrd, Jake Sandvig

You know how they usually say "save the best for last", right? Have you noticed then, how movie credits usually do that when they know they have something special on their hands? They refer to a special someone by "introducing" or "presenting" and in some cases they go by the very humble "and". Such is the case of Easy A, watching its inventive credits we take in a quite remarkable cast (Kudrow! Church! Tucci and Clarkson! McDowell! all of whom are amazing by the way) before we are told that there's also someone named Emma Stone starring in the film.
What nobody tells us is how much of Ms. Stone we'll be seeing and how extraordinary she is. She plays Olive Penderghast, a high school student who unintentionally sets her reputation on fire.
Trying to look for an excuse to indulge in some secret single behavior and not hang out with her constricting best friend Rhiannon (Michalka) during the weekend she tells her that she has a date.
Come Monday morning, Rhi interrogates Olive so much that just to shut her up she ends up confessing she lost her virginity to a college guy during the weekend.
This confession happens to be heard by school prude Maryanne (Bynes) who then proceeds to spread the story faster than an STD. Olive soon becomes notorious for putting out and she begins getting the strangest requests from people who ask her to say she had sex with them to lubricate their high school social status.
In this way she "beds" a closeted gay guy, an underachieving geek and just about anyone else willing to give her a gift certificate for some nice restaurant.
Unlike teen flicks where the idea of sex is shrouded by mystery, prudishness or just plain horniness, Easy A approaches it from a completely mature place and makes us wonder exactly what is so special about sex in a day and age when it could either mean uber coolness or complete degradation.
The screenwriters aptly compare Olive's conundrum to that of Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter who had to carry a red letter on her dress to condemn her adultery and the director asks us for example what are social networks if not scarlet letters of our own making?
Therefore when Olive realizes the mess she's in, instead of trying to dispel the rumors she becomes empowered by them. She creates a strong sexual persona for herself in which she can feel comfortable and powerful.
Of course, the movie never implies that people should go around faking sexual histories and we see how the situation gets out of hand for the heroine but we leave the movie wondering why we act towards sex like we do.
How many people you know for example, have faked entire stories about their conquests or inversely lied about their promiscuity? For what purpose?
This movie makes us question the idea of sex in a world where it can become a pro or a con. For everyone who thinks it's awesome we slept with three strangers during a weekend, others are ready to take us to hell and make us pay for these sins.
The best thing about Easy A is that it doesn't pretend to know the answers to these questions, like a living thing it makes discoveries along with its protagonist. And what a star they got!
Stone is pure comedic perfection. Watch how she delivers her complicated lines without the awkward selfconsciousness of Ellen Page or how she embraces her provocative beauty without the lack of restraint Lindsay Lohan came to show at some point.
Her performance is amazing because of the way in which Stone becomes Olive, there's no tick-tock examination of the character as she acts, none of the selfrighteous "I'm a teen" mode actors in similar movies have.
It's funny that Olive is such a fan of 80's teen comedies because in a way she embodies the evolution John Hughes' work should have commended to the genre. Instead the genre got stuck in trying to recreate his films without taking into consideration that things would change.
Interestingly enough the film makes fun of itself all the time, especially when it defies viewers to contradict its ridiculous, but true, points.
Therefore at times Easy A plays like a compilation tape that chides this generation for its need to be famous by way of infamy while bashing in the privileges that come from sexual liberation.
Emma Stone may be no Dr. Ruth but she sure knows how to guide us through the joys and calamities of sex.

Along Came a Spider (and Hollywood Squashed It).

Sony Pictures did what not even Venom could: kill Spider-Man. In what's been regarded as an insane strategy since it was announced earlier today, the studio has decided to reboot the series for the 2012 release (hmm all those Mayan theories are making more sense huh?) after director Sam Raimi refused to compromise the series' artistic integrity by rushing into a filming without a definite screenplay.

Reboots have come a standard of sorts in Hollywood, but they have been relegated for series that were in serious creative issues or were being left behind by the moving times.
When they hired Daniel Craig to play James Bond and Christopher Nolan to retell Batman from the beginning, they were not playing around. Both moves were highly risky and paid off in the best ways: box office hits and critical darlings.

But what was so wrong about Spider-Man that needed a reboot even before the first film turned a decade old?

Now that there's not much to do about this, the issue that follows is the idea of their intended reboot; according to the official release from the studio,

Peter Parker is going back to high school when the next Spider-Man hits theaters in the summer of 2012. Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios announced today they are moving forward with a film based on a script by James Vanderbilt that focuses on a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.

Don't they mean Smallville? or even worse Twilight?

If my memory serves me right Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) was bitten by the radioactive spider in the first movie, which means that whatever the studio has decided to tell in this new version will technically be set in what happened in about twenty minutes in the original film.
Hmmm perhaps because it didn't matter much?

The wonderful thing about Spider-Man was to see Maguire grow into those red tights. Remember that if it hadn't been for Raimi's genius casting of the atypical Maguire as a superhero we'd still probably be stuck with the likes of Val Kilmer and Billy Zane as comic book icons.
If Maguire hadn't been so perfect as Parker perhaps we wouldn't even have Craig as Bond or Robert Downey Jr. as Iron-Man.

It was this thinking outside the box that refreshed the superhero movie for the decade that was. With this Hollywood move we're reminded that the 2000´s are indeed over and done with.

More on the Spider-Man reboot:
Deadline Hollywood: "Spider-Man 4" Scrapped; Franchise Reboot for 2012 (includes complete statement from the studio)
Chud.com: The Devin's Advocate: Twilight for Spider-Man and Hollywood a wonderful analysis of what become the end of the blockbuster era or the perpetuation of zombiefied film production.
Cinemablend: 15 Reasons Rebooting Spider-Man is A Really Bad Idea all of them are spot on.

What does your Spidey sense tell you about this?

Smart People **

Director: Noam Murro

Cast: Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ellen Page

Thomas Haden Church, Ashton Holmes

With a self absorbed title that immediately gives away the fim's "look at how indie I am" intentions, "Smart People" presents itself in the same hazy New England settings where we have learnt that middle class, dysfunctional families treat emotional pain by throwing witty bits of dialogue at each other.

This particular family is headed by English Professor Lawrence Whetherhold (Quaid), a depressed widower who is loathed by people in the univeristy where he teaches.

His daughter Vanessa (Page) is a young Republican who has taken on the role of Stepford wife after her mom's death.

His son James (Holmes) lives in his college dormitory (and the film really gets rid of him except when it needs to display large showcases of quirkiness).

The lives of the Whetherhold family members get shaken a bit with the appearance of Lawrence's adopted brother Chuck (Haden Church), a pot smoking, womanizing slacker who crashes with the family and tries to put some life in them and with Lawrence's unexpected romance with doctor Janet (Parker who is lovely as usual, but really underwritten as a character) a former student of his with a complicated emotional agenda of her own.

The problem with "Smart People" (note the intentional self conscious smirk of the title...) is that it never dares to push itself and its characters, merely relying on them as stereotypes (not archetypes as it thinks it does) of other indie films.

Quaid, who constantly proves he's a much better actor than people think, seems extracted from "The Squid and the Whale", complete with greasy hair, unkempt beard and a protruding belly all meant to scream "college professor with issues", but Quaid gives Lawrence a detached sincerity.

He acts like an arrogant prick, because that's what he's always been.

Page, who on the contrary constantly proves what a one note actress she is, feels like a hybrid of Juno and Jennifer Garner's character in the film; a control freak with growing up issues, who just can't help but throw a snarky remark whenever she can.

The one beautiful thing about Page is that her attempts at restraining her youthful spirit always fail and now and then she shines and only then does she feel like a real person.

Haden Church does the same thing he did in "Sideways", but he does end up stealing the film, because unintentionally his character is the only one who seems to catch on how fake everyone else is and his carelessness, which might be contempt in disguise, is a real punch in the face.

"Smart People" is enjoyable, but relies too much on things the characters it portrays never would consider. During one scene Lawrence is trying to win back the affections of Janet, he approaches her and confesses that he hasn't had any epiphanies or enlightenment and that he's till the same person he always was.

The film would love to think of itself as that, problem is we never really knew what kind it was.