Pun Salad

Another young-people movie I mostly liked. The "A" in the title stands for the same thing it did in The Scarlet Letter, and very similar ground is covered here, although with many more laughs.

Emma Stone plays Olive, an impressively intelligent young lady attending an Ojai, California high school. It's the usual hotbed of teen hormones, hypocrisy, ostracism, and peer pressure. Constantly hectored by her friend, Olive makes up a story about an intimate weekend with a community college guy from the next town over. Through an unlikely, but very amusing, series of events, she quickly becomes known as the school tramp—all while never actually, y'know, doing anything.

Emma Stone is very good here, and the adult supporting cast is great: Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as her super-supportive parents, Thomas Haden Church as the best English teacher ever, Lisa Kudrow as the worst guidance counselor ever, and even Malcolm McDowell in a small role as the school principal.

So it's all very clever and zany. One amusing bit is where Olive wishes she were in an 80's John Hughes movie, unaware of the fact that she pretty much is. The only stale part is the movie's handling of the small subset of evangelical Christian students, who are (of course) hypocritical and judgmental prigs. Gosh, never seen that before.