Despite having a certain susceptibility to teen movies —
not that there’s anything wrong with a grown woman being able to quote most of Bring It On - I was genuinely surprised at how much I enjoyed this weekend’s Easy A. Emma Stone kills it as Olive, a high school student who traps herself in an extremely slutty lie, and as her potential romantic interest, Gossip Girl‘s Penn Badgley evokes the above-it-all cool of, well, Jesse Bradford in Bring It On. (Yes, I am aware that other movies exist.) Hooray, also, for Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as the weirdest, warmest movie parents in a long while. I walked out of the theater feeling like maybe, just maybe, the kidz are gonna be all right.
But we are gathered here today to discuss the strange case of Amanda Bynes, as
Easy A marks her first major film appearance since
Hairspray in 2007. (I’m not counting
Sydney White, since apparently no one did at the time.) Playing a tightly-wound evangelical Christian goody-two-shoes on a rampage against Olive’s alleged behavior, she isn’t given much to do but shoot Jesus lasers from her eyes and blast aggravated steam from her ears,
but she slapped on a prissy headband and went for it anyway. Bynes has always exhibited less vanity than her fellow teen stars, a willingness to go for the punchline (even if
she’s the punchline) that evades lesser comediennes. So I gotta ask: Amanda, what is up with all this retirement hoo-hah?
