I just loved this movie for its sheer entertainment value. The storyline was suitably risqué, and the lead was played by the delightful Emma Stone. It is the pure unadulterated fun story of a clean cut high school girl who sees her life paralleling Hester Prynne’s in “The Scarlet Letter”, a book she is currently studying in school. Then
one small misunderstanding leads to her using the school “rumour mill” to her social and financial advantage.
The story is based around high school student Olive Penderghast (Emma Stone), who finds herself the victim of her school’s “rumour mill” when she lies to her best friend Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka) about a weekend tryst with a fictional college freshman. Word quickly spreads of Olive’s promiscuity and, much to her surprise, she welcomes the attention. When she agrees to help out a bullied friend by pretending to sleep with him, her image rapidly degrades to a more lascivious state and her world begins to spin out of control. As she helps more and more of her classmates and her lies continue to escalate, Olive tries to find a way to save face before the school’s religious fanatic Marianne (Amanda Bynes) gets her expelled and she loses a shot at gaining her own happiness.
Olive is well spoken and smart… almost too smart to get herself into the situation she does. But she inevitably does get into it, and the fun of the movie is watching how deep she can go before she manages to find her way
out. There are a number of sub-plots involving relationships between other students and teachers, but for me this was all about one girl snubbing her nose at the established way of doing things and making it look ever so cool. I feel it’s an old school classic to rival Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
There is a great supporting cast also, led in my view by the quite wacky parents played by Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci. I particularly liked the touches they brought to the film with their new-age parents approach. They just seemed to round off a slightly off-beat story that I personally thoroughly enjoyed and will definately watch again.
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