Being one of the few things she asked for for Christmas, I bought this movie so that Jill could watch it. She had hyped this movie up so thoroughly that I was forced to experience it with her due to curiosity. Also I am a sucker for bad teenage dramas.
This movie is yet another in a growing series of epic masterpieces to be remade into a modern teeny bopper movie. This movie joins the likes of Ten things I hate about you (the taming of the shrew), shes the man (twelfth night), out cold (Casablanca), yet this time the tale is based upon the Scarlet Letter. The main character in this story is relegated to Hester Prynne except in this case the harlot's reputation is based entirely upon her own lies. Emma Stone pretends to sleep with a, constantly abused and bullied, gay classmate so that he can pretend to be straight until he can manage to escape their small town. When the ruse works for him she is asked by one guy after another to do the same thing so that their reputations can be altered. This series of lies and deceptions snowballs until the inevitable collapse and the protagonists eventual "Why did this all happen" moment.
I know its a teeny bopper movie and they are by definition trite repeats of the same boring story line, but I wasn't surprised at a single moment in this movie. If it weren't for Amanda Bynes role as a Christian super freak who hounds the main character for the entire movie this film would have no redeeming qualities. Am I sad that I watched it? No. Will I probably watch it again. Most likely. Will I continue to use redundant questions in my posts? That is yet to be seen.
So Marissa and I actually watched this earlier tonight. (Rental. Not technically logging. No post forthcoming from me, but maybe she'll play by her own strange rules.) It was, as you said, entirely unsurprising but still a decent and funny movie. I liked Amanda Bynes as the Christian girl too, but my favorite characters were Emma Stone's three family members. The combination nonsense and blunt honesty that flowed back and forth during their dialogues was fantastic! Also, this movie was very much unlike the Scarlet Letter. They directly referenced it, sure, but this was much more of a "let's borrow one concept from that story and make a new story round it" case than a "modern day retelling" of a classic tale like the Cinderella Story or Sidney White or whatever.
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