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Don't get me wrong, dear reader. She's lovely. Emma Stone was lovely before Easy A, and will be lovely after, and as a performer is richly deserving of a long and varied career as a Hollywood megastar. She's that good.

But come now. Easy A isn't any great shakes as a movie. This is a high school comedy with a healthy dose of satire, so some stylization is of course permitted, but Easy A exists in as much a fantasy universe as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. I'm not just talking about the hoary old cliche of the high school where every single person - even the geeks, even the dweebs, even the buttheads - are stunningly beautiful. (Don't get me started on the marginal likelihood that, per Easy A's setup, Emma Stone ever wandered the halls of any school anywhere "unnoticed.") Nor am I even going to pick on the degree to which Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, as Olive's entirely-too-likeable-and-cool parents, are entirely too likeable and cool.

No, I'm merely sore at the degree to which nobody in this movie behaves remotely like an actual human being. Even leaving aside the possibility that a teenage girl would, per Olive Penderghast, turn a white lie about her first sexual experience into an underground crusade to legitimize the school population's marginalized unwashed by way of rumours of sexual prowess... nobody in the world actually acts like this. These characters are driven by plot requirements rather than, y'know, character. You have a problem with the writing in Juno? Juno is freaking Waiting for Superman next to Easy A.

And as high school satires go, this has been done so much better before. Mean Girls, Saved, Ten Things I Hate About You, all managed to glom teen angst onto high concept and come away with something that more intensively mined their ideas. They were funnier, too. There are good ideas in Easy A - the tarring of the girl by way of sexual experience, vs. the elevation of the boys - but they are given short shrift next to the sunny-and-awesome show that seems to be playing all day, every day in East Ojai, California. What about Olive's sexual desire? What does she think about sex, anyway? How can a movie be about teen sex in every single scene, and yet come away with nothing to say about it?

To return to my starting point, Emma Stone really does give one of the best performances of the year here, a "starmaking turn" as they say, and she will go on to bigger things even beyond her newfound status as an "it" girl, rather like Olive herself. Likewise, if you can leave aside the fact that they're playing wildly unrealistic cliches, Tucci and Clarkson (and Thomas Hayden Church as the most perfect teacher ever) are tremendous. Easy A is appealing and easy. Close your eyes, though, and think about it.