10 Teen Movies That Are Smarter Than You Think

Will Gluck’s Easy A gave an already 22-year-old Emma Stone one of her last outings in the teen genre, starring as Olive Penderghast, whose mistaken promiscuous reputation in her high school leads her to accept her salacious fate rather than reject it.

Cashing in on the appearance of sleeping around, Olive gives hopeless virgins and closeted homosexuals the social props and cover they desperately seek in exchange for money and gift vouchers. She embraces her image and even affixes a scarlet letter A to her outfits to pwn her critics irl. But this causes unforeseen issues in her real relationships and leaves her wishing for more.

First and foremost, the film is inspired by, and in conversation with, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic historical novel The Scarlet Letter, but at the same time, Easy A manages to reference and subvert the John Hughes films that created the modern teen movie template. The intertextuality is not just implicit but explicitly signposted in a scene where Olive namedrops movies like Say Anything, Sixteen Candles, and Can’t Buy Me Love, leaving no doubt as to Easy A's influences, but making its differences to those films - especially the fact of its empowered, independent female lead - clear in the process.