A sharp teen comedy about a girl who pretends she isn't a virgin boasts a top-notch performance from Emma Stone

• Cath Clarke
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 October 2010

 

 

Remember Ally Sheedy's line in The Breakfast Club? "Say you haven't, you're a prude; say you have, you're a slut." In this sharper than average high school comedy 17-year-old Olive (an excellent performance by Emma Stone) hasn't. She is a virgin but goes along with a rumour sweeping school that she slept with a college kid. Stone brings real warmth to Olive, who deploys smart-alec wit as a defence against the vicissitudes of high school. Unable to shake off notoriety she wears it as a badge of honour: dressing like a stripper and agreeing to have pretend sex with a gay classmate who is being bullied. The script shrewdly boosts its IQ by working in parallels to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and piling on 80s teen movie references. But even with Stone's charms and some cracking one-liners it is no match for John Hughes. And a dash of girl power might have gone down a treat.

cracking : wyśmienity

dash : domieszka

deploy : rozmieszczać

notoriety : zła sława

one-liner : krótki dowcip

pile : piętrzyć się

prude : świętoszek

shrewdly : przenikliwie, trafnie

slut : zdzira

smart-alec : mądrala

sweep : szerzyć się

top-notch : znakomity, na najwyższym poziomie

vicissitude : zmienność, niestałość

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter : Szkarłatna litera, powieść  Nathaniela Hawthorne’a

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