Easy A is morally bankrupt, poorly written, miscast, derivative monstrosity of a movie.

I had heard good things.  It has an 87% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ebert loved it. The only notable detractor was the notorious contrarian Armond White. I like Emma Stone. I like the movies I’d heard this compared to (Juno, Mean Girls, the John Hughes’ oeuvre). Yet after seeing it myself, the only true sentiment I could find to agree with was Armond’s statement that this was a ”frontrunner for worst film of 2010.” Without a doubt.

If you haven’t seen it, just listen to what it’s about. [Spoilers ahoy.] Emma Stone plays a not hot girl (Olive) who dresses not conservatively. For some reason, there are cracks made about her being undatable. Emma Stone obviously is not ugly, so the only aspect of the movie that substantiates this claim is that, for the first act of the movie, she uses the occasional big word, and spends Saturdays at home.  Olive has a young brother, whose only role is to be the butt of several jokes about his being black and adopted in an all-white family. Comedy gold! Also, the entire story is told with thick voice over from Emma Stone talking into a webcam. (With a plot device like that, how could it not be good?)

For no reason in particular - a condition which the movie repeats over and over - Olive tells her best friend she slept with someone for the first time over the weekend. This is overheard byAmanda Bynes (post some terrifying plastic surgery), who plays a boring rip-off of Mandy Moore from Saved!

Then there’s a short scene with Dan Humphry being nice and handsome, but having zero connection to the plot.

Quickly, word spreads about Olive. An assumed gay character visits Olive at her house and proposes that she pretend to have slept with him, too, because, in a bit of accidental topicality, “It may get better, but right now it sucks.” Olive agrees to be the beard, word spreads that she is sleeping with everyone. Olive’s response: to start dressing trashy.

Other students begin asking Olive to pretend they hooked up, in exchange for gift cards. (Why not cash? I believe this is either a clumsy attempt to distinguish Olive from a prostitute or, more likely, a source of product-placement revenue.) Things get out of hand. Amanda Bynes and the now-former best friend begin picketing the school with signs that say “Olive is a slut.” No one seems to have a problem with this.

Then we quickly learn that the married guidance counselor slept with Amanda Bynes’ boyfriend and they exchanged an STD. The student blames it on Olive. Because the guidance counselor is married to the “cool teacher,” Olive accepts the blame. Things get more out of hand. (Where are Olive’s parents in this? Nonplussed. They are “cool parents.” We’re later told with a wink and a smile that the mom “used to sleep with everybody.”)

Now that the glory of being a slut (this is the movie’s word, btw) has wained and the shame of being a prostitute has prevailed, Olive decides to take action. (Keep in mind that at this point, Olive has only sacrificed her reputation to help others.) She dances in front of the school in skimpy clothing with a shirtless Dan Humphry (the school mascot), and tells everyone to go to her website to see more.

At this point, it is revealed the webcam video of Olive we’ve been watching is what was on her website! Thus she effectively outs the gay kid, reveals to all that the lovable losers are indeed losers, and ruins the career and marriage of two teachers (a burden that shouldn’t have been hers to begin with. Not only is this fact never addressed, Olive actually apologizes profusely for not keeping the secret. This is the only apology she makes.) Therefor, she undoes all the good she did, but does not undo the fact that she’s been dressing like a stripper nearly the entire movie.

Then we cut to the gay kid, where he and the large black man he ran away with are lovingly watching the scene from the movie version of Huckleberry Finn where Huck and Jim ride together on a raft at night. Seriously.

Then, and this is where it gets good, we cut to real time. The webcast ends when Dan Humphry shows up, holding iPod speakers over his head, á la Say Anything. Olive proclaims, to camera, I kid you not, “I’m going to go lose my virginity now!” Up to this point, Olive and Dan have not been on a date, have not kissed. They have hugged once. And she says this.

So what’s the moral of the story? If not a moral, what’s the point? What did Olive learn, or how did she change, or how did people change? What resolved? As far as I can tell, these questions are moot, because if you were to look for a moral, you would realize this: Dan Humphry (who has known Olive since childhood) only asks her out when she starts dressing and acting like a slut. Therefor, the moral of the story is, “Helping others is pointless, and dressing like a prostitute gets you what you want.”

Easy A is no Mean Girls; it doesn’t hold a candle to Juno. Easy A is worse than a Disney Channel original movie.