As
vivacious as Emma Stone is, and she is, it is hard to believe that she
is a high school kid let alone one who would be shunned and not one of
the 'in' crowd. An audience is asked to suspend belief when watching  a
movie but this is a little too much belief to suspend.

Loosely based on the novel "The Scarlett Letter", with a few references to the movie version starting Demi Moore, we see how Olive (Emma Stone) commits adultery, becomes a 'slut', among other names, and wears the latter "A" like Hester Prynne does in the book, but Olive never has sex.

What
leads to this is a scene where she does a gay friend, played by Dan
Byrd, a favor  pretending to have sex with him behind a closed door at a
party while all the party goers listen to their fake sounds which
wouldn't fool anyone and certainly not sex smart kids of today.  The
scene is suppose to be funny, and I think the director Will Gluck and screenwriter Bert V. Royal expected it to be hilarious but it seems
to fall flat. By the way Dan is the only one who looks young enough to
be a high school student.

The cast, with Lisa Kudrow as a school counselor, married to Thomas Haden Church, the English teacher, and Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as Olive's hippie parents plus Macolm McDowell as the school pricipal are among the adults all giving support to the younger cast members. Along with Amanda Bynes, the Christian virgin, Cam Gigandet, supposedly a Christian 'virgin' who gets a STD along with Aly Michalka, as Olive's best friend who turns on her, are students at the school plus the white knight played by Penn Badgley, all looking well over high school age.

This
being a film aimed at mainly teenage girls, in order to get the boys to
see it, the screenwriters have to throw in the smut and here it seems
to be pointed at, pardon the pun, at the vagina and every street name
and slang it is called.

I walked in expecting a light hearted comedy  but the laughs are few and far between, if any. There is suppose to be something funny for her getting paid to not have sex with the nerds and yet say she did with gift cards and discount tickets. This not a John Hughes high school film and neither will it become a classic as he films did.