SELECTED SHORTS Knight and Day.

Knight and Day. (20th Century Fox; 109 minutes; widescreen; PG-13; 2010). It might initially seem like faint praise that the cinematic reunion of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz is a vast improvement when compared to their previous teaming, the unwatchable psychodrama Vanilla Sky from 2001. Yet Knight and Day is way more fun than its tepid box-office response from last summer actually suggests.

It’s an espionage spoof that doesn’t take itself remotely seriously, as the stars meet cute in the opening sequence at a Wichita airport, with handsome Roy Miller (Cruise) constantly colliding with pert eyeful June Havens, (Diaz) before embarkation. Before you know it, they’re both on an airliner crawling with spies, as Roy effortlessly takes each one out while a clueless June primps herself in the ladies room. But the CIA has labeled Roy as a rogue agent who possesses a coveted teensy gizmo that can power entire towns (among the feds: Peter Sarsgaard in his umpteenth variation of a gimlet-eyed shady character) and even worse, they suspect June is allied with Roy. So Roy has little choice but to protect June from subsequent harm, as the pair globe-hops from Brooklyn to Austria to Spain, dodging numerous explosions along the way, and inevitably falling for each other.

So where were the audiences for this breezy summertime diversion? In Europe, where Cruise’s box-office pull is still considerable; the movie earned $186 million overseas, more than doubling its $76 million domestic take, for an international total of $262 million, which by default made Knight and Day the biggest grosser of Fox’s 2010 lineup. (The studio had too few other bright spots last year, such as the Steve Carell-Tina Fey comedy Date Night.)

And credit director James Mangold, who is less of a definable auteur and more of a crowd-pleasing showman (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma), with transforming this spy fantasy into a sleek star vehicle tapered to his leads’ on-screen charms. Diaz’s pouty-lipped innocent, sometimes ditzy, yet resilient in other moments, neatly balances the antic energy presented by Cruise, who often engages in amusing self-parody (the sunglasses from Risky Business, the Jerry Maguire toothsome grin that had viewers at “Hello,” the actionhero posturing from the Mission: Impossible franchise) and even has a touch of his couchjumping Oprah persona.

The car-crash action sequences obviously kid the pants off the recent Bourne-Bond models, yet Mangold still has fun with the scenes in which Roy slips June a succession of Mickeys, with her drugged viewpoint presented as a series of blackouts that display only fleeting snippets of Roy’s truly impossible escapes. And the silly repartee (credited to scriptwriter Patrick O’Neill)

between the stars is delivered with affectionate aplomb, especially when Diaz’s June asks how she got into a tropical bikini. “June, I’ve been trained to dismantle a bomb in the pitch black with nothing but a safety pin and a Junior Mint,” Roy replies, “so I think I can get you in and out of some clothes without (two-beat pregnant pause) looking.”

The Knight and Day DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment is letterboxed at a 2.35:1 ratio, preserving all the widescreen action mayhem. Don’t expect a commentary track or deleted scenes, but the best extra is a 13-minute behind-the-scenes vignette titled “Wilder Knights and Crazier Days,” with glimpses into the film’s stunts and Cruise actually participating in many action moments. (His leap off a building with a cable harnessed to his body is quite jaw-dropping, pardon the pun.) Even Mangold admits, “In the age of computer graphics, no one’s going to believe that {Cruise} did it.” Also in the package: two minutes’ worth of “viral videos,” supposed impromptu backstage sequences that were designed for pre-release marketing hype; a trailer running about three minutes; and a nine-minute segment that follows Cruise hanging out with the Black Eyed Peas (they sing “Someday” during the closing credits) in a bland pastiche that screams “DVD filler!”

Easy A. (Screen Gems/Columbia; 92 minutes; PG-13; 2010). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the classic 1850 novel of adultery that has since become the bane of high school students because it is required reading in English classes, provides the jumping-off point for this whip-smart teen comedy from director Will Gluck (Andy Richter Controls the Universe) that offers a star-making turn for its leading lady, Emma Stone.

As wisecracking high schooler Olive Penderghast, the husky-voiced, redheaded Stone inhabits virtually every scene and she makes the most of a funny scenario that is reminiscent of Oscar Levant’s long-ago withering putdown about Doris Day as “prostituting her virginity.” Olive has yet to be deflowered, but she nevertheless makes up a snowballing lie that she did the dirty deed, and that rumor speeds through the lockered school halls at mach speed. (Director Gluck employs a first-person Steadicam view that hurtles past the student body to emphasize the bad news traveling fast.)

So since she’s already perceived as damaged goods, Olive uses this misinformation as a sense of empowerment, as she agrees to more falsehoods that she has gotten randy with unlikely lads such as a flamboyant gay kid and a porky nerd, in exchange for gift cards to the Home Depot and area restaurants. Yet beyond the red A that she proudly wears as a badge of dishonor on her sexy bustiers, Olive learns that no one can see the good girl that lurks beneath the slutty innuendos, which could compromise the relationship she really wants to have with studly nice guy Todd (Penn Badgley from Gossip Girl).

Stone owns this movie from the get-go; Olive’s lip-sync to a Natasha Bedingfield song in an early moment is so endearing—she snarkily hates the track at first, then succumbs to its pop charms—that you likewise just fall in love with her character. And her arc from sweetheart to mock-floozy is neatly charted by director Gluck, who keeps things bouncy and on the light side. The never-neverland of John Hughes movies from the 1980s are deliberately recalled, yet Easy A is more satiric than sentimental, especially with its memorable cast of supporting characters.

Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci easily steal scenes as Olive’s flaky yet loving parents who wisely give her enough rope to either hang herself or discover how she can get herself out of this tough jam. Yet there are even more laughs generated from Amanda Bynes’ snotty holy roller, Alyson Michalka as a jealous gal pal, Thomas Haden Church as an ad-libbing English teacher, Lisa Kudrow as the world’s worst guidance counselor in a plot twist you won’t see coming, and Malcolm McDowell as an acerbic principal who declares, “This is public school. If I can keep the girls off the pole and the boys off the pipe, I get a bonus.” With its sassy script by Bert V. Royal that boasts nearly as many choice one-liners as could be found in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, Easy A affably romps through very familiar turf yet still manages to be both surprising and appealing.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment’s DVD release offers Easy A in a 1.85:1 ratio, with lots of trailers for other DVD and movie releases, plus a fiveminute gag reel with some amusing outtakes and a one-minute webcam footage of Stone’s audition for the role, which shows that even in the embryonic stages of this movie she was capable of knocking it out of the ballpark.

The commentary track with Stone and director Gluck is largely a gigglethon. Nevertheless, it offers some insights into this low-budgeter’s fast shooting schedule (the movie was filmed last May for a multiplex release just five months later), Gluck’s penchant for having something orangecolored in every shot (“I wanted it as a motif because I didn’t go to film school and I figured I had to try to do something cool-looking.”) that ends up visually dovetailing nicely with the SoCal backdrop, and the fact that the commentary had to be halted several times because legal types were listening in to squelch anything that could lead to litigious ramifications—like Stone projecting the movie’s final box-office take! (It earned $58 million, on a scant budget of just $8 million.) There are also plenty of jokes aimed at Stone’s future project, which they lovingly retitle Spider-Man: The Reboot, due for release on July 3, 2012.

—Bill DeLapp