After an embarrassing encounter with Rusty at a party,
Brandy, with the help of her more experienced friends, makes a check-list of
all the sex-related things she wants to do by the end of summer, before she
sets off for college.
As far as raunchy sex comedies go, “The To Do List” follows
in the path of “There’s Something About Mary” and “Superbad.” It certainly doesn’t skimp on the jokes
– it’s filled to the brim with them – and it doesn’t shy from the
scatological. There’s gross-out
humor aplenty. But where
“Superbad” (a film with a similar setting and many of the same cast members)
had a story of friendship nestled in its soft underbelly, “The To Do List” remains
flinty, only hinting at deeper themes.
That’s largely because the comedy of “The To Do List” can be
a double-edged sword, with jokes and actions perhaps undercutting real character
emotions. Brandy is decidedly set
on achieving her list, but ultimately, it seems only so that she can say she
did. For her, sexual encounters
are never about loving, caring for, or even actually liking the other person,
they’re always about achieving a goal.
Packed with a robust supporting cast, “The To Do List” does
a good job of building scenes around genuinely unique characters. Unlike this summer’s “The Heat,” whose
characters felt so ridiculous and unimaginably incompetent, the supporting
players here feel like they could really exist within this comedic world. Even Rachel Bilson, as Brandy’s older
sister Amber, who might be the most over-the-top, still seems rooted in this
reality, and a scene of her physically fighting with Brandy is well-played
against a scene of Cameron (Johnny Simmons) excitedly hugging Duffy
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse) after a phone call.
Screenwriter and director Maggie Carey wrote the script with
Aubrey Plaza in mind, instructing her to do her version of Tracy Flick from
Alexander Payne’s “Election,” and Plaza summons a prickly, defiant persona – one which supervisor Willy (Bill Hader) suggests has kept people at a
distance. And though there are
opportunities for Brandy to change and lighten up, especially with Cameron, her
lab partner with a bad case of puppy love, we never see that she’s changed in a
big way.
There doesn’t have to be anything wrong with playing sex for
laughs – here, 90s-era fashion and technologies are certainly played that way –
but we never get the sense that Brandy is getting any sort of authentic enjoyment out
of her physical encounters. Because
she’s never had any romantic experiences before, her flings seem less like acts
of feminist liberation than of naïveté.
Brandy might look to the smiling photo of Hillary Clinton on her desk for
feminist inspiration, but certainly Hillary would have a few things to say about
casual sexual escapades. Or at
least she will in 1998.
