The To Do List — 2013
Director- Maggie Carey
Cast- Aubrey Plaza, Johnny Simmons, Bill Hader,Alia Shawkat, Sarah Steele, Scott Porter and Rachel Bilson
Plot- Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish before hitting campus in the fall.
Review- Aubrey Plaza convincingly plays a sexually inexperienced, overachieving 18 year old girl living in the 90’s when actually she was in her late twenties when acting the part. She manages to play the character and make her both hilarious and irritatingly annoying at the same time.
The main theme of the character is that she is incredibly high achieving at school with high aspirations to go to university and do well. In order to excel at high school, she sacrifices her social life, only having a handful of close friends and not attending parties for 4 years. Over the course of the film, she writes and “to do list” of sexual acts she wants to complete before she leaves for college after the summer break. Throughout the film she hooks up with a variety of guys and performs all the acts only some of them are mentioned.
Over the summer holidays, she works at the local swimming pool with friend Cameron (who is in love with her), Derek, Rusty and the manager Willy. Here she spends most of her time practising enticing looks and reading about sex facts with her friends. She also is the receiving end of a number of practical jokes or “hazes” because she is the newbie and she’s also controlling to the point of irritating. As she’s trying to look sexy in front of Rusty, she gets agitated that all of her attempts are thwarted by hazes and embarrassing scenarios including her bikini top becoming loose in the pool and her flashing her (flat) chest.
Brandys main aim throughout the film is to lose her virginity to Rusty Waters (Scott Porter) as he was characterised as the sexy dream man that everyone wants to sleep with. At the end of the film, she achieves this goal however the joke was that he wasn’t very good in bed and only lasted one minute during sex.
I like this film as it approaches the sexual acts in an explicit way (no nudity), however they go about it with an air of innocence. This is shown through a conversation Brandy (Plaza) has with her friends in the bathroom at a party. Her friend Fiona (shawkat) “I bet he’d cum like, 3 times to which Brandy replies “Come where?”.
The film being set in the 90’s means that there were numerous items including clothing and technology (like pagers) which helped make this film more relatable to the “90’s kids”.
The choice of casting was perfect for the type of film where you needed an actor that could pull off serious, funny and incredibly sexy, sometimes in the same sentence. I was introduced to Alia Shawkat, who plays Brandys friend Fiona, and I like the characters that she portrays, usually with a dry sarcastic sense of humour like her role as Pash in Whip It (2009). Another great casting choice is Bill Hader playing the pool manager Willy. Again he has a sarcastic sense of humour and embraces the character completely. He frequently cast in comedy films (Forgetting Sarah Marshall & Adventureland) as he flawlessly becomes the lazy, pot smoking manager that spends his days teasing Brandy and drinking beer.
Overall this film was hilariously erotic yet teen friendly film with an amazing cast that and script and costume that helps build on the stories authenticity.
