The To Do List ** (2013, Aubrey Plaza, Johnny Simmons, Bill Hader, Alia Shawkat, Rachel Bilson, Sarah Steele, Andy Samberg, Scott Porter, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) – Movie Review

Writer/ director Maggie Carey’s 2013 American romantic comedy film The To Do List stars Aubrey Plaza as the sexually inexperienced Brandy Klark, who makes a list of sex things to accomplish before she goes to college.

Aubrey Plaza stars as the sexually inexperienced Brandy Klark from Boise, Idaho, who makes a list of sex things to accomplish before she goes to college.

Brandy is a socially awkward overachieving teenager who graduates as the valedictorian of her high school in 1993 and decides to learn all about sex over the summer to have sex with muscular college boy Rusty Waters (Scott Porter) to complete her To Do List.

Alia Shawkat, Rachel Bilson and Sarah Steele are the other key players, though ensemble cast also includes Johnny Simmons, Bill Hader, Scott Porter, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Andy Samberg, Donald Glover, Connie Britton, and Clark Gregg.

Wendy (Sarah Steele) and Fiona (Alia Shawkat) are Brandy’s best friends, who take her to a party, where she gets drunk for the first time and starts to make out with Rusty, setting the plot in motion.

Packed with gross-out sex jokes and cringe-worthy sex scenes, this is a surprisingly mucky comedy, borderline filthy at times, though it does have some charm and a welcome air of truth and reality too. It’s squarely aimed at teenage girls and young women, who’ll be laughing their socks off (mainly in embarrassment probably!) if the press preview was anything to go by.

I can’t see teenage boys and young men enjoying it quite so much. But they might tag along obediently with their girlfriends. Even so, it’s best as a girls’ night out movie.

The film depends on your liking for the characters and the actresses playing them. The writer-director is a bit in love with them, as I guess you would be. That restricts her distance and judgement but greatly increases her enthusiasm. She hopes you’ll share her love for them and maybe you will, even if they can seem quite selfish, self-obsessed and annoying much of the time.

It’s written and directed by Maggie Carey, in her enterprising and promising first feature film. Commendably, it feels like a quirky personal project, not one of those soulless comedies written by committee. There’s a lot of warmth somewhere behind the smut. I can’t help feeling, though, that it would have been a better movie if it was just a little cleaner and sweeter.

Carey’s husband is the likeable actor Bill Hader, who amusingly plays the amiable layabout Willy in the film. The actors don’t have such good opportunities as the actresses in Carey’s script, with their roles notably less well written. But Johnny Simmons (as Cameron, the cute boy next door), Andy Samberg (the long-haired hippy Van), Scott Porter (as Rusty Waters, the hunky lifeguard) and dorky Christopher Mintz-Plasse (as Duffy) all bring something special to the table.

It would be interesting to see a sequel with the story told from the men’s point of view, and with the women sidelined this time, maybe written and directed by Carey’s husband, with her in an acting role.

Maggie Carey married actor Bill Hader in 2006 and they had three daughters, but the couple divorced in 2018. Like her heroine, she was raised in Boise, Idaho. She was a lifeguard at the Borah High School swim pool, an obvious influence on The To Do List.

CBS Films decided to produce the film after a successful live table reading of the script at the Austin Film Festival. But the film didn’t perform quite as well as expected, though taking $3.9 million on a low cost of $1.5 million.

© Derek Winnert 2013 Movie Review

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