2.5 stars. Rating: R, for pervasive strong crude and sexual content, graphic dialogue, drug and alcohol use, and constant profanity, all involving teens
By Derrick Bang
Back in the day, youthful sexual
explorations followed a common sports metaphor, starting with reaching first
base and concluding with the obvious home run.
My, how things have changed.
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| At first, Fiona (Alia Shawkat, right) shares good friend Brandy's (Aubrey Plaza) elation over the progress being made on her summer list of planned sexual accomplishments. But like the so-called comedy in this film, Brandy eventually takes things too far, at which point Fiona demonstrates that while she might talk the talk, she apparently doesn't think much of people who walk the walk. |
In these sexually liberated and
quite raunchy days of the 21st century, that simple baseball metaphor has
blossomed into the complexity of a 22-level video game. Libido-driven folks
keeping score begin with quaint French kisses and hickies, progress through
once-unspoken acts such as motorboating and teabagging, and ultimately, ah,
climax with the horizontal bop itself.
At least, that’s what
writer/director Maggie Carey would have us believe, with her smutty teen sex
comedy, The To Do List.
Sadly, this new film is neither
as witty nor as memorable as 2010’s Easy
A, which made a star of Emma Stone, and to which The To Do List inevitably will be compared. While this new film’s
star — the richly talented and still under-appreciated Aubrey Plaza — deserves
a similar breakout hit, she won’t get it here. Carey’s film is too uneven, too
clumsy and (to its detriment) too reflexively coarse, in the manner of various
Judd Apatow or Farrelly brothers guys-behaving-badly yock-fests.
Ironically, Carey’s biggest
problem is that she doesn’t have the courage to pursue her genre convictions.
Her script is plenty dirty, but only at a potty-mouth level the Three Stooges
would appreciate. She never achieves genuine heat or eroticism, and too many of
Plaza’s fellow cast members work beneath their talents, their line readings
stiff, unpersuasive and motivated more by writer’s fiat than narrative rational.
We should perhaps ask the basic
question: Is this film intended to be genuinely sexy, or merely filthy? Because
if the former was Carey’s intention, to any
degree, she fouled out before reaching first base.
Her story is set in 1993,
apparently to avoid granting its characters any exposure to the Internet porn
that has become readily available since then. We meet the over-achieving Brandy
Klark (Plaza) as she graduates from high school and gives a roundly jeered
valedictory speech. Whatever her academic accomplishments, she has become
infamous as both a teacher’s pet and a virgin, the latter epithet apparently
far more heinous than the former.
Despite being a social pariah,
Brandy has two gal pals — Fiona (Alia Shawkat) and Wendy (Sarah Steele) — who
like her but agree that she could, well, loosen up a bit. To hear Fiona and
Wendy talk, they’ve either performed or contemplated every act once relegated
to the Kama Sutra or Dr. David
Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).
