thoughts on The To Do List (spoilers)

Aubrey Plaza plays Brandy Klark, a high school valedictorian who panics when she realizes, during a drunken graduation night make-out session, that she has no idea what she's doing when it comes to guys and sex.  This confuses her, since, as she tells her friends Wendy and Fiona (Sarah Steele and Alia Shawkat), she normally always knows what to do in her daily life.  She's an interesting character, this Brandy.  She's super studious and considered nerdy, but she doesn't lack confidence; on graduation night, she seems genuinely excited to attend an all-night graduation party hosted by Mormons (this movie takes place in Boise, Idaho, BTW), and is genuinely irritated when her friends take her to a kegger instead.  I'm always super impressed by confident characters in teen films and TV shows, because I certainly wasn't confident at that age; I wanted to fit in and be included and felt super left out if I didn't get invited to something fun I knew was going on. 

Anyway, following her embarrassing graduation night experience and a conversation in which her older sister, Amber (Rachel Bilson), convinces her that she needs to lose her virginity before going to college, Brandy puts together a "to do list" of sexual experiences she believes she must have over the summer.  The list ends with having sex with Rusty Waters (Scott Porter, a.k.a. Jason Street from Friday Night Lights, here with some longish blonde surfer hair), the hot older guy she made out with on graduation night.  She spends most of her time that summer working as a lifeguard at the pool, but her main priority is working on the list.

I mainly was interested in seeing this movie because of the cast, which includes two Friday Night Lights veterans (Porter and Connie Britton, who plays Brandy and Amber's mom), an O.C. veteran, and Bill Hader, who plays Brandy's boss at the pool.  I enjoyed all of the performances, as well as the '90s nostalgia; this movie is set in 1993, the year I turned 14, and I certainly wore the scrunchies and flowered dresses and had my Caboodle, just like the girls in this movie.  Wendy is moderately obsessed with the movie Beaches, and there is one scene where Brandy, Wendy, and Fiona make up from a fight by singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" to each other; we totally sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" in chorus when I was growing up.  So, all of that was fun.

The most interesting thing about the movie, though, is Brandy.  Let's talk about the to do list itself: no one does that.  No one makes a chart of what sexual experiences they think they should have and goes about accomplishing them like it's a homework assignment.  But Brandy does, surprisingly not at all timid about finding partners and performing the acts, but completely oblivious to the facts that 1) people's feelings might get hurt and 2) people might judge her harshly for what she is doing.  Both of these things happen; Cameron (Johnny Simmons), her high school lab partner and coworker at the pool, is heartbroken when he finds her chart-- he thought she liked him, and that they were actually dating.  Wendy is angry when Brandy accomplishes one of the acts with a guy she knows Wendy likes.  The lesson of the movie is that sex doesn't necessarily have to mean everything, but it does mean something, and shouldn't be treated as just a checklist to be completed. 

Though there is a lesson to be learned, here, I did appreciate that it wasn't overly heavy-handed, and that Brandy doesn't experience massive regrets about the entire experience.  As she says, teenagers don't have regrets.  She feels bad about hurting Cameron's feelings but doesn't suddenly decide that she's in love with him or that she should only have been fooling around with him.  Sex with Rusty Waters (which, yes, spoiler alert, she eventually has) isn't all she hoped it would be, but she doesn't think she will regret losing her virginity to him-- as she says, he's hot, and he plays the guitar, and it'll be a great story to tell her friends.  I liked that while she did mature a bit over the course of the movie, she didn't have some sudden turnaround at the end.

On a more minor note, I also enjoyed Connie Britton and Clark Gregg as Brandy and Amber's parents.  Their dad is completely freaked out about the idea of his daughters having sex but manages to keep walking in on them doing it; he has only ever had sex with his wife and is a little crushed to learn that she had sex with other people before him.  Their mom is open enough about talking about sex with her daughters to make me, personally-- and at times them-- a little uncomfortable. 

As is perhaps expected from a teen sex comedy, there is some gross-out humor involved.  I didn't mind most of it, but couldn't really deal with a scene where Brandy literally eats shit.  Seriously: this is something that I have seen happen at least three times in movies but have never heard of happening in real life.  Why?  Why do movies have to go there?

In spite of that one regrettable scene, though, I liked the movie as a whole.  Good performances, good characters, decent story.