One day, Aubrey Plaza is gonna have that game-changing moment — that non-television role we will remember decades into the future. This ain’t that role.
The To Do List is good introduction to sexperimentation. While promoting an otherwise PG feel, there are several scenes of awkward amateur sex. It’s an odd contrast, like discovering the Home Alone kid masturbating. Brandy Klark (Plaza) is the high school valedictorian. She’s into perfection, clean behavior (gotta love the days-of-the-week underwear) and leaving Boise in the fall for something better. Brandy is a compulsive list-maker and has a series of need-tos before Georgetown happens in the fall. On the ride from graduation to a Mormon party, Brandy’s slutty friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat) & Wendy (Sarah Steele) hijack the trip and take it to a kegger despite the protests from the back seat.
Now here’s where it gets a little weird; I’ve seen this part twice and I still can’t figure how Brandy goes from the kind of girl who corrects your grammar to the kind of girl who needs your hammer. Lessee … party … spies hunky Rusty Waters (Scott Porter) insisting musically that his following pour some sugar on him … Brandy gets drunk … gets sent to bed … makes out with confused Rusty 
looking for his own girlfriend … then … what? Suddenly, Brandy decides she needs to experience it all so she won’t be behind the G-town sexual froshcurve. She rips up the first list and creates a second with terms like “Fingerbang,” “Dryhump,” and “Rim job.” This inventory of colorful sex play is now her summer project. She has to look each of these terms up (and I hope most teens seeing this film had to as well) which begs the question “how did she know of these terms in the first place to look them up?” They weren’t freely discussed in my household or any other I know.
And after the list, comes the action. Well, sort of — she’s working her way up to intercourse. There is no nudity in the picture (unbelievable, right?); there’s also no homosexuality. Both of those facts strike me as strange. Seriously, what’s the cutoff? And why? No, this is (selective) checklist sex, where acts are randomly chosen, then registered and briefly evaluated, partners are numerous and Brandy seems oblivious to the concerns of, pretty much, anybody. Treated for comic effect, Brandy accomplishes all sorts of intercourse-free sex acts. For discovery? For science? For the good of all mankind? For Boise? For a particularly mild R rating? Dunno. I do think this film makes a fair glossary for the uninitiated. ‘Ohhhhhh. THAT’S cunnilingus.”
By the way, where the Hell was this “gotta get some” coed crowd when I was in high school?
There’s a sad disconnect in The To Do List. I mean, what kind of film has a father accidentally walk in on both of his daughters having sex (separately)? The success of Easy A has made the coed teen sex revolution all the easier to film, but you have to remember the rules of sex comedy – when all a boy wants to do is score without realizing any of the consequences, we chastise him. How is this any different for a girl? And the fact that Brandy treats all conquest with an air of “you have a penis … you’ll do –” historically, there are many words for this type of woman, and none of them are kind. Even if you choose to overlook these terms, however, Brandy is no Olive and Aubrey Plaza is no Emma Stone.
♪Here’s her story, sad but true
About a girl who everybody knew
She took vocab and ran around
Learning every definition in town♫
Rated R, 104 Minutes
D: Maggie Carey
W: Maggie Carey
Genre: Sexography
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Curious-but-repressed
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Folks who need sex to be … you know, sexier
♪Parody inspired by “Runaround Sue”
