Loud, crass, and puerile doesn't even begin to describe the visual terror that is "The To Do List."
It doesn't just scrape the bottom of the barrel for humor, "The To Do List" scrapes under the barrel, through the center of the Earth, out of the planet's atmosphere and blows past Pluto.
Focusing on Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza, "Parks and Recreation"), a good egg with perfect SAT scores, a sheltered home life and generally wound up, would seem like staid characterization. Until two of her friends, Fiona (Alia Shawkat, "Arrested Development") and Wendy (Sarah Steele, "Please Give"), take her to get "afterschool special drunk" at a party where the school hunk, Rusty Waters (Scott Porter, "Hart of Dixie"), walks into the wrong room and begins to romance Klark.
Mistaken identity ensues and the rebuff from Waters shakes Brandy to the core. So she goes on a supposed journey of self-discovery setting down a list of sexual favors she wants to complete before the end of the Summer of 1993.
Yup, that's the plot. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet? It gets worse because this veritable pilgrim's process of "The To Do List" is nothing but superficial gross out bunk. Why is it that Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer can't get away with this kind of humor, but the moment it's graced by a "Saturday Night Live" cast alum, some other awkward character actors and an indie sensibility, the litany of abysmal jokes becomes alright? Even "Movie 43" wasn't this rotten. Okay. Maybe "Movie 43" was that rotten, but "The To Do List" falls somewhere around its terrible graces.
"The To Do List" is equally witless in its composition. Settling for the gross out gags and stays there for the duration. It's apparent by the stream of humiliating gags that it wants to be shocking, but it rarely is. It's just unbelievably embarrassing what Plaza has to go through for the role. What's more unbelievable is how such superficial human beings exist even in a fictional realm.
Brandy Klark, for all her well-to-do demeanor in the beginning, turns out to be a manipulative sociopath. When "The To Do List" finally arrives at it's grand conclusion, it is appallingly facetious. No one has grown as a character, in fact they've regressed into unhealthy unstable tendencies and by the last shot Carey reneges resetting everything back to square one. ?
The engineered conflict serves to make the central three friends appear as even worse human beings. When they are dutifully aware that Brandy is set in her single minded determination to complete the to do list, they become incensed when their spit swapping encroaches on people they didn't like in the first place.
There's a host of actors from Bill Hader ("Turbo" and Clark Gregg, "The Avengers") to Connie Britton ("Nashville") and Rachel Bilson ("Hart of Dixie") who occasionally lend their efforts to this rotten egg, but it's too little too late. "The To Do List" has inflicted so much brain melting damage.
Who's this movie for anyway? Anyone with a decent internet connection has more access to this kind of explicit stuff for free than any generation preceding it; eviscerating the risque nature of these raunchy comedies and removing any sort scintillating quality these films were designed for.
Consequently, those offer better production values, the stunts are real and done by professionals, and on occasion it offers better writing and acting.
"The To Do List" for all its lack of any technical savvy is built for an audience who are and the impact of the humor becomes trite. There's kind of female empowerment film "The To Do List" wishes to be paraded as, but on the contrary it's also a cynical male fantasy. The same kind of backwards sentiment was expressed in Zack Snyder's "Suckerpunch" and that fell flat on its face.
In the consequence free world Maggie Carey's characters occupy, "Sex is a big deal, but not always a big deal."
That axiom makes no sense in the context of the film and as general advice.
There is a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel though. At least the camera is in focus.
dkahen-kashi@theeagleonline.com
