Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish before hitting campus in the fall.
Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish
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before hitting campus in the fall. Set in 1993 in Boise, Idaho, the film follows Brandy, played by Aubrey Plaza, a fiercely overachieving high school valedictorian who has excelled at absolutely everything in her academic life but finds herself blindsided by her own inexperience when it comes to sex and relationships.
After graduating at the top of her class, Brandy attends a party where she gets drunk for the first time and ends up making out with Rusty Waters — a confident, attractive college boy she has a crush on. When Rusty realizes who she is, he brushes her off, and Brandy, mortified, diagnoses the problem with her characteristic analytical precision: she simply lacks experience. Rather than feeling her way through it emotionally, she does what she always does — she makes a list. A very thorough, methodically organized checklist of sexual activities she intends to work through before college begins, with having sex with Rusty as the final goal.
To get close to Rusty, she takes a summer job at the local pool where he works as a lifeguard. Her study partner and longtime friend Cameron also works there, quietly harboring feelings for her that Brandy is too focused on her project to notice. As she works her way through her list — enlisting the help of her best friends Wendy and Fiona and getting advice from her older sister Amber played by Rachel Bilson — things grow increasingly complicated. The gap between what she thought sex education would feel like and what it actually involves begins to reveal itself in often hilarious and occasionally painful ways. By the time the summer ends and Brandy reaches the top of her list, she has learned far more than she bargained for — not just about sex, but about herself, her friendships, and what she actually wants from life going forward.
The film is a sharp, female-fronted spin on the classic coming-of-age sex comedy, deliberately flipping a genre that has historically been told from the male perspective. Brandy's clinical, achievement-oriented approach to sexual experience is the film's central comic device, but it also serves as a genuine character study of what happens when someone who has always followed a system tries to apply that same logic to something fundamentally human and messy. Friendship, self-discovery, and the gap between expectation and reality are all woven throughout, and the 1993 setting gives the film a nostalgic texture that grounds its more outrageous moments in a specific, lived-in world.
The To Do List is one of the smarter and more genuinely funny American sex comedies of the 2010s, largely because it trusts its lead completely. Aubrey Plaza is perfectly cast — her dry deadpan delivery makes Brandy's obliviousness both hilarious and deeply relatable, and the film around her is packed with a terrific ensemble including Bill Hader, Donald Glover, and Andy Samberg. Writer-director Maggie Carey brings an authenticity to the material that keeps it from feeling exploitative, and the result is a film that is raunchy, warm, and surprisingly smart in equal measure.
She's going from straight A's to getting her first F.
DIRECTOR
Maggie Carey
WRITER
Maggie Carey
The To Do List 2013 Movie Info:
Directed by:
Maggie Carey
Written by:
Maggie Carey
Starring by:
Alia Shawkat, Andy Samberg, Aubrey Plaza, Bill Hader, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Donald Glover, Johnny Simmons, Rachel Bilson, Sarah Steele, Scott Porter
Categories:
3 Arts Entertainment, The Mark Gordon Company, Varsity Pictures
Country:
United States of America
Story or Review
Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish before hitting campus in the fall.
Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish ...
Feeling pressured to become more sexually experienced before she goes to college, Brandy Klark makes a list of things to accomplish ...
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