The To Do List

-->

In The To Do List, Aubrey Plaza plays a recent high school graduate named Brandy. She’s the valedictorian, the “nerd”, the girl who knows when to use “whom” and not “who” but has almost no sexual knowledge. After graduation her best friends drag her to a party where she gets drunk and makes out with a ripped guitar-playing college student with stringy blond hair (Scott Porter). But when the night ends in humiliation, Brandy makes a list of every sexual act she can think of and commits to doing each one over the summer. Ever emboldened by a well-thought-out checklist, Brandy embarks on a sexual quest.

The To Do List is a pernicious piece of propaganda designed to re-inflict the horrors of 90s fashion and music on an unsuspecting audience. It’s set in the summer of 1993. My guess is that writer-director Maggie Carey was a teenager in the 90s, so this is her love letter to that bygone era of Sarah MacLachlan, Hillary Clinton, Janine Garofalo, and baggy clothes. (Brandy idolizes the former First Lady, while her conservative father, who’s terrified of discussing sex with his two daughters, reads Rush Limbaugh.)

While there were funny parts in The To Do List, the film’s brazen attempt to be shocking left me feeling slightly disturbed. I felt that my inner-puritan had suddenly and without warning been awakened and mobilized. When it comes to sexual activity, Brandy doesn’t beat around the bush. She goes for what she wants with a kind of scientific rapaciousness: Brandy’s not interested in intimacy. She’s interested in experience. Perhaps because her two friends (played by Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele) are constantly goading her about her chaste existence, Brandy feels left out of the party, like a kind of sexual freak who can’t even kiss a guy correctly.

Aubrey Plaza has this quality that runs throughout her performances in the delightful show Parks and Recreation as well as in her previous movie, Safety Not Guaranteed: she’s the unaffected hipster. Nothing can penetrate the wall she puts up to guard herself from other people. It’s one of the funniest things about her character on Parks, but it’s also the reason she’s not the lead character. In The To Do List, she’s still milking that quality, but the film seems determined to fix it. After an hour-and-a-half of Brandy’s sexual quest, she suddenly decides that sex can be a big deal, but it isn’t always, and shouldn’t have to be. That’s a wonderfully convenient mixed message for youth in 1993 or 2013. With the onset of AIDS a full-blown pandemic in the early 90s, you’d expect perhaps a little more responsibility from a movie so invested in sex.

But, much like the sitcoms of the 90s (Friends and Seinfeld come to mind), this movie lives in a world without AIDS or any other negative consequences from irresponsible sexual activity. (There is a scene where Brandy requests that her latest sexual partner wear a condom so as to avoid AIDS or pregnancy, but it’s delivered in a kind of mock-serious tone that seems disingenuous.) Then Brandy complains that all guys want is sex. This after she has forcefully taken the lead in every one of her sexual encounters over the past few months.

And at the end, when you’re hit over the head with the movie’s ambiguous message, you may feel as manipulated as the dumb guys Brandy’s been using for her “research.” A raunch movie that tries to make some kind of loosey-goosey statement about sex feels like a cop-out both as a raunch movie and as a kind of responsible social commentary.

With  Johnny Simmons as Cameron, the boy who likes Brandy, Bill Hader as the losery guy who runs a public swimming pool, Rachel Bilson as Brandy’s nymphomaniac of a sister, Andy Samberg, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Donald Glover as three of Brandy’s other conquests, and Connie Britton and Clark Gregg as Brandy’s parents. ★½

Phenomena

Probably the most outre of Italian horror director Dario Argento's body of work. Phenomena (aka Creepers) (1985) has just about everything one could ask for in a schlocky horror movie: a girl (Jennifer Connelly) who has some kind of psychic connection with bugs, a serial killer, a razor blade-wielding monkey, and a kid with a deformed face. Argento revives the old boarding school device (Connelly travels from America to study at a Swiss girls' school where most of the other girls are snooty little shrews who pick on her), but the director remains true to himself by once again avoiding (for the most part) the demands of logic or plot.

While Phenomena is less violent than some of Argento's earlier films (Deep Red comes to mind), it certainly ranks high on the "ick" factor. And after a slow start, the dumb aspects of this rather standard thriller start to actually have an effect on you. The ending--as contrived as it is--is genuinely spooky, with Daria Nicolodi trapping the heroine in a vast Swiss estate with some pretty amazing electric-powered shutters and a pit in the cellar full of skeletons and maggots. (Fun!)

Donald Pleasence appears as a kind-hearted old entomologist who studies bugs on murder victims to determine their time of death. He befriends Connelly and becomes a kind of grandfatherly influence on her. Dalila Di Lazzaro plays the suspicious, bossy headmistress of the school, Patrick Bauchau plays the ineffective inspector, and Federica Mastroianni plays Connelly's roommate. One of the film's greatest weaknesses is that it doesn't establish the school or its students very well. The girls only figure into the movie when Argento needs to show another victim being stalked. Also, I am perplexed by Argento's obsession with pushing his victims through glass. He did it in Deep Red and Suspiria also. Granted, it never ceases to be horrifying, and Argento will never be accused of abandoning previously used techniques. But haven't they suffered enough by then? 110 min. ★★½

The Conjuring

"There's a case in Long Island they want us to check out," says Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) to his wife, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga). Those in the know will recognize this as a reference to the horrific Amityville case. It's 1971, and the Warrens are paranormal investigators and demonologists who have spent a harrowing few weeks trying to exorcise the infested Rhode Island house of the Perron family (headed by Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor, the parents of five girls.) But there's a little historical inaccuracy here: As far as I know, the supposed hauntings of the DeFeo house in Amityville did not occur until 1977, after the real-life horror that befell the DeFeo family in 1974 when 24-year-old Ronald DeFeo shot and killed his parents and four siblings.

The Conjuring suggests all the horrible tragedies that we still talk about in hushed tones around campfires, such as the Amityville case. (Well, no one seems to remember the true case, just the widely disputed Jay Anson book about the alleged hauntings that occurred afterward.) This is Saw director James Wan's ode to the haunted house and demon possession shockers he grew up on. There's a little Exorcist, a little Poltergeist, and a little Amityville, and some unimaginative allusions to the Salem Witch Trials.

The Conjuring has that chilling effect that many less capable scare movies grasp for fruitlessly. It's not unlike reading that great Henry James hair-raiser The Turn of the Screw: it fills you with dread at the very beginning, and for the next two hours the dread only increases. Wan is going for the cumulative effect of subtle creepy things: creaking doors, hands of an unknown specter clapping in the dark cellar, pictures crashing to the ground with cacophonous force, secret passages boarded up long ago but newly discovered by our unwitting protagonists, creepy, pale ghost-children breezing through hallways and reflected fleetingly in window-glass, clocks stopping in unison, all the usual tropes that we've seen a hundred times. And yes, some of them are still creepy, but their familiarity hampers the film. 

One of the film's assets is that the characters generally avoid making stupid mistakes. I've grown impatient with horror movies that still resort to the "stupid character" cop-out. I mean, after fifty years of modern horror films, I think we've moved past that point. And yet, when I let down my guard and actually watch a contemporary horror film, I'm almost always disappointed to see that old device still hard at work, giving its director and writers carte blanche to unleash a barrage of horrifying consequences for their own characters' mutton-headed decision-making skills. Thank you, thank you, to the writers of The Conjuring (Chad and Carey Hayes) for at least respecting our intelligence in that arena.

This is the kind of scare picture that will make you want to bone up on your paranormal pop culture history. I started imagining myself going on a dastardly Amazon shopping spree, buying books on ghosts and other phenomena of the middle twentieth century. What is it about that period that seems to be of particular interest? I think it may be because the 1940s-1970s symbolized a time when the all-American family was at its peak. Even when that tradition was being challenged by hippies and war protestors and sexual revolutions and the like, it existed as a constant, a kind of immovable bastion or bogey, depending on your point-of-view.

The American family is a pretty easy target in a horror movie, and it's always disturbing to see it truly terrorized (as in Wes Craven's 1977 exploitation film The Hills Have Eyes, which was particularly frightening because it didn't obey the unwritten rules about who is supposed to survive a horror movie). You feel for the Perron family, and there's a connection between them and the Warrens that makes The Conjuring more human than much of its ilk.

But I'm not particularly fond of the dread I felt watching this movie. And while The Conjuring is certainly effective in its own way, it left me once again longing for a "fun" horror movie. Do they still make those anymore?

With Shanley Caswell, Hayley McFarland, Joey King, Mackenzie Foy, Kyla Deaver, Shannon Kook, and John Brotherton. 112 min. ★★½