Checked Off: THE TO DO LIST

I appreciate the effort to tell a casually randy teen comedy from the perspective of a young woman, make the film explicitly about labels and expectations that go along with being a woman, and end with the girl taking control of her body and coming out on top. I would’ve appreciated all that a whole lot more if Maggie Carey’s The To Do List managed to be funny while it was at it. Instead of another Bridesmaids, Easy A, or The Heat, the kind of funny female-driven comedy that leads for a round of patronizing women-can-be-funny-too surprise from certain predictable corners of the media landscape, this underachieving movie has a killer (and sadly underrepresented) hook in its point of view without the goods to back it up. It’s not an occasion to say, “women can star in a comedy, too,” but rather “women can star in a bad comedy, too.”

The movie’s essentially a loose collection of thin bits about a high school valedictorian (Aubrey Plaza) looking to spend her summer before college shaking her good girl image. Being a bookish, studious, conscientious young lady, she makes a checklist of acts to do in just a few months. Her attempts, cringingly awkward and gross, fall between gossip sessions with friends and shifts at the community pool. The success of the film hinges upon how funny a viewer finds these episodic sketches, which are light and forgettable, trending towards gross-out gags that are either too much or not enough. (One in particular, a riff on a similar gag in Caddyshack, is disastrously gross.) At most, I felt a desire to laugh without ever actually laughing. Nothing goes wrong enough to complain, but nothing goes right enough to entertain. It's a movie of good intentions and weak execution. It’s set in 1993, for example, but that idea never goes further than lots of great 90’s hits on the soundtrack and the wardrobe department dressing everyone in the most unflattering fashions of the era.

Similarly, the cast is underutilized. Plaza has a sardonic low-key approach that's an awkward fit with the anxiety and naivety in her character as written. She's a real talent - good on Parks & Rec and with great voice work in Monsters University and the English dub of From Up On Poppy Hill - but this movie doesn't play to her strengths. She's better than the material. That goes for the supporting cast around her as well. They’re all appealing performers – Alia Shawkat and Sarah Steele as the best friends, Rachel Bilson, as the vapid older sister, Connie Britton as the open-minded mom, Clark Gregg as the uptight dad, Bill Hader as the slacker pool manager – but even they don’t have more than a small moment or two to shine. As the guys the lead crushes on or who have crushes on her, Scott Porter and Johnny Simmons are appealing and underwritten, which is partly a good joke on how these roles are typically portrayed when a young man's in the lead and those roles are filled by young women. One’s a hot but dull blonde; the other’s a cute brunette who's taken for granted, but all around better for her. Sound familiar?

While watching the film, I intellectualized the novelty (importance, even) of the point of view and some of it was technically funny, but I just wasn’t entertained. Even the best moment would be the weakest in a better comedy. It's not bad, just, despite its raunch and purposeful button-pushing, weirdly sloppy and mild. A tepid milestone, it’s a film that says girls deserve crummy teen sex comedies too. True, but that doesn’t mean the results are any worthier than crummy teen sex comedies from a guy’s point of view.

Level Up: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

The first thing I noticed about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was that it’s a movie with interesting haircuts. The actors have hairdos that stick out in unnatural flips and strange angles, curvy bowls, supernatural spikes and neon colors, though not all on the same person at the same time. These are endearingly odd hairstyles. But that’s losing track of the point of the movie, isn’t it?

This is an aesthetically daring and improbably successful pop-art confection. Based on the cult comics by Bryan Lee O’Malley, unread by me, Edgar Wright’s film is a heady mash-up of influences, from manga to Mortal Kombat and from musicals and kung-fu movies to indie rock, Looney Tunes, and Super Mario. Far from being a woeful jumble of colliding reference points, the film adds up into a surprisingly effective cohesive experience, an arch actioner nestled inside a soulful comedy.

It’s a film in which the character’s strongest emotions manifest themselves externally, in the form of superpowers portrayed with zany cartoon embellishments and video-game trappings. Hence the dramatic supercharged duels that pepper the plot. It’s both a comment upon and a celebration of a certain youth culture that filters life’s experiences through pop culture.

At the center is Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a 22-year-old in a struggling garage-band that doesn’t even have a garage to practice in. He’s a pathetic guy, “chronically enfeebled” according to his sister (Anna Kendrick). On the rebound from a devastating breakup, he finds himself dating a clingy high school girl (Ellen Wong). His sister tries to talk him out of the relationship. His bandmates (Alison Pill, Johnny Simmons, and Mark Webber) think it’s a bad idea. His platonic gay roommate (Kieran Culkin) warns him against it. I think even Scott, deep down, knows this new relationship has no future.

Enter Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). She’s gorgeous, alluring, smart and funny. Scott is immediately in love. Soon, the two of them take tentative steps towards dating. But Ramona’s weighed down by the burdens of her past relationships. And this is no ordinary baggage. If Scott wants Ramona, if he truly loves her, he will have to fight and defeat her Seven Evil Exes, who have formed a League of Evil Exes under the command of the nefarious Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), oft mentioned, but unseen until the climax.

The movie proceeds in video-game style, with the pitch-perfect comedic timing of the characters’ interactions periodically intersected with fights that erupt with a visual brio that varies depending on which ex (or “level,” if you will) Scott is currently trying to beat on his way to the final Boss Fight. There’s a battle where the weapon of choice is sound waves; another finds Scott’s punches and kicks accompanied by big bold onomatopoeias (Bam! Pow! K.O.!). When defeated, the adversaries explode in a shower of coins.

The exes are often funny, featuring interestingly weird turns from the likes of Brandon Routh and Chris Evans. They’re one-note characters, but it’s fitting, given that Scott is fighting less the actual exes and more the idea of them. He’s fighting people he doesn’t even know for the love of a girl. He’s fighting to be better than all that she’s had before. And isn’t that an essential truth of relationships?

Sure, the plot gets clumpy and episodic. Its risks don’t always pay off as well as they should, but this film is still a blast. The cast is up for anything, trusting that their deadpan stylistic line readings and wild gesticulations would match up and make sense in the context of the whole explosive CGI-frenzy of the visual style that’s as rich and complicated as the characters are thin. They’re well served by Edgar Wright’s sure grasp on the tone and his nimble mingling of the visual and emotional. Together they create a brisk and winning film, surely the most formally challenging big studio picture since Speed Racer.

Scott Pilgrim is at its most satisfying when it’s at its most dizzyingly original and inventive, turning the stuff of low-culture into high-concept entertainment. After his excellent Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Wright has created yet another B-movie with a big heart, a scruffy genre outing with shiny surfaces.