Aubrey Plaza – Podcasting Them Softly

I’m not usually one for sex comedies, I’m more reserved about the subject matter overall, it’s just not my style and most of the ones they make these days are obnoxious as fuck and pretty terrible. However, having said that I caught Maggie Carey’s The To Do List the other night and I gotta say it was a great time for more reasons than just being hilarious, which it is. It’s probably about the best my experience will get in this sub genre and I think one of the main reasons why is Aubrey Plaza, who is so young here! I’ve seen her here and there mostly in supporting turns and cameos but never in dead on lead role, but she nails it here as Brandy, a terminally curious high school senior with no sexual experience and a burning desire to get some under her belt. As summer break starts she writes up a To Do List (or a Fuckit List, as one reviewer on IMDb so candidly put it) of experimentation ideas and sets out to check some boxes off, but her adorable naivety and unhinged overzealousness leads to some… fairly chaotic situational comedy. She encounters a brain dead jock douchebag named (I wish I was making this up) Rusty Waters and a sensitive good boy (Johnny Simmons), all while under the various influences of her hilariously repressed dad (Clark Gregg), secretly adventurous mom (Connie Britton) and spitfire sister (Rachel Bilson). The film is set over a portion of the summer in the 90’s, so not only is there a wonderful sheen of carefully curated nostalgia at play, she also works at an outdoor kids pool under the deranged mentorship of a hopelessly inebriated boss (Bill Hader) so the setting and atmosphere are lovely to hang out it. Plaza is such a terrific presence onscreen and this likely my favourite of her roles yet, she makes Brandy adorably clueless but also has this clumsy intuition where she stumbles into the most awkward sexual situations possible and then somehow manages to find her way out in ways that had me laughing a lot. It’s also nice to see a sex positive comedy from a girl’s perspective that does a nice job of blending the raunchier aspects with a really down to earth message woven into the narrative. Good stuff.

-Nate Hill

So before I write a review gushing about a horror remake I’ll say I’m well aware of the fact that MGM viciously plagiarized their own sacred content to produce a Child’s Play ‘reimagining’ that no one asked for, wanted or even knew was coming until a few months out. Hell, the original franchise is still technically going. Why did they do this? Well it has to do with rights and who holds them, a dumb and always pointless red tape hurdle that now means there will be two Chucky franchises operating simultaneously, both vaguely owned by the same studio but also kinda not? It’s weird, but needless to say the fans weren’t happy and I it’s important to know this behind the scenes shit going in because this is a very different Chucky movie than you might be used to. Now that that’s out of the way, is the film itself good? Yes! It’s a lot of fun and makes its departure from the original series in several key ways, the most obvious being Chucky himself, who is now voiced by Mark Hamill instead of Brad Dourif. He isn’t some voodoo doll inhabited by the spirit of a serial killer either, he starts off as a normal Buddi doll off the assembly line who has all his violence inhibitors, social boundaries and conscience features disabled by a very disgruntled Vietnamese factory worker before being sent stateside to be bought by a single mom (Aubrey Plaza) for her kid (Ben Daon) who doesn’t have too many friends. The ‘Buddi’ doll is at first kind of a blank slate until his AI capabilities kick in, the dysfunctional household and hectic neighbourhood around him augment settings and, you guessed it, he becomes a homicidal little bastard with Mark Hamill’s voice cackling out of him. The cast are all great including Brian Tyree Henry as a cop who lives next door, Tim Matheson as the oily toy company CEO and David Lewis as Plaza’s shitty asshole garbage boyfriend who meets the film’s stickiest and most hilarious end thanks to Chucky. This is a fun, imaginative, very gory flick filled with dark humour and gruesome kills. One of the ways it breaks new ground is seeing how Chucky’s Bluetooth capabilities allow him to control various other electronic devices in his vicinity for maximum carnage including a fleet of deadly drones. All because of a pissed off asian factory worker, a priceless plot detail that had me laughing right off the bat. This is a ton of fun if you can wrestle past the fact that it’s not the most necessary remake an enjoy it as a standalone of sorts.

-Nate Hill