The Little Hours

Writer-director Jeff Baena (I Heart Huckabees, Life After Beth), in his lighthearted Medieval nun-sploitation comedy, The Little Hours, depicts long-ago nuns as they may really have been, using modern-day language and Boccaccio's The Decameron as source text. The film follows three young women — Allesandra (Alison Brie), Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) and Ginevra (Kate Micucci) -- as they try to fill up hour after boring hour with anything, leading to much gossip, bickering and a dabbling in of witchcraft. What's that the Bible says about idle hands?

Throughout the film, crystal-blue skies frame the picturesque landscape of rolling green hills and the clean beige stucco of the abbey where the nuns reside -- immensely peaceful scenes Baena creates just so he can muck them up. When the convent's handyman dares to smile at them, one of the women screeches, "Fuck you, don't look at us!" These nuns are aggro, none more than Fernanda, who takes great joy in physically intimidating men. When the convent's humdrum day is interrupted by an alluring manservant (Dave Franco) escaping the wrath of a jealous husband (Nick Offerman), Fernanda puts an ax to the manservant's throat, her face millimeters away from his as she bellows into his ear, "Who the fuck are youuuuuuuuuu?"

Though the F-bombs wear a little thin, laughs do come at the expense of Offerman's Lord Bruno and Lauren Weedman, who plays his wife. The comedy isn't what you'd call highbrow. When the bumbling Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) attempts to define "sodomy," sussing out whether it's anal sex or oral sex, he's a little stumped: "Sodomy is lots of different things," he says, unsure and piss-drunk.