The Little Hours (2017)

I added The Little Hours on my watchlist ages ago because of the cast, specifically Aubrey Plaza and Dave Franco, but because of the characters, which are mostly nuns, I kept putting it off. I would have checked it earlier though if I had bothered reading the storyline. 

The film is based on the first tale of the third day of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron —which I'm yet to read—, and mainly follows three nuns, Sister Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza), Sister Ginevra (Kate Micucci), and Sister Alessandra (Alison Brie), who lives at a convent in the countryside. When a young, handsome servant (Dave Franco) fleeing from his master (Nick Offerman) takes refuge in the convent, the sexually-repressed nuns find ways to escape from their tedious lives. 

If a plot is what you are looking for then you should probably stay away from The Little Hours as it really lacks in that department and rather than a story it feels like watching a series of more or less connected Saturday Night Live sketches. That said, the story is still interesting enough to hold your attention and be enjoyable. 

The characters aren't very thought through either as they are pretty much walking stereotypes with very little characterization and no development at all, and some of them are nothing but plot devices —that's not very accurate though since you need a plot for that. This being said, each character has his/her own dose of crazy, especially Aubrey Plaza's, and for this reason they make quite memorable characters. 

As for the acting, there may not be award-worthy performances here but the cast does a pretty good job as most of them nail their characters and give humorous performances, the standouts being Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci, the first really delivering that contemporary dialogues and attitudes. 

Gunpowder & Sky

All of that being said, The Little Hours is still far from being a great, or good film. The problem is not the unnecessary nudity and vulgarity —it's not like you can't expect it from a movie like this—, but the fact that Dave Franco is criminally underused, the pacing is too slow and as a result, the film feels dragged in several places, a lot of the jokes fall flat, and if feels like director Jeff Baena always went with the first take so of course many scenes aren't as good as they could have been.