The Little Hours

The Little Hours, a happily deranged comedy from writer-director Jeff Baena, doesn’t always work, but you have to admire the movie’s exuberant madness. It is by turns a Monty Python-esque period spoof, an improv comedy wet dream (the dialogue is mostly extemporized, the setting deliberately anarchic), and a philosophical meditation on the nature of existence. (It’s based on two stories from The Decameron.) The film is set in a Medieval convent somewhere in the Italian countryside, where three nuns, named Sister Alessandra, Sister Fernanda, and Sister Genevra (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, and Kate Micucci, respectively) experience a sexual awakening. These three nuns look out upon their drab, cloistered little world with a kind of yearning that they can barely put into words. Then along comes the hunky young serf Massetto, (Dave Franco), who’s on the run from his angry master, Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman) after sleeping with the man’s wife (the delightful, snarky Lauren Weedman, whose dialogue is the equivalent of an endless series of glaring eyerolls).  

The three sisters are all immediately drawn to Massetto, partly because he’s pretending to be deaf and mute, a ruse devised by the priest (John C. Reilly) who runs the convent. Massetto’s silence is for his own protection, against the volcanic temper of Sister Fernanda. Early in the movie, when she and the others are passing by the previous gardener, she unleashes her comic fury, hurling curse words and turnips at him because she dislikes the convent food. The allegedly deaf-mute Massetto, non-threatening yet smoldering, emboldens the women to act on long-repressed sexual desires.

Then again, what would you do if the puppy-eyed, svelte Dave Franco showed up at your doorstep? Genuflect by day, and carouse by night, of course. The sisters, it turns out, are far more evolved than perhaps even they realize. It’s as if they’ve been waiting for something to set their desires into motion. And Sister Fernanda, in particular, isn't content with washing garments and tending the garden and saying her morning prayers: When she whips up a love potion using belladonna weed, she has more on her mind than romance: Sister Fernanda is part of a coven of witches, and she has her eye on Massetto as a potential sacrifice for an upcoming fertility ritual (!).

Even though The Little Hours can be jarring in its tonal shifts (the movie may be guilty of trying to be too many things), it’s never boring, and the performances have an other-worldly quality, partly because the dialogue is all modern. This anachronistic touch works especially because Baena doesn’t rely on it too much. The fact that Plaza, Brie, and Micucci talk like women from 2017 who’ve been transported back to 1398 (they curse like sailors, or perhaps teenagers posting selfies on Instagram), is a gimmick, but not the film's only source of comedy. It’s just a device made to loosen things up, so that Baena and his cast can explore and make fun of the world they've created, including the ways that the characters (and by extension, most humans) compartmentalize their lives. For example: John C. Reilly's priest, who’s in love with the soft-spoken mother superior (Molly Shannon). Their love isn’t portrayed as sleazy or clandestine; it’s longing and tender, and almost tragic in the way the romance in Brokeback Mountain was tragic, because it’s arbitrarily forbidden by the culture in which they live. The performances alone make The Little Hours worth seeing. All three of the leads seem to be harboring little sticks of comic dynamite inside them, and you never know when the next explosion will happen. All you can do is wait for one of them to get that look in her eyes.

FRESNO A METAPHOR FOR COMPULSIVE BEHAVIOR IN NEW JUDY GREER COMEDY

Judy Greer, who’s equally adept at piercing drama and electric comic lunacy, finally gets a vehicle in the form of Addicted to Fresno. Greer plays Shannon, who’s down on her luck, to say the least, and has taken up with her well-intentioned sister Martha (Natasha Lyonne), who’s gotten her a job where she works, cleaning rooms at a sleazy motel in Fresno, a city that has embedded its magnetic funk on the two women. Fresno, in fact, becomes a metaphor for the kind of horrible things we do to ourselves over and over again: Shannon is a sex addict, and she has little regard for her own personal safety or well-being as she jumps from one sleazy guy to another.

Shannon has been going to a twelve-steps program to fight her sex addiction, but it’s not helping. When Martha catches Shannon in the act with a particularly gross motel guest, Shannon panics and pretends he’s raping her. A struggle ensues, and somehow, Shannon kills the hapless horn-dog. The rest of the movie follows the sisters’ increasingly desperate attempts to dispose of the body, which they’ve hidden inside one of their big blue sanitation carts, and into which they continuously feed a generous hale of ice cubes.

Addicted to Fresno falters occasionally as a movie, sometimes running out of steam. At times, its story and execution feel only a few notches above the kind of readily available and unwatchable junk that Netflix provides to their instant-streaming customers. But it’s also very, very funny, and the performances of Judy Greer and Natasha Lyonne elevate the material and give it depth. These are both strong actresses who are funny, and it’s their strength as performers and their characters’ bond as sisters that improves Addicted to Fresno immeasurably.

Moreover, director Jamie Babbit and screenwriter Karey Dornetto have created a tough-minded comedy, not one of these soft-in-the-middle genre flicks that turns predictably syrupy at the end. As a result, it's full of pleasantly unexpected moments. The surprising elements of this movie that make it, ultimately, a winner, for me. And yes, it’s an R-rated comedy and it’s about a sex addict. So you can expect a good amount of vulgarity next to your sisters-bonding-despite-their-differences plot line. But Greer shapes Shannon into a real human being. She’s not just a “slut” or a “nympho.” Somewhere along the film’s madcap travails, Shannon admits she’s tired of having sex, but the pain and disappointment of having sex is better than the emptiness of not doing it. Kind of profound, and much deeper than anything we got out of Trainwreck.

Natasha Lyonne’s Martha provides perfect balance to Judy Greer’s interminable screw-up Shannon. Martha isn’t exactly the picture of success, but she’s independent enough to feel a little superior toward her sister. Of her small, humble house and her very humble job, she says “It’s my American dream.” There's a kind of dumb optimism in that statement that feels distinctly American and Lyonne delivers it not with tongue-in-cheek but with whole-hearted pluckiness. And Martha has her own issues too: She’s been unable to get over a recent break-up, and she’s as dependent on her sister Shannon’s screw-ups as Shannon is on Martha’s dependability.

The film is peopled with amusing supporting characters: Aubrey Plaza (perhaps not as funny as her character in Parks and Recreation) plays Martha’s kickboxing instructor and love interest; Ron Livingston plays Shannon’s married therapist-boyfriend, who’s somehow shocked (after leaving his wife for Shannon) that Shannon isn’t interested in pursuing a committed relationship; Fred Armisen and Allison Tolman play a couple who run a pet cemetery, who blackmail Shannon and Martha for 25,000 dollars once they discover their secret; Molly Shannon plays the sister of the deceased motel guest; and Malcolm Barrett plays Eric, another motel employee, and the first guy for whom Shannon feels more than a simply carnal attraction. There’s a hilarious scene in which he recites a delightful poem about the awfulness of Fresno, and Shannon concurs with alacrity.

That’s probably the best joke of this movie: the whole film is a happy little riff on how rotten Fresno is. But as anti-Fresno as it is, there’s some kind of knowing affection here, an affection not far off from John Waters’ love of his hometown of Baltimore, which may be the Fresno of the East coast. Readers, I recommend this one, especially if you’re a fan of either Judy Greer or Natasha Lyonne.

There’s also an hilarious scene in which the sisters try to rob an adult toy store (run by Clea Duvall). Shannon muses: “Who would have thought a sex store was such a low cash enterprise?” And another—the film’s most delightfully offensive scene—in which the ladies rob a bar mitzvah, at which the honored 13-year-old boy performs a raunchy Jewish-gangsta rap. I’ve never seen that before. 

The To Do List

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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

Safety Not Guaranteed

Safety Not Guaranteed is this year's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Somewhere, deep beneath this film's quirky, sometimes pretentious, all-too-obvious "indie"-ness, lies an actual movie. What we see is a sort of conglomeration of sappy feel-good dramadies and "too-clever-to-be-real" dramadies. The line between these two types can be difficult to spot, but it's there. Aubrey Plaza, whose downbeat, mad-at-the-world, affluent-suburban-kid act is funny on Parks and Recreation, may never play a different character again after this movie. She's always just a half-frown away from being April. But she's likable, and she carries this movie through the genuine cleverness for the first half and the meandering flakiness that carries the rest of the movie away into La-La-land.

She plays Darius, an intern at a Seattle magazine, who accompanies one of the columnists (Jake M. Johnson, of TV's New Girl) and a fellow intern (Karan Soni), to a small coastal town to write a piece on an eccentric named Kenneth (Mark Duplass), who's soliciting a partner for his time traveling endeavors in the classifieds section of the paper.

The relationships that develop as a result of this oddball set of events are interesting to watch, but you can never shake the creepy feeling you get because he's so much older than she is. This isn't the same as when Audrey Hepburn only acted with men who were hundreds of years older than her (Cary Grant in Charade, Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, etc). Audrey seemed perpetually grown-up (young enough to be chic, old enough to be sophisticated, wordly, and legal). Aubrey Plaza (the first names are only a letter away from each other), is perpetually adolescent. She's in her late 20s, but she looks 16. The chemistry between the two actors is muffled by the age discrpenancy.

Jake Johnson undergoes an inexplicable change from dirtbag to nice guy, which is odd because the reason he takes the assignment to follow the "crazy guy building a time machine" is so that he can meet up with an old flame for a one night stand. Johnson gives a winning performance that makes his sleazy persona pitifully real and somehow likable, but you wonder how the writer, Derek Connolly, convinced himself that Johnson's character could pull such a profound 180 so quickly. Johnson's performance lends it more credibility than it deserves.

The movie is at its best when it doesn't try to go for the predictable sentimentality that indie movies always shun with tongue in cheek. It's a peculiar tension to be both sweet and too smart for its own good. Aubrey Plaza is on her way to being the same kind of indie movie poster child as someone like Zooey Deschanel, who represents a sort of concentration of everything darling and obnoxious about "indie" culture. But Plaza wins you over because she's a cynic, but she's also good with the quippy lines, and Connolly has a knack for writing dialogue that is funny without beating the audience over the head. Such are the particular joys of Safety Not Guaranteed, a movie which is amusing, perhaps slight, perhaps less important and reverential about life than it thinks it is, but not totally dishonest nonetheless. (Some audience members may find that the marketing for this movie has misled them. It's not at all about time travel, but about the cult of eccentricity and the unexpected founding of new relationships.)

Directed by Colin Trevorrow. With Kristen Bell, Jeff Garlin, and Stephanie Langhoff.