What if nuns and priests were foul-mouthed and raunchy? Writer-director Jeff Baena apparently has these kinds of thoughts all the time, and he decided to write a whole movie about it, a 30-second punch line stretched to an agonizing 90 minutes.
Three young nuns are having an unhappy time in a convent in the middle ages. Alessandra (Alison Brie) was placed there by her father (Paul Reiser), because it’s cheaper than paying her dowry, but no amount of needle point can replace the touch of a man. Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) is secretly a witch who thinks a nunnery is a great place to recruit vulnerable young women into the coven she shares with her lover (Jemima Kirk). Ginevra (Kate Micucci) is generally pretty oblivious but when a sexy deaf-mute (Dave Franco) is brought into the enclave by Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly), it shakes things up quite a bit.
Despite a pretty talented cast, I think my review could have ended after the first paragraph. There’s just not enough here for a whole movie. I didn’t laugh once. You have to do more than cuss anachronistically to earn my praise. It seems to think that the genre is joke enough in itself but the farce has no target and the film has no point.
That’s a shame when I saw the trailer for it, I thought, “Damn, that is a good cast this has promise.”
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Strange premise, but on the miss list for not being any good.
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Sounds like this could pretty much start and stop with, “My sister was a nun until she found out what none meant,” a joke that really only works when said aloud.
The sad thing is there are plenty of interesting stories of love and lust in monasteries, and there’s even the legend of Pope Joan, and it wouldn’t have taken much more effort to adapt one of them.
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It sounds like this one had good potential but just didn’t live up to it..
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Such a shame when a movie doesn’t have enough to sustain watching it.
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That’s actually a great premise. In the middle ages, girls were put in convents just to get rid of them. Sounds like they didn’t go deep enough with it, though. I’ll pass.
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I’m pretty much with you all the way on this one. I thought the first 20 mins or so were hilarious, but it got old and dull very quickly…
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I was watching this film earlier today but stopped during the halfway point as I had things to do. So far, it’s pretty good as I know what will happen since I have seen Pasolini’s film version of The Decameron.
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Sounds like there’s lots of little threads in this story that could be interesting films in their own right if developed properly. I’d be down to see a film about a secret witch nun who converts nuns to become other secret witches. Alas! Nice one Jay!
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Well, I actually loved the movie and also I feel it should not be neglected to mention, that the displayed behaviour of the nuns is most probably historically accurate (I mean the swearing, not the witch craft).
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