‘Humpday' irreverent and hilarious
If there is one thing that we can take away from director Lynn Shelton's awkward sex comedy ""Humpday,"" it is that there is nothing more uncomfortable to watch, yet more strikingly hilarious, than two straight men who set out to have sex on camera.
At the heart of it all are two friends, played by Joshua Leonard and Mark Duplass, who will now be referred to as the dynamic duo of awkward comedy. Leonard plays Andrew, a free-spirited nomad who has seen the world and experienced life without ever really amounting to much.Duplass plays Ben, a married stiff with a 9-to-5 job, a house and high hopes of filling it with children. With the unexpected return of Andrew, who barges in at 2 a.m., Ben rebels against the life that he has built with his beautiful and loving wife (Alycia Delmore) and parties hard with a new group of free-loving artists.
Somewhere along the way, Andrew and Ben drunkenly decide they should enter a Seattle amateur porn contest known as Humpfest, in which aspiring artists attempt to bring the art back into porn. What is their artistic pornographic idea? Two straight men expressing their friendship by having sex on camera completely unscripted and unrehearsed.
As you can imagine, this leads to all sorts of awkward moments, all perfectly executed by the film's superb young cast. Leonard and Duplass have a very unique and natural on-screen chemistry, giving the friendship unmistakable authenticity. Delmore also shines as Ben's affectionate, yet ultimately distraught wife.
Together the three core cast members bring Lynn Shelton's story to life with impressively engaging performances, and the results are quite hysterical. As in, you might potentially laugh so hard you rattle the seats to the left and right of you.
""Humpday"" is a clear winner. The only downers in the audience will be those who fail to see past the documentary-style cinematography and very un-Hollywood like production values. However, should you be yearning for a smart, fresh comedy that smacks you in the face with uncomfortable moments, you will feel right at home seeing ""Humpday.""
Grade: A
‘Humpday' a pile of ad-libbed crap
Mumblecore, in a nutshell, is lazy filmmaking. The actors ad-lib (or appear to ad-lib) most of their lines, the camera is set up on a tripod and doesn't really do anything interesting and the whole idea is that the end product seems less like a film and more like a bunch of people hanging out in front of a camera.
""Humpday,"" from mumblecore perpetrators Mark Duplass and Lynn Shelton, demonstrates exactly what mumblecore is: an interesting experiment that can be used to cover for crummy execution.
The film follows two college buddies reunited after their lives diverged at graduation. Ben became committed to his girlfriend Anna; Andrew became a vagabond artist type who shows up on their doorstep with nowhere else to go. The two quickly resume their macho contests of male dominance, much to Anna's chagrin.
Ben and Andrew's macho competition starts with basketball in the alley, then drinking, but their rivalry takes a turn at a party where Andrew's sexual free-spirit friends coax the two to make a unique challenge to each other–to film themselves having sex with each other for a local porn competition. ""It's not gay, its about friendship,"" the pair reasons, and so begins a 90-minute standoff to see who will back down first.
If you're not insulted by the premise of their bet, you're part of the small segment of the population that subscribes to writer Shelton's promiscuous philosophy. Personally, I found the film to be a dance between latent homophobia and a juvenile understanding of sexuality.
Assuming you think the whole idea is genius, you still have to deal with the fact that these guys don't know how to make a real movie—they film themselves bullshitting dialogue and make loose motions of plot toward the final scene where they work up the courage to do the deed. And while watching the two guys squirm and try to get comfortable with platonic gay sex is mildly amusing, it's definitely not worth the boring 80 minutes beforehand as they try desperately to justify the idea to themselves and others.
As a rule, if you've never seen a mumblecore flick, you usually enjoy your first—you might see their ad-libs as organic and the plot-light structure something different. But the reality is that these movies are all the same, apart from the basic premise. And when a movie about making platonic gay porn and a movie about a puffy chair feel the same, the filmmakers sure as hell aren't doing much with the material they call a script.
Grade: F
