Humpday

You may have seen the blockbuster “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” The movie “Humpday” is nothing like that.‚ 

Both share some of the basic characteristics, however: two friends come together to make a porn movie. Both are dialogue-heavy comedies.‚  However, the gold is in the difference.‚  In “Humpday,” instead of the friends being played by two opposite sex buddies, they are played by two very heterosexual male chums.‚  Also, as much as the heavy dialogue succeeds in Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Humpday just gets bogged down in it.

The film opens at 2 a.m. when Ben (Mark Duplass) and his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore), are woken up by Ben’s bohemian, wild-man college friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard).‚ After the friends are reunited, Ben immediately loosens up his white picket fence demeanor to party hardy with Andrew.‚  Fancying themselves free-spirited and artistic, they decide to enter a film contest that is “so weird it pushes boundaries.”‚  They run with this idea, for better or worse, and decide that they should star in their own movie as two straight men that have sex together.‚  This boundary-pushing piece of art would be “beyond gay.”

With so much happening at the beginning of the film, Director Lynn Shelton leaves little of the characters to be developed as the film progresses.‚  She uses most of the good lines and events within the first 40 minutes, leaving the audience waiting for the last part of the movie.‚  This is rough particularly in a dialogue-centric movie, where the audience is not learning new things about the characters, nor does it have the events to move the plot through.

As a gay man, usually homoerotic subtexts will get me through any movie.‚  Humpday, for a movie about man-on-man porn, is charming in that is lacks any of this.‚  It is like the drunk, overweight fraternity guy, who always stands too close to you when he is talking with his shirt off.‚  In the current world of Bromance movies, (see “I Love You Man”) this movie is refreshing in that it balances the relationship between Ben and Andrew with Ben’s relationship with his wife.

Delmore, who plays wife Anna, gave the strongest acting performance in the movie. This may be due to the fact that she is given most of the best lines throughout the movie. Anna, although not directly involved in the relationship between the two men seems to be what holds the movie together, and makes it last its short 92 minutes.

The movie is believable.‚  After Ben and Andrew make the drunken, high decision to make porn, they immediately regret it the next morning.‚  However, neither of them wants to chicken out, so they both keep going along with the plan.‚  The film is great at depicting masculinity and male bonding in a humorous way, but seemed to let the audience down in terms of it being funny.