Humpday (2009)

Two straight guys decide to make a porno where they are the ones having intercourse with each other.

Do I have your attention?

Well, that is the premise of Humpday, winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. After I watched the trailer for this movie I knew that I was going to be in for something very different. Although that is the main storyline of the film there is so much more going on.

Ben (Mark Duplass) lives a quiet life with his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore). They have a nice home, a healthy relationship, and are trying to start a family. One night Ben's old friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard) drops in out of the blue. It's been a long time since the two have spent time together and they have a lot to catch up on.

When Andrew ends up at a girls house he invites Ben over. After drinking too much alcohol, they two friends wind up in a conversation about a local pornography festival where the films are meant to be more artsy than sexual. Ben and Andrew see the only possible way to make a splash would be to film themselves having sex because it would be about their love and how strong their friendship is.

The next day, needless to say the conversation hasn't gone away, and after their hangover's lift, they discuss further about whether or not to go through with their plan or not. Problems arise with Ben wife, manhood being questioned, and the actual act of following through with a plan like this.

This film is more than just about two guys trying to make a porno. It's about what defines a friendship and what the best way of expressing it would be. It's about the difference between doing something because you want to do it or because you are being forced into it. It's about art versus pride. It's about what constitutes a fulfilled life. It's about a lot of things. Yes, two guys making a porno is one of them.

Writer/director Lynn Shelton, who appears as the woman Andrew meets, has created a very personal and intelligent look into something absurd and intoxicating. She films from a documentary, guerrilla style, weaving amongst the characters and sitting with them almost as if they all know that the crew is there. It's sort of like The Office, except the camera is not a character but our portal into this story.

The conversations and situations make the audience go into their uncomfortable zone, stay there a while, and come back out and see how much you've changed. It's such an enjoyable experience. All of the actors but especially Duplass and Leonard as Ben and Andrew make this such a realistic and intimate film. They made me feel like that they actually had been friends for a long time.

I feel like some people, maybe even a lot of people will be uncomfortable watching this, but that is the point. We are uncomfortable because they too are uncomfortable. It's hard to watch people struggle with difficult situations like this, but it is how they work it out that makes it all worth while. I was very moved by how thoughtful and well conceived the film was. This is a rare gem.

Fmovies: I came here after watching it yesterday to write a review of Humpday, but when I found a few excellent reviews already here I changed my mind. Now I've changed my mind again. Although existing reviews express many of my problems with this movie, they do not adequately cover the most important issue.

Although reviewers who liked this movie have correctly noted that it is not about being gay--not even about "going" gay--this movie does present a vivid and disturbing picture of most straight men's attitude toward male homosexuality. To them, sex between two men is deeply repugnant, grossly unnatural and disgusting. The prospect of themselves touching another man sexually is so disturbing that they pee in their pants and act like terrified babies. Is that funny? Not to me. Is seeing it enacted brilliantly on screen enlightening and liberating? Not to me. I've seen it all my life.

I'm going to assume (because it's almost surely true) that the vast majority of Humpday's ardent fans are women, both straight and lesbian, and probably some straight men who consider themselves liberated and enlightened enough to laugh at the foibles of their less enlightened brothers or even at themselves in their own pre-liberation pasts. I suppose I have to allow also for a few self-loathing gay men, because I know they're out there. I'm going to address this review to those women and straight men; the self-loathing gays I'll pray for.

The fact that at least one of the men in Humpday is himself relatively enlightened does not make the movie's offenses any less offensive; it makes them worse, because it also shows how shallow and unreliable that enlightenment actually is. Those straight men who under ideal conditions are wonderfully tolerant of male homosexuality run away in disgust if it gets too close to them personally. It's not unlike the old liberal hypocrisy of advocating racial integration as long as they don't try to move in next door or marry our daughter.

It's never wrong to expose hypocrisy or shallow virtue. It's never wrong to shine the light of truth into the dark, nasty recesses of fear and hatred in all our lives. Humpday does that brilliantly. For the billions of men who are like the two in this move, watching it could be a blessing of incalculable value. And I would never want to deprive the long-suffering and universally abused female majority of any opportunity to see how fundamentally flawed and foolish men can be. I just don't enjoy watching it myself, and here's why:

I am a gay man. Having sex with another man is as natural and healthy to me as breathing. The prospect of sex with a woman is as unnatural and repugnant to me as sex with each other is to the guys in Humpday. But I would never want a woman to have to sit through a movie that shows her brutally and graphically how very disgusting she is to me sexually. However well-adjusted she may be, being told that she disgusts me could hurt her, unnecessarily, and I wouldn't want to do that.

That's exactly how Humpday makes me feel. It reminds me that the world is full of very powerful and likable men who find me disgusting, who would rather die than have to be like me or even risk seeming to be like me, and who would rather have ME die than get too close to them. What I AM disgusts and repels them.

It doesn't matter that the movie is not advocating that attitude. By simply reminding me how prevalent that attitude is, it digs into old wounds

Two close friends (Ben, played by Mark Duplass, and Andrew, played by Joshua Leonard) grapple with the following dilemma. Can two straight men engage in gay sex, film it, and hope to win a prize at The HUMP! annual film festival in Seattle, Washington? HUMPDAY is a sly and witty examination of sexual attitudes which, at times, is as disconcerting as it is nearly hilarious. Ben is married, and he and his wife are about to start a family, while Andrew is a Free Spirit who sees himself as kind of a marginal player on the international art scene. One night at a party in a Free Love commune, the two men drunkenly come up with a possible brand-new approach to the Genre of Pornography. Why not have two straight men do a gay porn flic. This becomes the odd and unsettling conundrum for the movie. Is it possible for two straight men to engage in gay sex, or would the act itself preclude that they were gay at the outset? The viewer watches as Ben and Andrew squirm with the unstated (and frightening) query, am I gay, or closer truth, just exactly how straight am I? Maybe the real message of the film is that as much as we feel that we have completely settled on our sexual identity, the true nature of sex might be much more fluid. Personal sexual attitudes are not really laws which are set in stone, but maybe they are just guidelines which are subject to change and reinvention as circumstances change. The film doesn't resolve the issue, but it certainly presents a dizzying collection of cringe inducing questions which highlight this quandary. HUMPDAY could be seen as a possible companion piece to the wonderfully disquieting film, CHUCK AND BUCK.

Humpday fmovies. Those thinking that "Humpday" is about any ordinary Wednesday are in for a rude awakening from this flick written and directed by Lynn Shelton. For everyone else, you know you're in for a brave and, at times, very funny account of two straight guys who decide to make a gay porno. The two guys are best friends Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard), whose lives have taken very different directions since High School. Ben is married to Anna (Alycia Delmore) with a baby on the way and Andrew is an artist and world traveler spending time with different women and experiences. The night after Andrew just shows up at Ben's doorstep looking to reconnect, the two find themselves at a party (at a house called Dionysus) thrown by Andrew's friend. Alcohol and the bong get passed around, guards are let down, and the conversation turns to sexual pleasures such as letting the dog lick peanut butter off you. Andrew mentions that he'd really like to make an erotic art film and Ben thinks that porn is a dime a dozen and if you really want to make something memorable, it has to be unique. The combination of these ideas plus being intoxicated leads to a pact where the two agree to have sex with one another. Can they do it? Will the two figure things out about themselves? Will Anna go along with it? The later question presents some very funny dance-around-the-subject moments. The developments in this movie about breaking down the walls of male homophobia are interesting. Actual nudity or sex is never shown nor does the movie fall back on crude humor but there is a lot of talk. Both guys feel like they have something to prove; Andrew that he is an uncompromising artist and Ben that he is not the boring, buttoned down family man that people think. Yet both are threatened, Andrew at a dildo introduced during a three-way and Ben at having feelings for a video store clerk. A scene where a basketball game between the two turns into a wrestling match says something for comfortable vs. uncomfortable physical intimacy between men and an honest conversation where Ben and Anna talk of their multi-faceted sexual needs not being met in this relationship alone are nice additions. Of course in the final scene the big question is broken down and analyzed, and some of the funniest stuff the movie has to offer is introduced. Will the physical fear become too real for the guys once hump day finally comes? The film is very talky and the camera work is grainy and dull-looking but what keeps the movie rolling are two very good performances from Duplass and Leonard. Duplass as the buttoned down, responsible Ben and Leonard as the wild-eyed, energetic Andrew; both display a willing but anxious chemistry of two guys who desperately want to be braver than they actually are. "Humpday" isn't always fun to watch but it's brave, funny, and interesting.

What a disappointment. This film started off promisingly, with a very funny premise that is established in a semi-believable way. Sadly, that is really all there is to the film. The funny premise leads nowhere, it is just milked and milked and milked until the audience is no longer laughing, but rather just waiting for it to end. Believability also starts going out the window about halfway through the film, with characters acting and reacting in ways that no human would, but are required contrivances to keep the story rolling along.

I too was not a fan of the overall aesthetic of the film, a sort of forced naturalism, with almost exclusively hand-held camera work, awkward quick focus and zoom changes, and an improvised feel to the dialog. I felt this sharply contrasted with the highly contrived nature of much of the script, and I also feel that it is generally unpleasant anyway.

I know of a situation very similar to the one presented in the film. This two guys challenge the other about having sex with each other without changing their own perceptions about who they were. It became a big joke because although they got very near, apparently, never ever happened. Funnily enough they both had, separately, an homosexual experience with a stranger. It is absurd to think that two human beings could not make love if there is a minimum of attraction, physical, intellectual, emotional. We have been brain washed about this factor. Homosexuals have no fear, not really, about straight sex but heterosexuals have an irrational fear of gay sex because, I believe, they are terrified of the fact they may like it or feel comfortable with it and then a flood of insecurities will follow. Under that umbrella "Humpday" gets it absolutely right. They don't get to it because of fear of themselves, plain and simple. But the whole thing could have been told in 30 minutes. Improvisations are fun if one has the sense to administrate and cut. Edit, edit and edit leaving the surprises alive and "Humpday" spends an inordinate amount of time saying the same things. However I had fun and the three leads are terrific.