Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex

Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m. and Ben’s long-lost college buddy, Andrew (Blair Witch Project survivor Joshua Leonard), stumbles in from deepest Mexico. Anna, who has never had the pleasure, watches the unexpected bromantic action with grim incredulity. Aggressively loud, demonstrative, and hairy, Andrew is a credible representation of Ben’s id.

Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Shelton’s third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in the Pacific Northwest. In this case, the lost weekend is steeped in sexual anxiety. Friday night, Ben has to retrieve merry Andrew from a house called “Dionysus” — home to a bi cutie (the director herself) and an omnisexual assortment of roisterers. No orgies, but plenty of stoned dancing. Anna, who has prepared her signature pork chop dinner, sits home alone. She stews; Ben gets stewed. Prompted by news of an amateur porn festival — sponsored by a local alt-weekly — Ben finds himself proposing to costar with showoff Andrew in a mad art project, dude-on-dude action, totally straight, yet somewhere “beyond gay.” Maybe they’ll be famous. The only problem: Just who is going to bone whom?

Having thus invested its protagonists in a game of “chicken,” played to justify their respective life choices, Humpday delivers some excellent situation comedy. The scene where Andrew and Anna have a get-acquainted drink and Andrew inadvertently exposes Ben’s boastful lie that his wife has signed off on their “project” is pure Honeymooners. (Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!) Ben can’t tell Anna why he wants to have sex with Andrew, only that it’s very, very important to him. And, terrified that Ben might think he really did have a yen, Andrew can only sigh, “I wish I was more gay.” Of course. Just as Brüno is more of a comment on celebrity culture than the love (or hate) that dare not speak its name, Humpday is actually less a queer comedy than a satiric view of macho. Appreciative as Shelton may be of her dudes, she has another agenda. Each in his own way, the guys have been freaked by a manifestation of assertive female sexuality — although the term “pussy-whipped” is never used.

See Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex

Miami New Times

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual

Published by

Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/humpday-isnt-…

Dude + dude = porno!

Photo: Seashel Pictures

Mark Duplass (left) and Joshua Leonard in “Humpday.”

If there’s an early candidate for Sundance breakout hit, that would be Seattle filmmaker Lynn Shelton’s third feature “Humpday,” a subtle and intelligent picture that blends dudely comedy and adult relationship drama. It premiered here on Friday afternoon to a packed house that surfed along with every laugh line and every squirm. If you want a frame of reference, Shelton’s clearly seen the films of Nicole Holofcener, Mike Leigh and the early Woody Allen, but gives those influences her own Pacific Northwest spin. Although it’s based on improvisation and shot without a screenplay, “Humpday” moves propulsively forward, as former college hell-raiser buds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard) come ever closer to fulfilling their mutual dare: making an amateur porn film, together, with no other participants.

I’m not sure how wide Duplass’ acting range is — I don’t know that he could be an action hero, or play Shakespeare — but he sure is great at playing self-deluded doofuses forced by some life crisis to ever-so-slightly grow up. Also known as half of the Duplass brothers’ filmmaking team (“Baghead,” “The Puffy Chair”), here he’s a 30ish Seattle yuppie who’s settled into Gap pleated pants, married life and homeownership, with fatherhood right around the corner.

See Dude + dude = porno! By Andrew O’Hehir @ Salon.com

* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual