..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Humpday
Directed by Lynn Shelton

Lynn Shelton's Humpday, a film about two straight guys who decide in a moment of drug-and-alcohol fueled one-upmanship to make an "artsy" amateur porn film with themselves as the star players, offers an insightful peek into male friendships and how we box ourselves into the roles in which we cast ourselves.

When Andrew (Joshua Leonard), a career traveler and sometime artist, shows up at the picket-fenced Seattle home of his longtime friend Ben (Mark Duplass) in the middle of the night, he turns Ben's life with wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) upside down. It sounds reminiscent of the tepid comedy You, Me and Dupree, but really, trust me -- it's not. Unlike You, Me and Dupree, Humpday actually has interesting characters who act and react in realistic ways, good dialogue, and a well-structured plot. Also, it doesn't have Kate Hudson in it, which automatically ups the odds that it won't suck.

You know as soon as Andrew shows up that he's going to be catalyst for chaos in the neatly structured life Ben and Anna have built for themselves. A day after his arrival in Seattle, Andrew hooks up with an artsy chick, Monica (Lynn Shelton) and invites Ben to a party at Dionysus, the house Monica shares with a pack of diverse artistic friends. Ben shows up, intending to just stay for an hour and then get home to Anna, with whom he has plans for dinner and baby-making sex. At first Ben, with his pleated khaki pants and pedometer, feels like a fish out of water among all these crazy creative types, but the spirit of Bacchus prevails and few drinks and bong hits later, he's having the best time he's had in ages.

As tends to happen when you mix a diverse artsy crowd with pot and alcohol, things take an interesting turn; some of the folks at the party start talking about their plans to create porn films to enter in Humpfest , Seattle's beloved amateur porn competition sponsored by alternative news weekly The Stranger (yes, this is a real event in which regular people film themselves having sex in interesting ways and then display it before a sold-out crowd of strangers in a night of Seattle-esque debachery). Next thing you know, Andrew and Ben have triple-dog dared each other into plans to make their own film for Humpfest, with the angle that it will be a porn film of two straight guys having sex with each other for the sake of art.

Of course, there's still the little issue of how exactly Ben is going to explain his porno plans to Anna, and whether the mutually understanding relationship they have will extend to him having sex in a hotel room with his friend on videotape, to be viewed by a roomful of strangers ...

I overheard some folks after last press screening tossing around the idea that Humpday is another film in "mumblecore" style of indie filmmaking -- an assertion I have to take some exception with; although it's true that Shelton worked in an improvisational style, developing the dramatic structure of the story and then working with her actors to develop the improvisational dialogue, Humpday is more evocative of Brit filmmaker Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky) than the mumblecore films. In part, what sets Humpday apart from mumblecore is that the story is driven as much by what's going on with the characters internally than by their interactions with each other, and we see that focus underpinning the structure of the scenes.

While Humpday is a film about two guys deciding to make a porn film with each other, it's not in the least pornographic, because it's less about the actual making of their cinematic masterpiece than it is about the nature of male friendships and the ways in which we judge others -- and ourselves -- by what we see on the surface. Ben, for all that he's happy with Anna, envies Andrew's freewheeling existence; Andrew, for all that he claims to love his freedom, secretly envies Ben's ability to settle down and hold a job. And while you'd think that Andrew would be the one putting the pressure on Ben to see their plans through, it's the presumably more conservative Ben who's willing to go the fullmonty and more on camera for the sake of, er, art.

Thus far, Humpday has been one of my favorite films of Sundance this year. Performances by the three leads were all solid. I generally like Duplass, though his smart-ass guy vibe can get a little wearing at times, probably because he reminds me of half the guys I dated in college; his performance in Humpday was one of his most natural and honest turns, and I liked him even more in this than in The Puffy Chair, which he also directed. Leonard is great as well, and the two guys together have a great sense of comedic timing and play off each other well. Delmore, though, is something of a revelation, having been previously seen only in Shelton's mockumentary What the Funny. She's got a great screen presence and she's quite lovely to boot; I'd love to see her do more indie film work down the road.

The film is laugh-out-loud funny throughout, but it's also tempered by moments of introspection that lend it a deeper air that its comedic premise would indicate. There's a great moment for Andrew when he has the opportunity for a three-way with Monica and her lesbian lover, when he sees himself as a fraud: he's the guy who paints a great picture of himself as this open-minded, liberal, free-spirited artist, when in fact he's really as uptight as he accuses Ben of becoming, using the mantel of artist to excuse himself from the need for ambition or accomplishment. I enjoyed Shelton's earlier films We Go Way Back and My Effortless Brilliance, but with Humpday, she's made a great little film that, in the right marketing hands, could play well even to more mainstream audiences.

- Kim Voynar

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