Review of Humpday (2009) by Drew S — 02 Jan 2010

Pretty standard mumblecore...several good ideas, but it's sort of frustrating watching a couple of guys try to out-edge each other for an hour and a half. I understand that no-budget filmmaking has to subside on its dialogue but Humpday really doesn't have anything more to say after the first forty minutes, and the ending is unsatisfying in every way imaginable. Its take on "bromance" is interesting and the film actually gets pretty deep into the sections it does explore; the problem is that the premise doesn't quite expand like it should. Instead of having the characters repeatedly stress that they're deeper than they look, they're not quite so picket fence, they're big old frauds, etc., why not turn an eye to what they really are? We come away from the movie with more of a sense of the people they're not. We know that Ben is a loving husband who's sold on his own hidden depth, and we know that Andrew is a countercultural hipster, but that's really it. When you consider the fact that neither character really seems to believe what they're saying in the first place, something about the whole movie feels sort of wasteful. The laughs are pretty mild, but surprisingly most of them come from sight gags, or the utter bizarreness of the situation at hand, not necessarily whatever the script wants to bring forth.

Strong (possibly improvisational) acting by a collection of mumblecore veterans makes the ordeal ultimately worth watching, but it's not particularly illuminating or intellectually expansive.