Review of Humpday (2009) by Julia C — 19 Nov 2009

In Humpday, the late night arrival of best friend and eccentric artist Andrew (Joshua Leonard, best remembered as one of the teens from the infamous Blair Witch Project) puts a kink in married couple's Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna's (Alycia Delmore) lives when Andrew and Ben rekindle their long friendship and take it to great lengths when the two decide that Andrew's next artistic venture will be an artsy pornographic film showing these two life-long straight friends engaging in homosexual sex with each other.

What started out as a hilarious, drunken thought has lead the two men to become very serious about the film, with neither one backing down from it, while Delmore's character grows increasingly annoyed with the change that has happened in their lives.

The trendy, fad term I keep seeing tossed around is "mumblecore". I don't know what mumblecore is, nor do I care to learn about it. Like Torture Porn, mumblecore seems to be another pointless characterization of film that extremely bored people have come up with.

This is an indie film with open-minded subject matter that's presented mostly with a comedic touch, but also heavy-handed artistic approach. The humor is subtle for the most part, but the climatic peak of the film provides many laugh out loud moments that I thoroughly enjoyed (though still dipped in independent aesthetics of filmmaking, so most of you mouth-breather and moronic common movie watchers may still not see the humor right in front of your face).

Overall, the film was very enjoyable. All of the actors were great. Mark Duplass is also a director who gave us the very low-key independent "horror-esque" film Baghead. There's a GREAT bottomless scene from Delmore, whose a thick but really hot chick, and Leonard looks like a young Zach Galifianakis all throughout the film.

Funny, engaging, and different.