Humpday

Directed by Lynn Shelton

(R)

****

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Two straight buddies determine to co-star in a porn film.

Humpday “made me giggle all the way through,” said David Edelstein in New York. In this sexually charged comedy, Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard play Ben and Andrew, two old college pals who reunite and, after a night of partying with free-loving lesbians, make a plan to enter an amateur porn-film contest. Their revolutionary concept: to film themselves—two straight guys—having sex. Their pitch: “It’s not gay. It’s beyond gay.” Director Lynn Shelton depicts the “sexual twilight zone of male buddydom with satire and sympathy,” giving the genre an acutely hilarious twist. “Think of it as a Judd Apatow or Kevin Smith buddy film turned inside out,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. Humpday cuts through its characters’ machismo to “contemplate the underlying forces hard-wired into men’s psyches in a homophobic culture.” Shelton proves herself a sharp, perceptive director who has made an “honest, audacious high-wire comedy,” said Scott Tobias in The Onion. How ironic that it took a woman to tackle the strange bonding rituals of straight men.