Not quite a buddy movie

Humpday is an indie film about two old college friends who reunite after a few years apart: middle-class Ben is married and he and his wife are trying very hard to have a child; the unsettled bohemian Andrew, who fancies himself an artist, in town for a while, is invited to stay with Ben, and winds up shaking up Ben's life with a drunken proposal that the two of them enter a homemade porn movie contest by shooting the heterosexual friends having sex.

This sounds like fun, but it's not. It's a comedy in that it's not a tragedy and it's not terribly serious in tone, but it's also not very funny; there are very few jokes or punchlines here, and scenes that have potential to be humorous wind up being just uncomfortable. That's actually kind of admirable, I guess, but it's not very entertaining. I suppose in tone it's kin to the films of cringing discomfort made by Sacha Baron Cohen (I haven't seen Borat or Bruno and have no plans to do so).

Many critics believe that this plot took the modern buddy/ bromance movie to an awkward extreme, but that's not quite accurate. Ben and Andrew aren't really buddies anymore; in fact, they seem to barely know each other. It would have been more interesting to take two real friends, guys out of a Seth Rogen movie, and subject them to this quandary. These two guys have little intimate chemistry (unlike, say, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes) and once they're sober, there seems to be no good reason for them to even think about going through with their plan, aside from Ben's weak reasoning that it's a chance for one last stab at something crazy.

Indie stalwart Mark Duplass (pictured) is very good as Ben; Joshua Leonard, one of the guys in The Blair Witch Project, is fine as the unlikeable Andrew. Ben's wife, played by Alycia Delmore, is also fine, and has perhaps the most memorable scene in the movie when Andrew lets their plan slip to her, thinking that Ben had already told her. Though the film had a written screenplay, much of the dialogue came out of improvisation, and I'm sorry but I'm through pretending that improv is arty and honest and all that; improvised acting makes my ass tired. Humpday was written by a woman (Lynn Shelton) and I give her points for heading into territory where few male filmmakers would probably tread without Jim Carrey or Will Farrell in tow, but it's still a disappointment.