Written by Justin Barber
At this year's much quieter, much warmer Sundance Film Festival, filmmakers Lynn Shelton, Ben Kasulke and Nat Sanders made a habit of closing out a number of bars with a celebratory “Humpdance.” It was always a needed moment of levity, considering that no joke, the last couple months of have been kind of a downer. The election got us all riled up into an hourly news-checking frenzy just in time for the media to scrutinize the knuckles of every Wall Street sucker punch. We residents of Bummer City needed at the festival a good laugh. To the rescue was the film made by these three celebrators, a film thats intelligence transcends the question that drives it: “Are you man enough to bone a dude?”
That’s an accurate if simplistic way to dive into the Magnolia-acquired Humpday, which premiered to a packed, boisterous house at the Eccles Theater. Her third feature, replete with performances by state-of-the-art, painstakingly researched and assembled improv machines Mark Duplass (Baghead), Josh Leonard (The BlairWitch Project) and newcomer Alycia Delmore, Shelton's work is a layered study of self-definition/delusion, relationships and masculinity.
“It’s about the reunion of two old college buddies, Ben and Andrew, who haven’t seen each other for years. Somehow, within 24 hours of being in each other’s company again, they manage to box themselves into a mutual dare to have sex with each other on film. For an “art project”. Which wouldn’t be so radical or weird except for the fact that Ben’s married, and both guys are about as straight as straight can be.
"The film’s about fear of conformity; of not living up to your own image of yourself; about long-term romantic relationships; about a certain kind of male friendship between two guys who adore each other but who also bring out the most absurdly competitive aspects in each other.”
-Lynn Shelton, Spout.com 1/16/09
Read full piece HERE:
http://shortendmagazine.com/content/view/623/65/
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