list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Humpday on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Humpday/397589/default.aspx Title: Humpday
Year: 2009
Director: Lynn Shelton
Plot: My Effortless Brilliance writer/director Lynn Shelton takes the topic of male bonding to new extremes with this comedy about two best friends who make an unusual pact that both may soon come to regret. Back in college, Andrew and Ben were inseparable. Years later, Andrew comes knocking on Ben's door and makes the discovery that that his wild former roommate has fallen into a life of depressive domestication. Of course it doesn't take long for the two overgrown adolescents to fall into the usual pattern of ultra-macho one-upmanship, and before long Andrew has hatched a plan to save Ben from a passionless existence in suburbia. There's a party at a sex-positive commune, and the revelers are producing erotic art films for the local amateur porn film festival. Andrew is interested, but after running out of booze and ideas the pair isn't sure how to proceed. Just then, inspiration hits: Andrew and Ben should have sex on camera. Of course it isn't a gay thing, just an artistic experiment. The following day, neither Andrew nor Ben is willing to back down from their unique proposal, and the only things preventing them from moving forward with the plan are the slight complications of heterosexuality, and Ben's disapproving wife Anna. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 9
Number of Lists: 4
Number of blog posts: 9
Number of discussion threads: 1
]]>Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:17 GMTHumpday2009Lynn Shelton<a href="http://www.spout.com/films/365084/detail.aspx" style='text-decoration:underline'>My Effortless Brilliance</a> writer/director Lynn Shelton takes the topic of male bonding to new extremes with this comedy about two best friends who make an unusual pact that both may soon come to regret. Back in college, Andrew and Ben were inseparable. Years later, Andrew comes knocking on Ben's door and makes the discovery that that his wild former roommate has fallen into a life of depressive domestication. Of course it doesn't take long for the two overgrown adolescents to fall into the usual pattern of ultra-macho one-upmanship, and before long Andrew has hatched a plan to save Ben from a passionless existence in suburbia. There's a party at a sex-positive commune, and the revelers are producing erotic art films for the local amateur porn film festival. Andrew is interested, but after running out of booze and ideas the pair isn't sure how to proceed. Just then, inspiration hits: Andrew and Ben should have sex on camera. Of course it isn't a gay thing, just an artistic experiment. The following day, neither Andrew nor Ben is willing to back down from their unique proposal, and the only things preventing them from moving forward with the plan are the slight complications of heterosexuality, and Ben's disapproving wife Anna. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide9Taggedy Taggged (6-10)491http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s397589.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Humpday/397589/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/7/7/42941.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 7/7/2009 9:01:17 AM
Body: I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the border, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettuccine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straight-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many a Judd Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message at Sundance praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uninitiated turning off. This review originally appeared in slightly different form during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:17 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog7/7/2009 9:01:17 AMI’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the border, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettuccine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straight-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many a Judd Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message at Sundance praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uninitiated turning off. This review originally appeared in slightly different form during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/7/7/42940.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 7/7/2009 9:01:05 AM
Body: I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the border, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettuccine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straight-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many a Judd Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message at Sundance praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uninitiated turning off. This review originally appeared in slightly different form during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:01:05 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com7/7/2009 9:01:05 AMI’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the border, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettuccine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straight-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many a Judd Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message at Sundance praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uninitiated turning off. This review originally appeared in slightly different form during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/29/40066.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/29/2009 2:01:34 PM
Body: Celebrating the films of 1999, Rotten Tomatoes kicks off a 12-month, retrospective series of features with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Blair Witch Project. The groundbreaking, record-smashing indie horror flick made its debut at Sundance ten years ago this month, and RT writer Joe Utichi does a great job of reminding us of both the film’s legendary story and its lasting influence. While I left The Blair Witch Project out of SpoutBlog’s five-day series of “Sundance Stories of Yore,” I wouldn’t have paid as great a tribute as Utichi has. Personally, I never appreciated the film in any way, but thanks to this video I’m now thinking differently about the merits of the production. I may never need to watch the actual film again, but I have to give the filmmakers credit for how they went about getting their 20 hours of footage. That’s why it’s even more unfortunate that directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick haven’t done anything noteworthy since. At least Blair Witch actor Joshua Leonard has just made his “comeback” with a starring role in the 2009 Sundance hit Humpday. In the past ten years, he’s had small parts in films like Men of Honor, The Shaggy Dog and Prom Night, and interestingly enough he provided the voice of “Tyler Durden” in a video game version of Fight Club (another landmark film from 1999). But with Humpday, which like Blair Witch utilizes his talent for improvisation, he’s in the foreground once again. Now someone needs to give Heather Donahue and Michael C. Williams their due spotlights so we may continue to celebrate a Blair Witch renaissance. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:01:34 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/29/2009 2:01:34 PMCelebrating the films of 1999, Rotten Tomatoes kicks off a 12-month, retrospective series of features with an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Blair Witch Project. The groundbreaking, record-smashing indie horror flick made its debut at Sundance ten years ago this month, and RT writer Joe Utichi does a great job of reminding us of both the film’s legendary story and its lasting influence. While I left The Blair Witch Project out of SpoutBlog’s five-day series of “Sundance Stories of Yore,” I wouldn’t have paid as great a tribute as Utichi has. Personally, I never appreciated the film in any way, but thanks to this video I’m now thinking differently about the merits of the production. I may never need to watch the actual film again, but I have to give the filmmakers credit for how they went about getting their 20 hours of footage. That’s why it’s even more unfortunate that directors Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick haven’t done anything noteworthy since. At least Blair Witch actor Joshua Leonard has just made his “comeback” with a starring role in the 2009 Sundance hit Humpday. In the past ten years, he’s had small parts in films like Men of Honor, The Shaggy Dog and Prom Night, and interestingly enough he provided the voice of “Tyler Durden” in a video game version of Fight Club (another landmark film from 1999). But with Humpday, which like Blair Witch utilizes his talent for improvisation, he’s in the foreground once again. Now someone needs to give Heather Donahue and Michael C. Williams their due spotlights so we may continue to celebrate a Blair Witch renaissance. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/20/39699.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/20/2009 9:00:42 AM
Body: Fox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer. Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these three deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:00:42 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/20/2009 9:00:42 AMFox Searchlight, the distributor that tends to get the most bang for its Sundance buck, has picked up worldwide rights to Max Mayer’s romantic film Adam with intent for a 2009 theatrical release. Other big deals of the past 24 hours include Sony Classics’ acquisition of North American rights to the blaxploitation tribute Black Dynamite and Magnolia’s pickup of worldwide rights to Lynn Shelton’s comedy Humpday, which will get a VOD release a month prior to its debut in theaters this summer. Check out our Sundance Deals chart for the full scoop on these three deals and the rest of the acquisitions as of this morning. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/1/17/39632.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 1/17/2009 8:01:16 PM
Body: We’re almost 48 hours into the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and Humpday seems to be the biggest break-out hit thus far — and according to Mike Jones at Variety, it could very well soon become the first narrative film to sell during the duration of this year’s festival. Days before the film had its hugely successful Friday afternoon premiere, we published one of our preview interviews with director Lynn Shelton. Last night, post-unveiling, I caught up with Shelton to talk about working like Mike Leigh, her cinematic interest in dudes, and why she’s glad her first two films didn’t premiere at Sundance. In the Q&A after the premiere, you said the idea for the film came to you after Joe Swanberg went to the real Humpfest [an amateur porn film festival in Seattle, which sets the events of the film into motion]. Can you talk a little bit about what it is exactly he saw there that he reacted to? I didn’t go with him, I have no idea. I heard how the majority of the work there is not actually porn; it’s like funny, blue humor, and then, there’s like some weird sci-fi. I think, it’s people just being kind of silly, you know? And a lot of it is very amateurish. So, it’s not usually good production values, and then occasionally there’ll be something really hardcore. But I guess there was a piece or two that was like — I actually don’t know, because I didn’t see it — but there was something in it that struck him and that he was really interested in. Not sexually, but just as a filmmaker. But, in general, it was just funny to me that this straight guy couldn’t stop talking about this gay porn that he saw. So, my idea was actually that maybe these two friends would go to Humpfest and have a similar experience. I tried to think of a character who might sort of feel like, “I should do that.” So, my original concept for the Josh Leonard character was this wild, open to everything, thirst for life kind of like adventurer type, who was like, “I must do everything at least once in my life before I die. We only have one life to live.” And then he goes, “I haven’t been with a man, how embarrassing,” and then sort of convincing his little buddy who he has a sort of Svengali-like hold over, like, “Yeah, we should do this.” And then they would see Hump Fesy and then get inspired to try it and have sex together. I wasn’t sure if there would be a girlfriend or a wife or anything. So, it was really a different starting place. As soon as I pitched it to Mark [Duplass] he said, “A) I want to play the domesticated dude, and B) I think it would be a more interesting trajectory if they were trying to make a film for Hump.” And then the idea just kept evolving, evolving, evolving. But, the true starting place was wanting to work with Mark and wanting to continue to kind of explore male relationships and the limitations of them. Like these two guys who love each other so much and who were so on the same page before, and now are trying to reach for that again. And they’re also holding up a mirror to each other, 10 years after knowing each other so well. I had this experience at a fundraiser last weekend, when all my high school buddies - who I never see - came out of the woodwork. I was looking into their faces and you have these flashbacks of what they were like at 15. And here they are and we’ll all getting old together. It can give you a whole different spin on your own life, and who you are and who you’ve become. You mentioned your continued interest in male relationships. Obviously, this is the second movie in a row you’ve made about two male friends who have come back together after a long time. What is it that interests you about that, do you think? Especially as a woman looking at male relationships. I  might be just deluding myself, but I feel I have a certain amount of emotional intelligence. It pains me and fascinates me and breaks my heart when I see people who have a hard time with emotional intelligence, with trying to connect and not being able to. And it just so happens that guys tend to be like that. But again, the truth of the matter is that My Effortless Brilliance really started with one thing, one true inspiration point, which was Sean Nelson. I really wanted to work with that guy, and I thought it would be an interesting center point for a film. It was exactly the same thing with Mark. I wanted to work with Mark. Because they’re guys, [the films] ended up being about guys. Now, I could have made it romantic - but I don’t know, for some reason it feels like romance is kind of mined more so than in other territories. When I watch Humpday, I feel like as much as it’s about the two guys’ relationship, I think it’s also about the marriage and just the way that grown-up relationships are. The compromises we make, and the question, is honesty always the best policy? Exactly. Totally. And that whole component, which isn’t usually the main theme of the movie and doesn’t get brought up as much. But, the scenes with Anna, from the ovulation sex scene where she mounts him like a horse - all of those scenes I’m so proud of. I love them and I feel like they’re really vital to the way the film works. So, yeah, on paper it looks like My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday are a lot more similar than they are in real life. I really feel like they’re very, very different. [laughs] The relationships are really different, and it’s a very different scenario. In this one, they really want to reconnect. I think they really want to badly. And they’re really different personality types and different combinations, too. And then you’ve got the extra added component of Anna. I was really surprised when you said in the Q&A at the screening that there was no script. I wouldn’t have guessed that from watching the film because it seems like it’s so much tighter than a lot of movies that are completely improvised. I really, really, really wanted to have a strong narrative drive in this film. And I believe that you can do that without writing a script. To make it more accessible to some people, the best way I can describe it is that it’s a lot like Mike Leigh. He goes through months of improvisation and he uses the words of the actors, he doesn’t write the words himself. He lets the actors do that and he just writes it down and then rehearses the shit out of that script and makes a movie. I do the exact same thing, except that instead of writing down those words, I write the final draft in the edit room. It really is the same. After months of developing their characters in tandem with them and already having a loose plot, as the characters are developed I’m getting the plot tighter and tighter and tighter. And I’m letting them contribute but I’m ultimately the one who says, “No, I really want this to happen.” And then by the time we get on set, we really have all the components of a script, except for the actual script. So I can’t emphasis that enough. It’s really the opposite of showing up without a script and saying, “Let’s make a movie.” You know what I mean? It’s very different than that. And I want it to feel very different than that. I want an experience where the audience is being drawn through what’s going to happen. And I think you have to have a certain amount of shit in place before that can take place. But I want the level of naturalism to be much higher than I’m capable of writing down. I feel if I worked with a writer who had a knack for naturalistic dialogue, and worked with actors who were super-technical and could translate that and make it sound like it comes out of their own mouths, I could do that kind of work, and I’m open to it. But, right now, this process is working really well for me. I enjoy it. I read in the L.A. Times today that you didn’t exactly know what was going to happen in the [climactic hotel room scene]. Yeah, true. You had no idea how the film would end, basically. No. And that was really important for us, we wanted that open-ended feeling. Like we didn’t want to know, “Oh, we’re landing here.” We wanted to be open enough that we could play every scene like anything was possible. And then when we got there, the same thing. We didn’t want the crew to know, we didn’t want the cast to know, we didn’t want anyone to know what was going to happen. So there would be this sense of immediacy and naturalism in the dynamic. This real sense of a tension in the air. When you say that you basically scripted in the editing room, how do you work with your editor? Are you finding the story together out of what you shot? Nat [Sanders] stared cutting when we were about halfway through the shooting, and he’d just rough out every scene. And after we finished shooting, I gave him another week and a half or so to finish doing that. And then we’d work together 10 hours a day, just like working our asses off. And it was great. For me, the most ideal editor/director relationship is that it’s a two-headed monster and you’ve got two different brains. For me, I’ve always edited my own shit and it’s so nice to have another brain there, a really sharp, awesome brain, somebody who’s even more OCD than I am, which I didn’t think was possible. I’m a really good editor too, so the two of us together were, yeah, we’re really hammering it out together. And after a while it gets very ego-less. Like who knows where the idea came from. After the film, a woman commented that it seems like the film is anti-homophobia, but then also kind of reinforces it. For me, it’s not a gay-themed movie at all. It’s the opposite of a gay-themed movie, it’s about being straight. But, specifically it’s about the limitations of straightness and it’s about how absurd the extremities of straightness can be, basically. I’ve always been interested in the boundaries of sexual identity. And straight guys are the ones in general, if you’re going to use a broad stroke, who are most invested in everybody knowing that they’re straight. They don’t care if the rest of the world is gay as long as everybody knows, and they know themselves, they are straight. I just find that fascinating, because I don’t feel like that at all. And I think most women I know, both gay and bisexual, don’t feel that way. And I didn’t get into this in the film really, but I think it must have to do with the way that there’s a lot of pressure on straight guys. This whole idea of being a man and what it is to be man, and what if you’re not a man. I don’t know, all this crap is a lot of pressure that they put on themselves. But, it clearly freaks a lot of guys out, the idea that they’re secretly gay or whatever. It’s so absurd, and I wanted to show the absurdity of that. So, for me, portraying that honestly and then poking fun at it is not homophobic. You’re showing homophobic characters, maybe — who don’t want to be homophobic, but they kind of are. But, that’s the truth of it. And you’re also pointing out simultaneously that it’s ridiculous, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think that makes the movie homophobic. The opposite is true, in fact. Before the movie, after Geoff Gillmore introduced you, you said that you’d been thirsting to be [at Sundance] for a long time. And I wonder if, having your first few films premiere in other festivals, and then coming to Sundance with your third film, do you feel more prepared for this experience? Fuck, yeah. Oh, my god, yes. First of all, if my first film had gotten into Sundance, I would have known that it was a big deal, but I really feel like in the back of my heart I would have been like, “Oh, this is what happens. You make a feature film, you get into Sundance.” And that’s this sort of level of — what’s that word? Entitlement. And taking it for granted to a certain degree. Having been on the festival circuit for three years, having gone to an array of different sizes and different sorts of regional festivals, having a wonderful time - they’re all so different - and getting to know programmers and other filmmakers and stuff, I definitely felt prepared. Going to SXSW, for instance, as I understand the second largest festival in the country, there was so much press and industry there and I felt like was constantly failing my film. I didn’t have anybody; it was just me. And so I tried to figure out how to house everybody, and then all my friends were doing press interviews all the time. I had no idea how to get press, I felt like I was constantly failing my film. And I just really understood why I needed a publicist, why I need a sales agent, why I needed all that in place if I was going to go to another big festival. And so it was great. It was like a training ground. I’m couldn’t be happier that it’s my third film and it’s this film. And I also feel like I paid my dues. I feel like I deserve to be here. I don’t know, it’s just great. I definitely don’t take any of this for granted. I’m really, really just soaking it up. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:01:16 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog1/17/2009 8:01:16 PM We’re almost 48 hours into the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and Humpday seems to be the biggest break-out hit thus far — and according to Mike Jones at Variety, it could very well soon become the first narrative film to sell during the duration of this year’s festival. Days before the film had its hugely successful Friday afternoon premiere, we published one of our preview interviews with director Lynn Shelton. Last night, post-unveiling, I caught up with Shelton to talk about working like Mike Leigh, her cinematic interest in dudes, and why she’s glad her first two films didn’t premiere at Sundance. In the Q&A after the premiere, you said the idea for the film came to you after Joe Swanberg went to the real Humpfest [an amateur porn film festival in Seattle, which sets the events of the film into motion]. Can you talk a little bit about what it is exactly he saw there that he reacted to? I didn’t go with him, I have no idea. I heard how the majority of the work there is not actually porn; it’s like funny, blue humor, and then, there’s like some weird sci-fi. I think, it’s people just being kind of silly, you know? And a lot of it is very amateurish. So, it’s not usually good production values, and then occasionally there’ll be something really hardcore. But I guess there was a piece or two that was like — I actually don’t know, because I didn’t see it — but there was something in it that struck him and that he was really interested in. Not sexually, but just as a filmmaker. But, in general, it was just funny to me that this straight guy couldn’t stop talking about this gay porn that he saw. So, my idea was actually that maybe these two friends would go to Humpfest and have a similar experience. I tried to think of a character who might sort of feel like, “I should do that.” So, my original concept for the Josh Leonard character was this wild, open to everything, thirst for life kind of like adventurer type, who was like, “I must do everything at least once in my life before I die. We only have one life to live.” And then he goes, “I haven’t been with a man, how embarrassing,” and then sort of convincing his little buddy who he has a sort of Svengali-like hold over, like, “Yeah, we should do this.” And then they would see Hump Fesy and then get inspired to try it and have sex together. I wasn’t sure if there would be a girlfriend or a wife or anything. So, it was really a different starting place. As soon as I pitched it to Mark [Duplass] he said, “A) I want to play the domesticated dude, and B) I think it would be a more interesting trajectory if they were trying to make a film for Hump.” And then the idea just kept evolving, evolving, evolving. But, the true starting place was wanting to work with Mark and wanting to continue to kind of explore male relationships and the limitations of them. Like these two guys who love each other so much and who were so on the same page before, and now are trying to reach for that again. And they’re also holding up a mirror to each other, 10 years after knowing each other so well. I had this experience at a fundraiser last weekend, when all my high school buddies - who I never see - came out of the woodwork. I was looking into their faces and you have these flashbacks of what they were like at 15. And here they are and we’ll all getting old together. It can give you a whole different spin on your own life, and who you are and who you’ve become. You mentioned your continued interest in male relationships. Obviously, this is the second movie in a row you’ve made about two male friends who have come back together after a long time. What is it that interests you about that, do you think? Especially as a woman looking at male relationships. I  might be just deluding myself, but I feel I have a certain amount of emotional intelligence. It pains me and fascinates me and breaks my heart when I see people who have a hard time with emotional intelligence, with trying to connect and not being able to. And it just so happens that guys tend to be like that. But again, the truth of the matter is that My Effortless Brilliance really started with one thing, one true inspiration point, which was Sean Nelson. I really wanted to work with that guy, and I thought it would be an interesting center point for a film. It was exactly the same thing with Mark. I wanted to work with Mark. Because they’re guys, [the films] ended up being about guys. Now, I could have made it romantic - but I don’t know, for some reason it feels like romance is kind of mined more so than in other territories. When I watch Humpday, I feel like as much as it’s about the two guys’ relationship, I think it’s also about the marriage and just the way that grown-up relationships are. The compromises we make, and the question, is honesty always the best policy? Exactly. Totally. And that whole component, which isn’t usually the main theme of the movie and doesn’t get brought up as much. But, the scenes with Anna, from the ovulation sex scene where she mounts him like a horse - all of those scenes I’m so proud of. I love them and I feel like they’re really vital to the way the film works. So, yeah, on paper it looks like My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday are a lot more similar than they are in real life. I really feel like they’re very, very different. [laughs] The relationships are really different, and it’s a very different scenario. In this one, they really want to reconnect. I think they really want to badly. And they’re really different personality types and different combinations, too. And then you’ve got the extra added component of Anna. I was really surprised when you said in the Q&A at the screening that there was no script. I wouldn’t have guessed that from watching the film because it seems like it’s so much tighter than a lot of movies that are completely improvised. I really, really, really wanted to have a strong narrative drive in this film. And I believe that you can do that without writing a script. To make it more accessible to some people, the best way I can describe it is that it’s a lot like Mike Leigh. He goes through months of improvisation and he uses the words of the actors, he doesn’t write the words himself. He lets the actors do that and he just writes it down and then rehearses the shit out of that script and makes a movie. I do the exact same thing, except that instead of writing down those words, I write the final draft in the edit room. It really is the same. After months of developing their characters in tandem with them and already having a loose plot, as the characters are developed I’m getting the plot tighter and tighter and tighter. And I’m letting them contribute but I’m ultimately the one who says, “No, I really want this to happen.” And then by the time we get on set, we really have all the components of a script, except for the actual script. So I can’t emphasis that enough. It’s really the opposite of showing up without a script and saying, “Let’s make a movie.” You know what I mean? It’s very different than that. And I want it to feel very different than that. I want an experience where the audience is being drawn through what’s going to happen. And I think you have to have a certain amount of shit in place before that can take place. But I want the level of naturalism to be much higher than I’m capable of writing down. I feel if I worked with a writer who had a knack for naturalistic dialogue, and worked with actors who were super-technical and could translate that and make it sound like it comes out of their own mouths, I could do that kind of work, and I’m open to it. But, right now, this process is working really well for me. I enjoy it. I read in the L.A. Times today that you didn’t exactly know what was going to happen in the [climactic hotel room scene]. Yeah, true. You had no idea how the film would end, basically. No. And that was really important for us, we wanted that open-ended feeling. Like we didn’t want to know, “Oh, we’re landing here.” We wanted to be open enough that we could play every scene like anything was possible. And then when we got there, the same thing. We didn’t want the crew to know, we didn’t want the cast to know, we didn’t want anyone to know what was going to happen. So there would be this sense of immediacy and naturalism in the dynamic. This real sense of a tension in the air. When you say that you basically scripted in the editing room, how do you work with your editor? Are you finding the story together out of what you shot? Nat [Sanders] stared cutting when we were about halfway through the shooting, and he’d just rough out every scene. And after we finished shooting, I gave him another week and a half or so to finish doing that. And then we’d work together 10 hours a day, just like working our asses off. And it was great. For me, the most ideal editor/director relationship is that it’s a two-headed monster and you’ve got two different brains. For me, I’ve always edited my own shit and it’s so nice to have another brain there, a really sharp, awesome brain, somebody who’s even more OCD than I am, which I didn’t think was possible. I’m a really good editor too, so the two of us together were, yeah, we’re really hammering it out together. And after a while it gets very ego-less. Like who knows where the idea came from. After the film, a woman commented that it seems like the film is anti-homophobia, but then also kind of reinforces it. For me, it’s not a gay-themed movie at all. It’s the opposite of a gay-themed movie, it’s about being straight. But, specifically it’s about the limitations of straightness and it’s about how absurd the extremities of straightness can be, basically. I’ve always been interested in the boundaries of sexual identity. And straight guys are the ones in general, if you’re going to use a broad stroke, who are most invested in everybody knowing that they’re straight. They don’t care if the rest of the world is gay as long as everybody knows, and they know themselves, they are straight. I just find that fascinating, because I don’t feel like that at all. And I think most women I know, both gay and bisexual, don’t feel that way. And I didn’t get into this in the film really, but I think it must have to do with the way that there’s a lot of pressure on straight guys. This whole idea of being a man and what it is to be man, and what if you’re not a man. I don’t know, all this crap is a lot of pressure that they put on themselves. But, it clearly freaks a lot of guys out, the idea that they’re secretly gay or whatever. It’s so absurd, and I wanted to show the absurdity of that. So, for me, portraying that honestly and then poking fun at it is not homophobic. You’re showing homophobic characters, maybe — who don’t want to be homophobic, but they kind of are. But, that’s the truth of it. And you’re also pointing out simultaneously that it’s ridiculous, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think that makes the movie homophobic. The opposite is true, in fact. Before the movie, after Geoff Gillmore introduced you, you said that you’d been thirsting to be [at Sundance] for a long time. And I wonder if, having your first few films premiere in other festivals, and then coming to Sundance with your third film, do you feel more prepared for this experience? Fuck, yeah. Oh, my god, yes. First of all, if my first film had gotten into Sundance, I would have known that it was a big deal, but I really feel like in the back of my heart I would have been like, “Oh, this is what happens. You make a feature film, you get into Sundance.” And that’s this sort of level of — what’s that word? Entitlement. And taking it for granted to a certain degree. Having been on the festival circuit for three years, having gone to an array of different sizes and different sorts of regional festivals, having a wonderful time - they’re all so different - and getting to know programmers and other filmmakers and stuff, I definitely felt prepared. Going to SXSW, for instance, as I understand the second largest festival in the country, there was so much press and industry there and I felt like was constantly failing my film. I didn’t have anybody; it was just me. And so I tried to figure out how to house everybody, and then all my friends were doing press interviews all the time. I had no idea how to get press, I felt like I was constantly failing my film. And I just really understood why I needed a publicist, why I need a sales agent, why I needed all that in place if I was going to go to another big festival. And so it was great. It was like a training ground. I’m couldn’t be happier that it’s my third film and it’s this film. And I also feel like I paid my dues. I feel like I deserve to be here. I don’t know, it’s just great. I definitely don’t take any of this for granted. I’m really, really just soaking it up. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/17/39631.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/17/2009 8:01:03 PM
Body: We’re almost 48 hours into the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and Humpday seems to be the biggest break-out hit thus far — and according to Mike Jones at Variety, it could very well soon become the first narrative film to sell during the duration of this year’s festival. Days before the film had its hugely successful Friday afternoon premiere, we published one of our preview interviews with director Lynn Shelton. Last night, post-unveiling, I caught up with Shelton to talk about working like Mike Leigh, her cinematic interest in dudes, and why she’s glad her first two films didn’t premiere at Sundance. In the Q&A after the premiere, you said the idea for the film came to you after Joe Swanberg went to the real Humpfest [an amateur porn film festival in Seattle, which sets the events of the film into motion]. Can you talk a little bit about what it is exactly he saw there that he reacted to? I didn’t go with him, I have no idea. I heard how the majority of the work there is not actually porn; it’s like funny, blue humor, and then, there’s like some weird sci-fi. I think, it’s people just being kind of silly, you know? And a lot of it is very amateurish. So, it’s not usually good production values, and then occasionally there’ll be something really hardcore. But I guess there was a piece or two that was like — I actually don’t know, because I didn’t see it — but there was something in it that struck him and that he was really interested in. Not sexually, but just as a filmmaker. But, in general, it was just funny to me that this straight guy couldn’t stop talking about this gay porn that he saw. So, my idea was actually that maybe these two friends would go to Humpfest and have a similar experience. I tried to think of a character who might sort of feel like, “I should do that.” So, my original concept for the Josh Leonard character was this wild, open to everything, thirst for life kind of like adventurer type, who was like, “I must do everything at least once in my life before I die. We only have one life to live.” And then he goes, “I haven’t been with a man, how embarrassing,” and then sort of convincing his little buddy who he has a sort of Svengali-like hold over, like, “Yeah, we should do this.” And then they would see Hump Fesy and then get inspired to try it and have sex together. I wasn’t sure if there would be a girlfriend or a wife or anything. So, it was really a different starting place. As soon as I pitched it to Mark [Duplass] he said, “A) I want to play the domesticated dude, and B) I think it would be a more interesting trajectory if they were trying to make a film for Hump.” And then the idea just kept evolving, evolving, evolving. But, the true starting place was wanting to work with Mark and wanting to continue to kind of explore male relationships and the limitations of them. Like these two guys who love each other so much and who were so on the same page before, and now are trying to reach for that again. And they’re also holding up a mirror to each other, 10 years after knowing each other so well. I had this experience at a fundraiser last weekend, when all my high school buddies - who I never see - came out of the woodwork. I was looking into their faces and you have these flashbacks of what they were like at 15. And here they are and we’ll all getting old together. It can give you a whole different spin on your own life, and who you are and who you’ve become. You mentioned your continued interest in male relationships. Obviously, this is the second movie in a row you’ve made about two male friends who have come back together after a long time. What is it that interests you about that, do you think? Especially as a woman looking at male relationships. I  might be just deluding myself, but I feel I have a certain amount of emotional intelligence. It pains me and fascinates me and breaks my heart when I see people who have a hard time with emotional intelligence, with trying to connect and not being able to. And it just so happens that guys tend to be like that. But again, the truth of the matter is that My Effortless Brilliance really started with one thing, one true inspiration point, which was Sean Nelson. I really wanted to work with that guy, and I thought it would be an interesting center point for a film. It was exactly the same thing with Mark. I wanted to work with Mark. Because they’re guys, [the films] ended up being about guys. Now, I could have made it romantic - but I don’t know, for some reason it feels like romance is kind of mined more so than in other territories. When I watch Humpday, I feel like as much as it’s about the two guys’ relationship, I think it’s also about the marriage and just the way that grown-up relationships are. The compromises we make, and the question, is honesty always the best policy? Exactly. Totally. And that whole component, which isn’t usually the main theme of the movie and doesn’t get brought up as much. But, the scenes with Anna, from the ovulation sex scene where she mounts him like a horse - all of those scenes I’m so proud of. I love them and I feel like they’re really vital to the way the film works. So, yeah, on paper it looks like My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday are a lot more similar than they are in real life. I really feel like they’re very, very different. [laughs] The relationships are really different, and it’s a very different scenario. In this one, they really want to reconnect. I think they really want to badly. And they’re really different personality types and different combinations, too. And then you’ve got the extra added component of Anna. I was really surprised when you said in the Q&A at the screening that there was no script. I wouldn’t have guessed that from watching the film because it seems like it’s so much tighter than a lot of movies that are completely improvised. I really, really, really wanted to have a strong narrative drive in this film. And I believe that you can do that without writing a script. To make it more accessible to some people, the best way I can describe it is that it’s a lot like Mike Leigh. He goes through months of improvisation and he uses the words of the actors, he doesn’t write the words himself. He lets the actors do that and he just writes it down and then rehearses the shit out of that script and makes a movie. I do the exact same thing, except that instead of writing down those words, I write the final draft in the edit room. It really is the same. After months of developing their characters in tandem with them and already having a loose plot, as the characters are developed I’m getting the plot tighter and tighter and tighter. And I’m letting them contribute but I’m ultimately the one who says, “No, I really want this to happen.” And then by the time we get on set, we really have all the components of a script, except for the actual script. So I can’t emphasis that enough. It’s really the opposite of showing up without a script and saying, “Let’s make a movie.” You know what I mean? It’s very different than that. And I want it to feel very different than that. I want an experience where the audience is being drawn through what’s going to happen. And I think you have to have a certain amount of shit in place before that can take place. But I want the level of naturalism to be much higher than I’m capable of writing down. I feel if I worked with a writer who had a knack for naturalistic dialogue, and worked with actors who were super-technical and could translate that and make it sound like it comes out of their own mouths, I could do that kind of work, and I’m open to it. But, right now, this process is working really well for me. I enjoy it. I read in the L.A. Times today that you didn’t exactly know what was going to happen in the [climactic hotel room scene]. Yeah, true. You had no idea how the film would end, basically. No. And that was really important for us, we wanted that open-ended feeling. Like we didn’t want to know, “Oh, we’re landing here.” We wanted to be open enough that we could play every scene like anything was possible. And then when we got there, the same thing. We didn’t want the crew to know, we didn’t want the cast to know, we didn’t want anyone to know what was going to happen. So there would be this sense of immediacy and naturalism in the dynamic. This real sense of a tension in the air. When you say that you basically scripted in the editing room, how do you work with your editor? Are you finding the story together out of what you shot? Nat [Sanders] stared cutting when we were about halfway through the shooting, and he’d just rough out every scene. And after we finished shooting, I gave him another week and a half or so to finish doing that. And then we’d work together 10 hours a day, just like working our asses off. And it was great. For me, the most ideal editor/director relationship is that it’s a two-headed monster and you’ve got two different brains. For me, I’ve always edited my own shit and it’s so nice to have another brain there, a really sharp, awesome brain, somebody who’s even more OCD than I am, which I didn’t think was possible. I’m a really good editor too, so the two of us together were, yeah, we’re really hammering it out together. And after a while it gets very ego-less. Like who knows where the idea came from. After the film, a woman commented that it seems like the film is anti-homophobia, but then also kind of reinforces it. For me, it’s not a gay-themed movie at all. It’s the opposite of a gay-themed movie, it’s about being straight. But, specifically it’s about the limitations of straightness and it’s about how absurd the extremities of straightness can be, basically. I’ve always been interested in the boundaries of sexual identity. And straight guys are the ones in general, if you’re going to use a broad stroke, who are most invested in everybody knowing that they’re straight. They don’t care if the rest of the world is gay as long as everybody knows, and they know themselves, they are straight. I just find that fascinating, because I don’t feel like that at all. And I think most women I know, both gay and bisexual, don’t feel that way. And I didn’t get into this in the film really, but I think it must have to do with the way that there’s a lot of pressure on straight guys. This whole idea of being a man and what it is to be man, and what if you’re not a man. I don’t know, all this crap is a lot of pressure that they put on themselves. But, it clearly freaks a lot of guys out, the idea that they’re secretly gay or whatever. It’s so absurd, and I wanted to show the absurdity of that. So, for me, portraying that honestly and then poking fun at it is not homophobic. You’re showing homophobic characters, maybe — who don’t want to be homophobic, but they kind of are. But, that’s the truth of it. And you’re also pointing out simultaneously that it’s ridiculous, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think that makes the movie homophobic. The opposite is true, in fact. Before the movie, after Geoff Gillmore introduced you, you said that you’d been thirsting to be [at Sundance] for a long time. And I wonder if, having your first few films premiere in other festivals, and then coming to Sundance with your third film, do you feel more prepared for this experience? Fuck, yeah. Oh, my god, yes. First of all, if my first film had gotten into Sundance, I would have known that it was a big deal, but I really feel like in the back of my heart I would have been like, “Oh, this is what happens. You make a feature film, you get into Sundance.” And that’s this sort of level of — what’s that word? Entitlement. And taking it for granted to a certain degree. Having been on the festival circuit for three years, having gone to an array of different sizes and different sorts of regional festivals, having a wonderful time - they’re all so different - and getting to know programmers and other filmmakers and stuff, I definitely felt prepared. Going to SXSW, for instance, as I understand the second largest festival in the country, there was so much press and industry there and I felt like was constantly failing my film. I didn’t have anybody; it was just me. And so I tried to figure out how to house everybody, and then all my friends were doing press interviews all the time. I had no idea how to get press, I felt like I was constantly failing my film. And I just really understood why I needed a publicist, why I need a sales agent, why I needed all that in place if I was going to go to another big festival. And so it was great. It was like a training ground. I’m couldn’t be happier that it’s my third film and it’s this film. And I also feel like I paid my dues. I feel like I deserve to be here. I don’t know, it’s just great. I definitely don’t take any of this for granted. I’m really, really just soaking it up. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Sun, 18 Jan 2009 01:01:03 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/17/2009 8:01:03 PM We’re almost 48 hours into the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and Humpday seems to be the biggest break-out hit thus far — and according to Mike Jones at Variety, it could very well soon become the first narrative film to sell during the duration of this year’s festival. Days before the film had its hugely successful Friday afternoon premiere, we published one of our preview interviews with director Lynn Shelton. Last night, post-unveiling, I caught up with Shelton to talk about working like Mike Leigh, her cinematic interest in dudes, and why she’s glad her first two films didn’t premiere at Sundance. In the Q&A after the premiere, you said the idea for the film came to you after Joe Swanberg went to the real Humpfest [an amateur porn film festival in Seattle, which sets the events of the film into motion]. Can you talk a little bit about what it is exactly he saw there that he reacted to? I didn’t go with him, I have no idea. I heard how the majority of the work there is not actually porn; it’s like funny, blue humor, and then, there’s like some weird sci-fi. I think, it’s people just being kind of silly, you know? And a lot of it is very amateurish. So, it’s not usually good production values, and then occasionally there’ll be something really hardcore. But I guess there was a piece or two that was like — I actually don’t know, because I didn’t see it — but there was something in it that struck him and that he was really interested in. Not sexually, but just as a filmmaker. But, in general, it was just funny to me that this straight guy couldn’t stop talking about this gay porn that he saw. So, my idea was actually that maybe these two friends would go to Humpfest and have a similar experience. I tried to think of a character who might sort of feel like, “I should do that.” So, my original concept for the Josh Leonard character was this wild, open to everything, thirst for life kind of like adventurer type, who was like, “I must do everything at least once in my life before I die. We only have one life to live.” And then he goes, “I haven’t been with a man, how embarrassing,” and then sort of convincing his little buddy who he has a sort of Svengali-like hold over, like, “Yeah, we should do this.” And then they would see Hump Fesy and then get inspired to try it and have sex together. I wasn’t sure if there would be a girlfriend or a wife or anything. So, it was really a different starting place. As soon as I pitched it to Mark [Duplass] he said, “A) I want to play the domesticated dude, and B) I think it would be a more interesting trajectory if they were trying to make a film for Hump.” And then the idea just kept evolving, evolving, evolving. But, the true starting place was wanting to work with Mark and wanting to continue to kind of explore male relationships and the limitations of them. Like these two guys who love each other so much and who were so on the same page before, and now are trying to reach for that again. And they’re also holding up a mirror to each other, 10 years after knowing each other so well. I had this experience at a fundraiser last weekend, when all my high school buddies - who I never see - came out of the woodwork. I was looking into their faces and you have these flashbacks of what they were like at 15. And here they are and we’ll all getting old together. It can give you a whole different spin on your own life, and who you are and who you’ve become. You mentioned your continued interest in male relationships. Obviously, this is the second movie in a row you’ve made about two male friends who have come back together after a long time. What is it that interests you about that, do you think? Especially as a woman looking at male relationships. I  might be just deluding myself, but I feel I have a certain amount of emotional intelligence. It pains me and fascinates me and breaks my heart when I see people who have a hard time with emotional intelligence, with trying to connect and not being able to. And it just so happens that guys tend to be like that. But again, the truth of the matter is that My Effortless Brilliance really started with one thing, one true inspiration point, which was Sean Nelson. I really wanted to work with that guy, and I thought it would be an interesting center point for a film. It was exactly the same thing with Mark. I wanted to work with Mark. Because they’re guys, [the films] ended up being about guys. Now, I could have made it romantic - but I don’t know, for some reason it feels like romance is kind of mined more so than in other territories. When I watch Humpday, I feel like as much as it’s about the two guys’ relationship, I think it’s also about the marriage and just the way that grown-up relationships are. The compromises we make, and the question, is honesty always the best policy? Exactly. Totally. And that whole component, which isn’t usually the main theme of the movie and doesn’t get brought up as much. But, the scenes with Anna, from the ovulation sex scene where she mounts him like a horse - all of those scenes I’m so proud of. I love them and I feel like they’re really vital to the way the film works. So, yeah, on paper it looks like My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday are a lot more similar than they are in real life. I really feel like they’re very, very different. [laughs] The relationships are really different, and it’s a very different scenario. In this one, they really want to reconnect. I think they really want to badly. And they’re really different personality types and different combinations, too. And then you’ve got the extra added component of Anna. I was really surprised when you said in the Q&A at the screening that there was no script. I wouldn’t have guessed that from watching the film because it seems like it’s so much tighter than a lot of movies that are completely improvised. I really, really, really wanted to have a strong narrative drive in this film. And I believe that you can do that without writing a script. To make it more accessible to some people, the best way I can describe it is that it’s a lot like Mike Leigh. He goes through months of improvisation and he uses the words of the actors, he doesn’t write the words himself. He lets the actors do that and he just writes it down and then rehearses the shit out of that script and makes a movie. I do the exact same thing, except that instead of writing down those words, I write the final draft in the edit room. It really is the same. After months of developing their characters in tandem with them and already having a loose plot, as the characters are developed I’m getting the plot tighter and tighter and tighter. And I’m letting them contribute but I’m ultimately the one who says, “No, I really want this to happen.” And then by the time we get on set, we really have all the components of a script, except for the actual script. So I can’t emphasis that enough. It’s really the opposite of showing up without a script and saying, “Let’s make a movie.” You know what I mean? It’s very different than that. And I want it to feel very different than that. I want an experience where the audience is being drawn through what’s going to happen. And I think you have to have a certain amount of shit in place before that can take place. But I want the level of naturalism to be much higher than I’m capable of writing down. I feel if I worked with a writer who had a knack for naturalistic dialogue, and worked with actors who were super-technical and could translate that and make it sound like it comes out of their own mouths, I could do that kind of work, and I’m open to it. But, right now, this process is working really well for me. I enjoy it. I read in the L.A. Times today that you didn’t exactly know what was going to happen in the [climactic hotel room scene]. Yeah, true. You had no idea how the film would end, basically. No. And that was really important for us, we wanted that open-ended feeling. Like we didn’t want to know, “Oh, we’re landing here.” We wanted to be open enough that we could play every scene like anything was possible. And then when we got there, the same thing. We didn’t want the crew to know, we didn’t want the cast to know, we didn’t want anyone to know what was going to happen. So there would be this sense of immediacy and naturalism in the dynamic. This real sense of a tension in the air. When you say that you basically scripted in the editing room, how do you work with your editor? Are you finding the story together out of what you shot? Nat [Sanders] stared cutting when we were about halfway through the shooting, and he’d just rough out every scene. And after we finished shooting, I gave him another week and a half or so to finish doing that. And then we’d work together 10 hours a day, just like working our asses off. And it was great. For me, the most ideal editor/director relationship is that it’s a two-headed monster and you’ve got two different brains. For me, I’ve always edited my own shit and it’s so nice to have another brain there, a really sharp, awesome brain, somebody who’s even more OCD than I am, which I didn’t think was possible. I’m a really good editor too, so the two of us together were, yeah, we’re really hammering it out together. And after a while it gets very ego-less. Like who knows where the idea came from. After the film, a woman commented that it seems like the film is anti-homophobia, but then also kind of reinforces it. For me, it’s not a gay-themed movie at all. It’s the opposite of a gay-themed movie, it’s about being straight. But, specifically it’s about the limitations of straightness and it’s about how absurd the extremities of straightness can be, basically. I’ve always been interested in the boundaries of sexual identity. And straight guys are the ones in general, if you’re going to use a broad stroke, who are most invested in everybody knowing that they’re straight. They don’t care if the rest of the world is gay as long as everybody knows, and they know themselves, they are straight. I just find that fascinating, because I don’t feel like that at all. And I think most women I know, both gay and bisexual, don’t feel that way. And I didn’t get into this in the film really, but I think it must have to do with the way that there’s a lot of pressure on straight guys. This whole idea of being a man and what it is to be man, and what if you’re not a man. I don’t know, all this crap is a lot of pressure that they put on themselves. But, it clearly freaks a lot of guys out, the idea that they’re secretly gay or whatever. It’s so absurd, and I wanted to show the absurdity of that. So, for me, portraying that honestly and then poking fun at it is not homophobic. You’re showing homophobic characters, maybe — who don’t want to be homophobic, but they kind of are. But, that’s the truth of it. And you’re also pointing out simultaneously that it’s ridiculous, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t think that makes the movie homophobic. The opposite is true, in fact. Before the movie, after Geoff Gillmore introduced you, you said that you’d been thirsting to be [at Sundance] for a long time. And I wonder if, having your first few films premiere in other festivals, and then coming to Sundance with your third film, do you feel more prepared for this experience? Fuck, yeah. Oh, my god, yes. First of all, if my first film had gotten into Sundance, I would have known that it was a big deal, but I really feel like in the back of my heart I would have been like, “Oh, this is what happens. You make a feature film, you get into Sundance.” And that’s this sort of level of — what’s that word? Entitlement. And taking it for granted to a certain degree. Having been on the festival circuit for three years, having gone to an array of different sizes and different sorts of regional festivals, having a wonderful time - they’re all so different - and getting to know programmers and other filmmakers and stuff, I definitely felt prepared. Going to SXSW, for instance, as I understand the second largest festival in the country, there was so much press and industry there and I felt like was constantly failing my film. I didn’t have anybody; it was just me. And so I tried to figure out how to house everybody, and then all my friends were doing press interviews all the time. I had no idea how to get press, I felt like I was constantly failing my film. And I just really understood why I needed a publicist, why I need a sales agent, why I needed all that in place if I was going to go to another big festival. And so it was great. It was like a training ground. I’m couldn’t be happier that it’s my third film and it’s this film. And I also feel like I paid my dues. I feel like I deserve to be here. I don’t know, it’s just great. I definitely don’t take any of this for granted. I’m really, really just soaking it up. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/1/16/39611.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 1/16/2009 11:01:03 PM
Body: I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the equator, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettucine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straightt-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many an Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message this morning praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uinitiated turning off. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:01:03 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog1/16/2009 11:01:03 PMI’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the equator, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettucine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straightt-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many an Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message this morning praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uinitiated turning off. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/16/39610.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/16/2009 11:00:49 PM
Body: I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the equator, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettucine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straightt-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many an Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message this morning praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uinitiated turning off. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:00:49 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/16/2009 11:00:49 PMI’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy which uses a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be. Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the equator, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettucine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straightt-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.” In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out. The clear-cut theme of many an Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone. I saw a Twitter message this morning praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uinitiated turning off. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/1/16/39586.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 1/16/2009 9:00:33 AM
Body: Clint Eastwood’s new cranky-old-man epic, Gran Torino, sped past the competition to prove its raw masculine authority at box office. Over the past twenty years, Eastwood has perfected his own sub-genre: the grizzled old timer who comes back for one last hurrah. This latest iteration adds a surprising dose of compassion. Karina shares which movies she’s most excited to see at Sundance this year. The list includes, Moon, The Clone Returns Home, Hump Day, O’er the Land, The September Issue, The Informers, and World’s Greatest Dad. Listen to FilmCouch and win free stuff! We’ve got two contests going on. Send us an e-mail telling us the most absurd piece of merchandise you’ve seen branded with an image of Che Guevara, and you can win a program from the Che roadshow signed by Steven Soderbergh, a copy of Che’s Diaries, and the soundtrack to the film. Also, send us your favorite movie about Hollywood, and you can win a copy of the new film The Deal, starring William H. Macy. Send e-mails to filmcouch (at) spout (dot) com. (Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday) 0:00 - Intro 1:31 - contests 5:58 - listener feedback 11:55 - Gran Torino 29:57 - Sundance preview filmcouch-104 Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:00:33 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com1/16/2009 9:00:33 AM Clint Eastwood’s new cranky-old-man epic, Gran Torino, sped past the competition to prove its raw masculine authority at box office. Over the past twenty years, Eastwood has perfected his own sub-genre: the grizzled old timer who comes back for one last hurrah. This latest iteration adds a surprising dose of compassion. Karina shares which movies she’s most excited to see at Sundance this year. The list includes, Moon, The Clone Returns Home, Hump Day, O’er the Land, The September Issue, The Informers, and World’s Greatest Dad. Listen to FilmCouch and win free stuff! We’ve got two contests going on. Send us an e-mail telling us the most absurd piece of merchandise you’ve seen branded with an image of Che Guevara, and you can win a program from the Che roadshow signed by Steven Soderbergh, a copy of Che’s Diaries, and the soundtrack to the film. Also, send us your favorite movie about Hollywood, and you can win a copy of the new film The Deal, starring William H. Macy. Send e-mails to filmcouch (at) spout (dot) com. (Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday) 0:00 - Intro 1:31 - contests 5:58 - listener feedback 11:55 - Gran Torino 29:57 - Sundance preview filmcouch-104 Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/groups/Sundance/HUMPDAY_and_amateur_porn/532/39334/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: SkyPilot
Post To: Sundance
Post Date: 1/9/2009 5:37:49 PM
Body: Is the amateurs-making-porn genre here to stay? Perhaps as long as porn is around? Humpday reminds me of a few films I've seen over the last few years. The description makes me think I'll either sort of like it or really, really hate it. Either way, I'd like to see it. Nutshell pitch: two old college buddies who are prone to one-upsmanship dare one another to enter an amateur porn competition. They eventually decide their best chance to win is to have sex with one another. This isn't about being gay, they say; this is art. I'm interested in Humpday for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the writer/director (Lynn Shelton) is a woman, so I'm excited to see how she handles this story that seems to be primarily about men. The Sundance description ends, "her craft shines brightest when our two gentlemen finally get down to the task at hand: creating a classic 'wriggle in your seat' moment of truth." That reminds me of another film about amateur pornographers called Dear Pillow (2004), which was overflowing with such 'wriggle in your seat' moments. I liked Dear Pillow more than The Amateurs (2005), but The Amateurs had some merit too. Both films are interested in how creating pornography can affect the relationships of those involved. (I haven't seen Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but I've heard that theme's in there, too.) Dear Pillow went further than The Amateurs by looking at how merely consuming pornography can affect one's relationships. I'd love to hear from anyone who sees this movie at Sundance--is it just a re-tread of these older films? I doubt it. Another thing I don't know is whether all of these recent films are just retreading older amateurs-making-porn films. Have you guys seen older movies about pornographers?
]]>Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:37:49 GMTSkyPilotSundance1/9/2009 5:37:49 PM Is the amateurs-making-porn genre here to stay? Perhaps as long as porn is around? Humpday reminds me of a few films I've seen over the last few years. The description makes me think I'll either sort of like it or really, really hate it. Either way, I'd like to see it. Nutshell pitch: two old college buddies who are prone to one-upsmanship dare one another to enter an amateur porn competition. They eventually decide their best chance to win is to have sex with one another. This isn't about being gay, they say; this is art. I'm interested in Humpday for a lot of reasons. For one thing, the writer/director (Lynn Shelton) is a woman, so I'm excited to see how she handles this story that seems to be primarily about men. The Sundance description ends, "her craft shines brightest when our two gentlemen finally get down to the task at hand: creating a classic 'wriggle in your seat' moment of truth." That reminds me of another film about amateur pornographers called Dear Pillow (2004), which was overflowing with such 'wriggle in your seat' moments. I liked Dear Pillow more than The Amateurs (2005), but The Amateurs had some merit too. Both films are interested in how creating pornography can affect the relationships of those involved. (I haven't seen Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but I've heard that theme's in there, too.) Dear Pillow went further than The Amateurs by looking at how merely consuming pornography can affect one's relationships. I'd love to hear from anyone who sees this movie at Sundance--is it just a re-tread of these older films? I doubt it. Another thing I don't know is whether all of these recent films are just retreading older amateurs-making-porn films. Have you guys seen older movies about pornographers? http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/friendship/MemberTagFilms.aspxfriendship
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