Who's In It: Mark Duplass, Josh Leonard, Alycia Delmore
The Basics: Two old friends, both heterosexual, decide on a drunken dare to enter an amateur porn contest--it's a real event in Seattle called "Hump" and participants produce short, creative, homemade sex videos and win cash prizes--and have sex with each other. Then for the next 90 minutes they yap-yap-yap about it, trying their best to get the other one to chicken out first. I was reminded of that line in
It's a Wonderful Life where the old man yells at Jimmy Stewart, "Why doncha kiss her already instead of talkin' her to death!" After a while you may feel compelled to yell similar man-on-man-action encouragements.
What's The Deal: This movie is weird for a couple of reasons. First, it acts like mundane gay sex is this daring thing that no straight-identified guy has ever tried without the lure of a cash reward and that these two wannabe bohemians are brave pioneers who--oops--find that their unexpected but totally understandable fears of intimacy and emasculation get in the way. Then at the beginning of the film you see some gay friends hanging out with them but at no point do any of those folks chime in to say, "Oh, by the way, heterosexual men get it on with each other in porn all the time. They call it 'Gay for Pay.' It's been done before. A lot. You're nothing special." In fact, these gay characters totally disappear. It's like the filmmakers knew that if they showed up again and explained these inconvenient truths then the movie would be over.
How Much You'll Enjoy It If You Can Get Past The Overall Tone Of Self-Congratulation: It's occasionally funny as it presents a warmhearted indictment of gay panic, especially when the married fledgling indie-porn star's wife jumps in to bust up the planned activity or when she decides to angrily use her husband as a hungover stud service during her last days of that month's ovulation cycle. But again, though this film has the more "radical" plotline, there's more daring stuff going on in a few moments of the very flawed
Brüno than there is here.
Why It's Not A "Mumblecore" Movie: Because the characters speak in complete sentences. Somehow the presence of Mark Duplass, who was responsible for the m'core-ish film
The Puffy Chair, has gotten this one saddled with that silly genre name. Meanwhile, you've seen the bearded guy before. He was "Josh" in
The Blair Witch Project.
Funnier Team-Switching Comedies:
Chasing Amy. Or, if you want to go way back, there's the completely and fascinatingly exploitive late '60s let's-pretend-we're-gay-to-get-out-of-going-to-Vietnam comedy
The Gay Deceivers.