FEW kinds of art are more boring than the insistently transgressive, and few movies are more boring than “Humpday,” which features two straight guys who spend an hour discussing whether they should have sex with each other as an artistic statement.
Ben (Mark Duplass), a conventional Seattle husband, is in baby-making mode with his wife (Alycia Delmore) when his Kerouac-y best bud from college, wild child Andrew (he even has a beard and — gasp! — tattoos!), shows up and moves in. “You got the car, you got the wife, you got the… coffee-table books,” Andrew declares, as if mentioning malaria, typhoid and beriberi.
Andrew (Joshua Leonard) entices Ben into joining him for an all-night pot-fueled conversation about “boundary-pushing” art, i.e. the kind meant to win hipster huzzahs while drawing yawns from all others. (Wanna actually rile people up? Try drawing some satirical cartoons of Mohammed.) They decide that having sex on film would be, like, really out there.
The static story (nothing much ever happens), stock characters and blathery talk reinforce the unpleasantness of eyeball-scalding lighting, a sound design that makes each conversation seem like a hubcap rattling on a concrete floor, and my-cameraman-has-epilepsy photography.
The press notes say writer-director Lynn Shelton, who talks a lot like her characters, calls this film “the culmination of my quest to find a deeply collaborative and organic way of making movies.” Please, can we keep that kind of language where it belongs — in the produce aisle at Whole Foods?
HUMPDAY Get a room, you two. Running time: 94 minutes. Rated R (strong sexual content, profanity, drug use). At the Angelika, Houston and Mercer streets.