Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

On Movies: A comic look at homophobia and identity

'I thought it would be a delicious absurdity," says Lynn Shelton about the concept for her movie, Humpday. That is, to have two determinedly heterosexual males, buddies from college, placed in a situation where they're forced to have sex - with each other.

'I thought it would be a delicious absurdity," says

Lynn Shelton

about the concept for her movie,

Humpday

. That is, to have two determinedly heterosexual males, buddies from college, placed in a situation where they're forced to have sex - with each other.

"Here are these two guys who are so straight that they're actually out-duding each other toward doing each other," the director says, laughing.

Humpday, which opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse, stars Mark Duplass as a married man, settled into a Seattle house with his Seattle wife (Alycia Delmore). One night his crazy pal from long ago (Joshua Leonard) shows up. The unexpected guest drags his friend to a den of Dionysian hipsters and the duo are forced into this bizarre dare - the two of them playing a macho game of chicken, where neither's going to back down.

Laughter, angst, and awkwardness ensue. Shelton's minimalist, improv-y film is about homophobia and friendship, marriage and identity - sexual and otherwise.

A hit in January at Sundance, where Magnolia Pictures won a bidding war for distribution rights, Humpday is sort of a DIY, mumblecore version of a Hollywood bromance. You know, Role Models, I Love You, Man, anything with Paul Rudd and another guy, or anything with Judd Apatow's name on the credits.

"I really like Judd Apatow and his merry band," says Shelton, 43, in town recently, breakfasting on Rittenhouse Square. "I think it's amazing how he brought a real intelligence and humanity to an extremely crass genre. . . .

"But actually, I did not set out to make a comedy," adds the Seattle native, who came to filmmaking (Humpday's her third) by way of acting, photography, and experimental video art.

"As disingenuous as that may sound, it's really true. My films always have humor in them, but they have just as much a kind of weightiness. And the humor comes out of - I hope - a very authentic human place. . . .

"We understood that the opportunity for humor was there, but on set . . . we were dead serious."

Shelton, who cast herself as one of the lesbian partygoers in Humpday, lives with her ex-actor carpenter husband and their 10-year-old boy. With the success of the film - a microbudget affair, funded by grants, family, and friends - Shelton landed an agent and manager and took meetings in, gulp, Los Angeles.

"I never thought I would have the opportunity, and I never had the desire, frankly, to intersect with Hollywood," she confesses.

But after Sundance, she was sought out by folks keen to represent her. She met with producers and studio execs and started fielding various concepts and projects, scripts and books.

"There are a couple that actually look really good," Shelton reports. "I was having anxiety attacks when I would start to think about working in a more expensive manner, with bigger names. . . . I really don't want to lose the deep, deep joy that I feel on this little intimate set that I created where I actually handpick everybody who's there.

"But what I realized is that I can do that, too. I can expand my horizons a little bit."

"In the Loop," profanely. Fans of expletive excess and glorious barrages of profanity need go no further than the Ritz Five, to see Armando Iannucci's rat-tat-tat political satire In the Loop. A screwball view of the bungled partnership of the United States and the United Kingdom in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Iannucci's transatlantic cast walk the corridors of power in Washington and London, delivering shoddy forecasts as momentum builds for war.

And one character - the prime minister's press secretary, played by Peter Capaldi - hurls abuse at all in his path. Spewing some of the most colorful (and unprintable) venom imaginable, Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker is a ferocious beast of belittlement and bile. And it's clear watching the film - which costars James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander, Anna Chlumsky, Steve Coogan, and David Rasche - that Capaldi is having the time of his life.

"All his insults are very, very carefully crafted," says Iannucci, who makes his feature-directing debut with In the Loop after multiple successes in British TV and comedy. "Peter spent a lot of his time saying his lines over and over in a corner so that his mouth could memorize, so that they could splutter out seemingly without thought."

Iannucci, born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland (his father moved there from Naples, Italy), sweated the dialogue. Simple four-letter words would not suffice.

"Actually, swearing in itself is a bit boring," he notes, on the phone from New York. "So what we do is try to bring something new and unexpected to each bout of swearing by couching it in these baroque, elaborate threats of physical violence."

In the Loop is an extension of Iannucci's award-winning hit BBC show, The Thick of It, a fly-on-the-wall free-for-all about the machinations of British government. Capaldi played the same character, inspired by Tony Blair's former press secretary, Alastair Campbell, on the show.

But the premise for the film came to Iannucci from reading accounts of confabs between members of the Blair and Bush camps.

"I'd always wanted to make a funny film with lots of fast, zappy one-liners," says Iannucci, 45. "But I wanted to wait until I found the right story. And never in a million years thinking that the story would be all about our two countries going to war in the Middle East. . . .

"But as I read more about the dysfunction within the different Washington departments - the State Department, the Pentagon - and how the Brits were manipulated and almost star-struck by being on the world stage . . . I thought, either you tear your hair out at that and scream, or else you see it as farce.

"And I saw it as farce, really. What can I say?"

.