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Sundance Journal 2009 Day 9: Lynn Shelton’s Humpday

I can’t say that I’m a huge connoisseur of the mumblecore films and from the batch that I have seen so far, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday is easily one of the better films to emerge from the grouping of low budget talkies.

Eric Lavallée

Published on January 27, 2009

I can’t say that I’m a huge connoisseur of the mumblecore films and from the batch that I have seen so far, Lynn Shelton‘s Humpday is easily one of the better films to emerge from the grouping of low budget talkies. I must say I didn’t care much for this cinematic trend and perhaps as an end of film festival snack it was filling enough for someone whose brain needed some simple matter but if I had a larger appetite the one note idea is stretched out so thin that I’d normally be left cranky and irritated.

Shelton (see pic) herself was a secondary character, but this is a bro film featuring a director/actor who is slowly moving away from the mumblecore crowd in Mark Duplass and a bearded happy-go-lucky Joshua Leonard (see pic below) who have a good natural chemistry and can for the most part keep a straight face.

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Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).