"Hump Day."

* * * 1/2 Funny People
Written and directed by Judd Apatow. With Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Leslie Mann. (R)

No one has wrought more truth from Hollywood's current obsession with boys being boys than Judd Apatow, who with Funny People seems to be completing a trilogy that began with The 40-Year-Old Virgin (sex) and Knocked Up (fatherhood). Funny People is about death, although it manages to run two-and-a-half hours without once evoking the comedian's synonym for bombing. Despite the title it is only fitfully funny, Apatow having gotten the comedian's bug to play it straight and be taken seriously. The model may appear to be Terms of Endearment, but the film is closer to the crueler, more pessimistic melodramas of Douglas Sirk, with Adam Sandler as Jane Wyman and Seth Rogen his unlikely Rock Hudson.

Sandler, very fine as usual in a dramatic role, plays a 40-something movie star with leukemia and Rogen the young stand-up he hires as a writer and confidante. George Simmons has Sandler's career, having made his fortune with awful comedies pitched to 8-year olds, and Ira is essentially a younger version of Rogen, who was discovered and mentored by Apatow. Jokes are made about Rogen's recent weight loss and Jonah Hill's position in Apatowwood as Rogen's Mini-Me, and in place of Apatow's NBC sitcom "Freaks and Geeks" there's an awful NBC high school sitcom starring Jason Schwartzman.

George uses his imminent death to make amends with his family and woo the one that got away, who is played by Apatow's wife, Leslie Mann. Laura is a former actress — the clip of one of her "Melrose Place"-type shows is actually from Isabel Coixet's Things I Never Told You — and her children are played by their daughters. Her husband is played by Eric Bana (an in-joke if you've seen Knocked Up), who is cringingly awkward at comedy. It's here that Funny People, which has no discernible dramatic arc, goes off the rails. Many a proud papa has bragged about his daughter's performance in a school play, but it takes blinding self-indulgence to share it with the world.

Funny People is more bromance than romance, George showing more interest in the alleged girth of Ira's penis than the lovely Laura. And as a sour showbiz love letter, crammed with famous comedians paying homage to both George Simmons and Judd Apatow, it's a stand-up fan's wet dream.

* * * 1/2 Humpday
Written and directed by Lynn Shelton. With Mark Duplass, Alycia Delmore and Joshua Leonard. (R)

It takes a woman to take the dick-obsessed banter of Funny People to its logical conclusion with Humpday, Lynn Shelton's low-budget comedy about two heterosexual men who decide to have sex as an art project. Bracingly honest about the way we live now, it's the film that Zack and Miri Make a Porno should have been, had Kevin Smith owned up to his big fat crush on Jason Mewes.

Ben (mumblecore auteur Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are a relatively straightlaced Seattle couple trying for a baby. Ben's old college friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard), a shaggy, globetrotting artist, comes calling and soon hooks up with a woman (Shelton) who invites Ben to meet her polyamorous housemates. "The place is called Dionysus and they're not kidding," says Ben to his wife on the phone, hiding in the bathroom. Intrigued by Andrew's apparent freedom, he decides they should join his new friends in entering Humpfest, the amateur porn competition run annually by the Seattle alternative newspaper The Stranger.

But will they go through with it? These are the children of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and boy do they talk, talk that eventually transcends issues of masculinity and sexuality, exploring the way old dynamics surface with people we haven't seen in a while and the difference between the way we think of ourselves and the way we actually are. Shelton's eminently quotable screenplay sharply delineates the lives of her characters, stumbling through an emotional minefield in that makeshift Gen-X way. Ben & Anna & Andrew are approaching their 30s with the misgivings and fear born by a distrust of certainty that Shelton shares. Says Ben of their porn video, "It pushes boundaries, and that's what a good piece of art will do," and even that truism does not go unexamined.

* * * 500 Days of Summer
Directed by Marc Webb. Written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. (PG-13)

Finally there's 500 Days of Summer, under whose heterosexual veneer beats an onanistic heart. Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), may spend 500 days in love with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), but he never really gets to know her. Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber make no apologies that their semi-autobiographical screenplay is no "he said, she said," its model that classic of male subjectivity The Graduate — except that Benjamin Braddock never called Elaine a skank.

Tom is a would-be architect writing greeting cards (a contrivance that's the tip-off that this movie is more Hollywood than it pretends to be) and Summer his boss's new administrative assistant. He discovers they both like the Smiths and Edward Hopper (what are the odds?), and their relationship, recounted in a time-shifting narrative that mimics a tortured and tortuous memory, is unremarkable: He wants a girlfriend, she just wants to have fun.

Tom gets his notions of love from music and movies, which occasion the best parts of the picture: parodies of foreign films and a musical number set to Hall and Oates's "You Make My Dreams Come True," complete with marching band and animated bluebird. As in that more recent ode to male subjectivity High Fidelity, the characters define themselves by their music. Summer shows her hipster cred by karaokeing "Sugartown" and Tom by following her with "Here Comes Your Man." But Tom's wise-beyond-her-years little sister (Chloë Grace Moretz), like his pre-coital bathroom pep talk, betrays the clichés at the heart of this not-so-indie picture.

There is a romance here, a romance with a more orderly past in which men wore ties, women were secretaries and only sailors had tattoos. No one uses a cell phone or drives a car since the characters live and work in Los Angeles's pre-war downtown. Current indie sweetheart Deschanel, inseparable from her bangs and vintage dresses, is of a piece with the film's vinyl-coveting nostalgia. Yet by the time Tom and Summer have moved on, both seem to have stopped shopping at the Buffalo Exchange. Tom's new girl is a pouty-lipped babe off the Hollywood assembly line. My guess is she doesn't even know who the Smiths are. But I don't think the filmmakers really care.