Zack and Miri Make a Porno

As Jackie Treehorn laments in The Big Lebowski, pornos these days lack plot, and production values, and feelings. Kevin Smith's "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" would make Jackie quite proud.

The basic plot revolves around two friends, Zack and Miri. The two have a platonic relationship and live together. As they hit dire financial straits, Zack suggests they should make a porno and sell it to make money to pay rent, utilities, etc.

I went into this film with some hesitation. I left quite impressed. Seth Rogen proves he can convey emotion and still be funny. Elizabeth Banks provides the perfect on-screen mate for Rogen. However, I feel, as did others who saw the preview, that Craig Robinson (Darrell from The Office) steals nearly every scene he is in.

Zack and Miri heartily earns its R rating. It is easy to see how the MPAA nearly rated it NC-17. No matter the rating, I would whole-heartedly recommend this movie to anyone (with the exception of grandparents).

First off, do not watch this with your parent, grandparents or in-laws. You can definitely feel that this is a Kevin Smith feel, and the fact that it has Jason Mewes in it could have been a strong hint also. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a strange but enjoyable love story, cleverly written by Smith so that you do actually feel the romance behind the porn.

No this movie isn't a major Hollywood blockbuster, and it is definitely not for everyone, if you're a prude give it a miss, but if light hearted and don't mind movies with the full range of body organs then I would recommend watching this!

Roommates and longtime friends Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) meet a gay couple (Brandon Routh and Justin Long) at a high school reunion held on the eve of Thanksgiving. One of these guys (Routh) is so handsome and charming Miri crudely and of course futilely propositions him on the spot. Zack happens to talk to his lover (Long, hilariously deep-voiced and confident). It turns out the gay men produce and act in their own profitable line of gay porn films. They really are good-looking and have it together, and Zack and Miri, being so broke their electricity and water have been cut off, decide to make a porno of their own. The plot twist, obvious in conventional romantic comedy terms, is that the process of shooting a sex scene with them in it makes Zack and Miri, who, we don't know exactly why, have contented themselves with hasty, meaningless sex with others up to now, realize--after a slight delay--that they've really loved each other along.

Smith's use of Seth Rogen in a schlub-wins-pretty-girl comedy (there's no doubt that Elizabeth Banks is pretty) links him with Judd Apatow's productions, but let's hope he isn't swallowed up by the Apatow factory. Apatow can do anything, but in spite of the success of 'Knocked Up,' 'Super Bad,' 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' and 'Pineapple Express,' I wish he'd go back to producing really good failed TV series like 'Freaks and Geeks' and 'Undeclared,' where Seth got started and Judd gave birth to all the good comedy.

Kevin Smith's continuing appeal is his own. It lies in his faithfulness to his New Jersey "Askewniverse" regional working-class outlook and in his ability to call a spade a spade, "spade," in this case, being a string of four-letter words. He has never strayed far from his basic concerns even when more money came his way, as it did as soon as his under-$30,000 debut production 'Clerks' was snapped up by Miramax and feted at Sundance and Cannes. Smith's movies are frank and contemporary, outrageous and funny. Above all they're sui generis, a quality achieved through adhering closely to favorite tropes and locales and a posse of pals.

His dead-end mallrats entering their thirties without accomplishment or future speak truth, and the best things about his movies has always been the dialogue, which is spiky and arresting and nonstop and alive, even if he avoids polish so studiously that the lines aren't as memorable as they might be. Or is it just that I'm too old to be fully tuned in to the language, even though I understand it? Relationships and situations get honest treatment, even though they're hardly explored in depth. He's also good at politics and religion, as in 'Dogma', which took things a step beyond 'Clerks.' Raised as an Irish Catholic, Smith delighted in insulting the Church, but the Catholic League didn't take his provocations lightly. Sometimes drawing on Ben Afleck and Matt Damon and other celebs, he's kept going back to the same crew of actor-friends and characters, including Jason Lee, Brian O'Halloran, Mr. Affleck, Betty Aberlin, Jeff Anderson, Walter Flanagan, Ernest O'Donnell, or course Kevin Smith himself ("Silent Bob"), and my own favorite and the most frequent of all, the provocative yet needy Jason Mewes. Smith's last movie was 'Clerks II,' which much like Zack, highlighted a sexually outrageous act in a shoddy fast food joint. A good addition here is Zack's black cohort from his place of work, Delaney (Craig Robinson of the US TV "The Office"), who has great timing and delivery, and becomes the porno's producer.

In a way Zack even directly reenacts what Smith actually did when he shot 'Clerks'--he made a movie at night in the New Jersey convenience store where he was then working in the daytime. The crew in Zack wind up making their porno at night in the non-Starbucks coffee shop called Bean-N-Gone where Zack and Delaney work. Predictably, a guy (Tyler Labine) comes in in the wee hours to buy a cup of coffee so he can drive home. He's so drunk he doesn't notice that one of the new porn recruits and Jason Mewes are having sex on a platform in front of the counter. This time, even though it's put off and partly an afterthought, the main characters not only find love but success in free enterprise--with their friends.

Smith's dialogue never falters. But I confess to an increasing nostalgia for the purity and simplicity of the original Clerks. That had a promise, a sense of how ordinary guys could be witty and smart, a sense that though nothing was happening, something momentous still might. It hasn't. 'Zack and Miri' doesn't take us any further than 'Clerks II' did; I think 'Clerks II' even had cleverer dialogue. This time down-and-dirty language is beginning to feel wearisome. It's beginning to feel forced. People don't talk that way all the time--at least women don't. But that doesn't mean Smith's fans are burned out. The Weinstein brothers have picked up this one, and nobody's going to lose any money. Last time I compared Kevin Smith to Eric Rohmer. That may seem far fetched at first, due to Rohmer's delicacy vs. Smith's gross-out factor. But both filmmakers are essentially perpetual adolescents who write good dialogue. Both of them go back to the same themes every time. Rohmer doesn't make a masterpiece every time and neither does Smith. But you keep coming back. I still like this vulgarian indie auteur.

You definitely need an immature and dirty sense of humor to enjoy this.

I feel like I should let everyone reading this know of the bias I had in favor of this film going in. In spite of my dislike of "Mallrats", "Jersey Girl" and even "Clerks II" (which didn't gel into a cohesive whole for me, although it featured several great individual scenes), I have always liked Kevin Smith as a person, based not only on his podcast and Q&A sessions, but on my one, admittedly short, personal meeting with him. I have also always liked Smith as a writer, and still count "Clerks" as one of the most true-to-life, funniest, and most genuinely inspired screenplays ever written, and all his other movies despite being more flawed in my estimation have something or the other to recommend in them, "Chasing Amy" being his best outside "Clerks". Also influencing my opinion of the film is the fact that if you put Zack in an art-house theater instead of a coffee shop and showed him Robbe-Grillet movies he would basically be me. It also happens that the relationship between Zack and Miri, platonic roommates who have known each other for a long time, is an exact reflection of my own relationship with my roommate. With all that covered, does "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" meet my lofty expectations?

In spite of some forced and unfunny gay and race jokes, it certainly does. I'm almost surprised by it, as I thought there was no way it could meet my expectations. The most instantly noticeable thing about "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is how good the film looks. Throughout his career Smith has been criticized for his skills as director (or lack thereof), and surprisingly Smith has been one of his biggest critics. On a SModcast episode recently Smith said that he and David Klein (his cinematographer) had really worked hard at making this look like a 'real movie' (perhaps not the exact words, but it was something like that). The effort really has paid off. "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is a genuinely well-shot film, there's none of the awkwardness and amateurishness of some of Smith's other movies, and if Smith himself says that he thinks of himself as 'not a real film-maker' then he should re-evaluate himself because he has really achieved something quite surprising here.

The screenplay is no disappointment either. In spite of, as I said earlier, some forced and unfunny race and gay humor, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" still features characters who feel like real people (something Smith has always been able to do) and some really inspired dialogue and even some well-executed sight gags this time around. Oh, it's absolutely filthy, of course, but there's real heart here, and where I personally think "Clerks II" failed at bringing vulgarity and romance together into a cohesive whole, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" does exactly that, including in the film's key scene between Zack and Miri (which also features a "LOST" joke! Did Kevin Smith make this movie for me?!)

The plot is pretty much what you should expect going in. It's a romantic comedy centered around the making of a porn film to help the two leads get out of a financial crisis. The movie is hardly unpredictable, but it's well-written enough to survive the familiar, conventional outcome. You can't expect something as unconventional as "Chasing Amy" (although this movie might be more consistent and hence better), which was a romantic comedy set in a geek/nerd world, with such accurate reflection of the people I know and the life I live that it remains a favorite of mine in spite of its rough visual look and some bad acting, but "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is so well-written and contains such genuine emotion that it overcomes all the hurdles which a romantic comedy faces.

The acting is certainly a big part of the movie's success. No offense to Joey Lauren Adams, but Elizabeth Banks has the skill and presence to carry a film like Adams could only hope to, and is a surprisingly great comedienne. Seth Rogen is an affable goofball as he usually is, and Craig Robinson is... Craig Robinson. The two big surprises here are Jason Mewes, who plays a character quite different from Jay very well. There's no real emotional acting for him here, but he's really hilarious and solid here, and Katie Morgan (!), who doesn't have much to do but is a surprisingly decent comedic actress who may actually have a mainstream career in her future.

Some critics have accused "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" of being sappy. I don't know if it's just my being able to identify with Zack so much and my having a Miri of my own, but I felt like the film ended up being genuinely sweet and not sappy. It made me laugh, it nearly made me cry, and it left me feeling very satisfied by the end. Easily Smith's most satisfying movie since "Chasing Amy", possibly since "Clerks", and with the move away from Jersey, away from the View Askewniverse, it sees Kevin Smith maturing as a director and yet still delivering something that's very much a 'Kevin Smith' movie, just a more accomplished version of one. Before this, I thought his horror project "Red State" would be a disaster, after this I'm actually thinking he can pull it off.

8.5/10