Pagando Bem, que Mal Tem?

It is difficult to imagine a title that will more or less tell you almost everything major that happens in the movie you are about to see than Zack & Miri Make a Porno. The title pretty much sums up the whole film right there, in the broad strokes. But, as with most things, the meat is in the subtext. What the title doesn't tell you is that while making a porno, Zack & Miri, and their other accomplices, will make you laugh pretty hard. Zack & Miri Make a Porno may not be high art, but it is very funny movie, with a touch of heart to go along with it.

Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been best friends for as long as they can remember. They live together, but in a completely platonic relationship, drive to work together and both attend their school reunion together. Things are a bit rough for them these days, though: their rather meager jobs are not bringing in enough money to keep the rent paid and all the utilities running. So, after running into an old classmate whose lover is the star of porno films in California, they hit upon a brilliant scheme to make some money: make a porno film.

In short order, they raise some capital from a co-worker (Craig Robinson), recruit a stripper, Stacey (Katie Morgan), Lester (Jason Mewes),a man who isn't afraid to expose himself, a cameraman (Jeff Anderson) and Zack and Miri plan to round out the cast themselves. However, in the process of getting down to business, Zack and Miri are realizing that their long-standing friendship may actually be something more, and can they manage to watch each other get it on with someone else after discovering that they may only want to be with each other.

One thing is certain: if you are not able to listen to frank jokes featuring almost every vulgar word in the English language, not to mention a fair dose of nudity and simulated sex, you should be looking elsewhere for an evening at the movies. Zack & Miri Make a Porno pulls few punches in these categories. If this is not an issue for you, then Zack & Miri will provide a plethora of laughs. As scripted by Kevin Smith, Zack & Miri is one hilarious joke after another, most of which comes from Smith's always impressive ability to weave some terrific conversations full of wit between his various characters. Zack & Miri Make a Porno, like all of Smith's best films, is all about the dialogue, and it works wonderfully, as always.

Seth Rogan is proving to be an actor who manages to give a performance that seems so completely unforced and natural. Zack, like many of Rogan's other roles, is a slice of life guy, and Rogen manages to make it seem like you are just watching a friend that you filmed around the house with a video camera. Elizabeth Banks is equally good in the role of Miri, and the two characters have a nice, natural chemistry, that evokes it's power when the two film their first sex scene for the porno, which Smith stages tastefully and scores with a great, unreleased song by Live. You know you care about what happens to these characters once this scene hits.

The supporting cast is strong, especially Robinson as Zack's co-worker who is principally interested in financing this film so he can see some women naked after being married for so long (A scene between his character and his wife late in the film is a riot) and Jason Mewes, no longer under the influence of drugs, proves that he will do almost anything in a film and gets plenty of laughs.

Zack & Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith's second turn at a film outside of his "View Askewniverse" series of films that he kicked off with Clerks, and it shows that Smith has ability to produce a funny film without exclusively relying on his old standby characters. In the process of doing so, he has crafted something that, if you can handle the racy nature of the material, will leave you in stitches.

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

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).

Lifelong platonic friends Zack and Miri live together but struggle week to week to make ends meet and keep the bills paid. When they get their water and power cut off on the night they are stumped as to how they are going to get out from under. At the same time a viral video of Miri in her large pants (aka "granny pants") reveals that they have some weird sort of online fame already – a fame they are keen to exploit. Their plan? Well, get a group of locals together, rent a camera and get some basic sets and make themselves an amateur pornographic film. It is all business of course, but will even "performance" sex complicate Zack and Miri's relationship?

I live in a first floor flat on a busy junction in a part of Birmingham and, as well as being a cool place to be, I do get lots of direct marketing from the film posters on the buses going by within about 5m and just below my window level. This was not a particularly pleasant thing when I had to content with Rogen's goofy face every 5 minutes when this film was released – I'm not a big fan of him and I find him to be pretty one note but just happened to come along at the right time. However I was interested enough in Kevin Smith to go and check it out to see if he had managed to get better. It was no surprise (given the title) to find that he had certainly not grown up anymore because this is a film that relies heavily on crude jokes and sexual references above everything else.

This does the job for quite a while because the film is sporadically funny in a childish way. I suppose it will depend who you are because some people love this sort of thing whereas for me, it was just too obvious and forced – even if I still found it quite amusing. It wears off though because, talking of obvious and forced, the actual plot is really poor. It is not just that it is predictable (lots of films are "predictable" if you think about it) but it is more the way it trudges towards the obvious conclusion without worrying about whether or not the audience care (we don't) or if it rings true (it doesn't). The focus on crude jokes in the first half means that you don't really care about the characters and when Smith decides to go all doe-eyed in his plot then you just don't buy it and it only results in being unfunny and dull.

The cast all do the basics and there is only really one "good" performance in the film – which is from Banks. She has a natural presence which is sort of charming and she does work that well here. She isn't good enough to charm the film into being better (Rosario Dawson sort of managed it in Clerks 2) but she does reasonably well considering what is asked of her. Rogen does his usual stuff – if you like that then you will like this but for those who disliked him even once then this is more of the same. Mewes is amusing but his presence only reminds you how much funnier he was as Jay. Long is funny in his small turn and there are a couple of other good comic performances from others in the group as well.

Overall this film is just what we have sadly come to expect from Kevin Smith – a crude film that is funny but nowhere near funny enough to carry the whole film like he once did. The plot is poor and obvious but this will only irritate in the final third – up till then there are at least a hatful of crude laughs to be had if you like that sort of thing.

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.