Print
Email Story
Kevin Smith's Clerks was one of the first R-rated movies I ever saw, so it's always held a special place in my heart.
It's also strong anecdotal evidence -- the best kind of evidence -- that the media's impact on kids is overstated. Clerks is stuffed with obscenity, and though I must have seen it by age 13, I didn't learn just how cool swearing is until well into college. Now every third damn word I say can't be spoken on prime-time TV (these reviews run, before the F-bombs are excised, around 8,000 words), but that has a lot more to do with the ongoing disappointment of existence, much of which has to do with being a Seattle sports fan, than from watching too many dirty movies.
Anyway, it's been a bumpy road since Clerks and Mallrats, Smith's first and best (who wants to start an internet fight??). But after Clerks 2 and the new Zack and Miri Make a Porno, he's on a two-film hitting streak -- assuming you're down with intermittently hilarious movies that lack a key element that could have made them great.
Long-time friends/roommates Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks are in deep financial straights. They can't make the rent or even keep their utilities running. At their 10-year high school reunion, a meeting with gay porn actor Justin Long sets Rogen's wheels turning: if he and Banks made a porno, their money problems would be over.
After convincing Banks it wouldn't mess with their friendship to sleep together for money, the pair recruit friends, strippers and assorted sleazebags as producers and co-stars. For once in his life, Rogen's looking competent and ambitious. But it's not long before jealousy shows up, threatening both the production and Banks and Rogen's decades-long relationship.
Zack and Miri has many of writer/director Kevin Smith's hallmarks: schlubby working-class characters, a preoccupation with contact sports and pop culture, and dialogue so dirty that marrying Mr. Clean wouldn't make the dirt come off.
What's new is that, instead of sounding like perverts who dropped out of the Ivy League for excessive perversion, his characters sound mostly natural.
That opens up a funny cast (including a few Smith regulars and more recent talent like Rogen and Craig Robinson) to be extra funny. Just how funny is going to depend heavily on how hilarious you find made-up sex acts and arguments about which Star Wars characters would screw each other (a personal jeer and cheer, respectively), meaning some moments will fall flat with a vengeance, but its overall hit rate is pretty high.
Things are weaker in the emotional department. You can't say Smith doesn't explore some less-traveled roads with his examination of relationships, from the age-old question in Clerks of how many blowjobs is too many for a girl to have given before you dated her to the bisexual love triangle of Chasing Amy.
Now we're up in some business of whether it's possible to make porn with a friend without things getting weird. That's actually Step 3 in my 7-Step Me-Friendship Application, so my perspective may be skewed (interestingly, no one's completed that app yet), but Zack and Miri doesn't get too deep into the particulars of its situation. Too bad -- sometimes the best way to reach universal truths is through odd paths. For a movie with a premise I'd never seen before, the course of Rogen and Banks' relationship felt too familiar.
Even if it were a romantic comedy, which it's not, exactly -- if other rom-coms had this much nudity, I'd have to start dating someone just for the express purpose of getting dragged along to them -- Zack and Miri is funny enough to stand on its comedic merits alone.
If Smith had been able to nail down that romantic side, he would have been on to something special.
Grade: B
