Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Seth Rogan, Elizabeth Banks
For all its crudeness, Zack and Miri Make A Porno turns out to be a surprisingly sweet movie. I mean, sure, the set-up allows for a lot of nudity and profanity and a little bit of toilet humour, but in the final analysis it’s very much a film about the changing relationship between two people – one that’s more realistic than most on-screen relationships. To my mind Dogma is Kevin Smith’s best film, but Zack and Miri and Clerks run neck and neck for the runner up position.
Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks star as the eponymous Zack and Miri, two childhood friends who are now roommates with a pile of unpaid bills to their names. The water and power are soon turned off and the threat of eviction looms, forcing them to consider an extreme solution. Inspired by his encounter with a gay porn actor (Justin Long) at their high school reunion, Zack comes up with a plan for them to make their own porno and then use reunion mailing list as the starting point for marketing and distributing it. Miri insists that no one wants to see them having sex to which Zack counters, “Everyone wants to see anyone having sex.” If the internet can be distilled down to one single lesson, I believe that’s what it would be.
They work out a story – a Star Wars parody – and begin recruiting a crew and co-stars, including Bubbles (Traci Lords), Lester (Kevin Smith mainstay Jason Mewes), Stacey (Katie Morgan), Barry (Ricky Mabe), Delaney (Craig Robinson) and Deacon (Jeff Anderson). They also begin to confront what it will mean for their relationship if they have sex, even if it is only for the camera. They’ve known each other forever and have a good, solid friendship which could be ruined if they have sex and things become weird between them. On the other hand, they may have sex and realize that they were meant to be together all along – but they won’t know until they take the leap.
Various mishaps befall the production, forcing the filmmakers to start over from scratch with a completely different story and using the coffee shop where Zack works as their set. Problems also arise between Zack and Miri due not to the prospect of having sex with each other, but the jealousy each begins to feel about the thought of the other having sex with someone else. Rogan and Banks are well-matched here and manage to convey a sense of Zack and Miri’s long history and the complexity of their feelings for each other. Banks, who has popped up time and again over the last couple of years in smaller roles, proves that she has talent and charisma to spare. She’s particularly good in the moment when Miri realizes exactly how she feels about Zack, a moment without dialogue which nevertheless manages to express every single nuance of the revelation.
The trajectory of Kevin Smith’s career has been interesting. His first few films are loosely interconnected – characters in one know characters from another – and tend to feature the same actors over and again. Zack and Miri is self-contained and the regulars are mostly absent, save for Mewes and Anderson (although, I swear Ben Affleck makes an uncredited cameo as the demolition foreman – somebody tell me I’m not crazy) and the feel of it is markedly different from previous Smith films. I can’t decide whether I prefer his scrappier early work or the glossier efforts of late, but I think he’s one of the more consistently smart writer/directors out there right now and Zack and Miri proves that though excrement jokes still come easily to him, he's also maturing a lot as a storyteller.
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