Zack and Miri Make a Porno
by Robert WilonskyPals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin' it on for the video cam, realize that their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. Hard-up meets hard-on in a movie that's all heart once you get past the shot that'll shock only those for whom the donkey show in Clerks II wasn't oh-God-no enough. There's a Star Wars dress-up sequence, too, but the Lucasfilm homage is tossed after a few fleeting but promising moments; from there, it's straight-up sex in a coffee shop after work hours, where Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) enlist some new fuck buddies to shoot their amateur smut opus, Swallow My Cockuccino. But from its few scatological asides to its inevitable boob shots, nothing about Zack and Miri feels terribly fresh, much less transgressive.Writer-director Kevin Smith makes two kinds of movies: romantic comedies and bromantic comedies, with Chasing Amy — his one legitimately great movie — the crossover hybrid hit. They're all decidedly conventional affairs, save for the detours into gross-out juvenilia that seem less sincere the older Smith gets. The feel is more of pandering to an audience that goes to his movies solely to walk out with a couple of lines they can quote to each other on the ride home.
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