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Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Help! I'm a douchebag and I refuse to do anything different!
2008
Review: November 14, 2008
Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Katie Morgan, Jason Mewes
It might help.
THE SETUP:
Best friends facing poverty make a porn film to make money.
DISCUSSION:
This is the first Kevin Smith film I have made it all the way through. I watched half of Dogma at the half-off theater before I realized that it was shit on celluloid that was wasting my time, and walked out. But I've kind of vaguely paid attention to his career and how his movies did. There is one reason I wanted to see this movie, and that is my unnatural attraction for Seth Rogen, and his near-unspeakable sexiness in the trailer. The movie proves the maxim that what is appealing for two minutes is not necessarily appealing for 50 times that length.
We open with Zack [Rogen] waking up his roommate Miri [Elizabeth Banks]. They have been roommates since high school and are best friends, but never got romantic. They are in Pittsburgh, just before Thanksgiving, and it's cold and snowy. They go to Zack's job at a Starbucks-clone café, where this black employee is playing the race card at being asked to work on "Black Friday." For a while all of the characters seem to be doing their best to swear as much as possible and be as vulgar as they can. Some of it ends up being mildly amusing. Then it's Zack and Miri's ten-year high school reunion, where Miri plans to seduce this guy who used to make fun of her. Turns out he's gay, the boyfriend of Justin Long, here as a gay porn star. The two of them have a lover's spat in which Long threatens to "make a scene" and won't shut up about how much he loves sucking cock. It's always interesting to see what straight people think gays are really like.
We see a picture of Rogen as a stoner back in high school, but Miri's character remains completely unexplained. We know she was called "Stinky Linky," in high school, but now that she's bubbly, sexy and gorgeous, why doesn't she have a boyfriend? And does she have a job at all? Please don't wait for the answers—she's just the gorgeous babe that all male schlubs in movies are automatically issued. Anyway, the water is soon turned off as well as the power and heat, and Zack comes up with the idea that they should make a porn film to raise money. They get the savings of Delaney, the black employee, and hunt up Jason Mewes because he apparently has to be in every Kevin Smith film. Also on hand are famed porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan [both of whom actually turn out to be quite delightful]. They decide that porn films always have a dirty play on a popular mainstream movie's name, and about 10 minutes is taken up with them generating a bunch of porn movie names. Humor, arr, arr. They finally settle on—you guessed it—Star Whores, and this whole Star Wars theme, which, needless to say, is more than a bit out of date. At this point, even Matrix parodies would be out of date and—does Smith know that Star Wars is 30 years old? Anyway, the cast bravely continues as though nothing is amiss. Soon enough that idea is destroyed and we hit the expected "setback" mark, then they go on and decide to make the movie in the coffee shop, using the security camera and a microphone taped to a hockey stick as a boom.
I guess there are spoilers in this paragraph, but only if you've never seen a movie before. Blah, blah, they shoot scenes and eventually discover that Zack has only written one sex scene for Miri, with him. They finally do it, and are all like making love, rather than just fucking, and finally become aware of their feelings. In here, the other people involved in the film pitch in to get Zack and Miri's utilities back on, because they're so grateful for "being a part of something." Then there's a thing between Zack and Miri where one of them thinks the other has slept with someone else, and Zack takes off for three months! And then Delaney gets him back, because the film is unfinished. Within a few minutes he's back with Miri, they declare their love for each other, the end.
It's mildly amusing while it lasts, but the second it ends, you ask yourself "WHY did it need to be that long?" And then you start to think about all the parts where nothing was happening but people having potty mouths, and parts where everything just fell quite dead. And then you start to wonder some of the previously-asked questions about Miri's personality and job, or lack thereof, and then you start to wonder, if they never finished the film, how did Miri get the money to KEEP the utilities on? And then you realize that there really is nothing to the film but the main plot—no depth, no subplots—and all of that is delivered straight-on, without a trace of subtlety. And then one starts to think about Smith himself, and soon I began to think about an interview with Smith I had read about this film.
The first thing that struck me about this interview with The Onion is the way Smith tries to position Clerks as the precursor to all the popular Judd Apatow movies such as 40-Year-Old Virgin and Superbad, calling them "movies I would have made," because they "mix raunch and sentimentality," apparently oblivious to the fact that the Apatow films also have depth, subtext, subplots, and realistic characters in situations that make sense—that Smith's film lacks. Then we have to think about how he thus far has tried to create movies within the "View Askewneverse," i.e. the self-contained world of his own movies, with the same actors [and often same characters] he often uses. This one switches Pittsburgh for Jersey, but is it really all that different? Then later in the interview he discusses how this story is really the story of the making of Clerks, down to using the security camera and the mic tapeds to the hockey stick. Which made me have to wonder about the scenes in here where the people in the film thank the director for making them "part of something" and bringing new meaning to their lives. It also needs to mentioned that someone needs to tell Smith that he is not a very good writer. And all of this makes me wonder if Smith is a little bit like that guy we all know, the one who continues to do the same thing over and over, discounting everyone who says it's not working, and thinking this time, maybe THIS TIME they'll "get it."
Anyway, it won't kill you to see, but you'd be better off renting an Apatow film. On the way out I told my friend that another friend of mine wanted to see it, and I was worried I might get roped into seeing it again. "Oh no," he said matter of factly, "You can't see that again." Then it turns out my other friend had heard it was "worse than just okay," so didn't want to see it anymore anyway.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
It won't kill you, but I wouldn't bother.
