Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008, The Weinstein Company)
purchase this DVD (Amazon)
As dumb as it is to feel bad for a world-famous director who has always been able to do pretty much whatever he wants, I can’t help it when it comes to Kevin Smith. Partly because he’s had to listen to cries of “not as good as Clerks!” every time he’s released a movie since, well, Clerks — and partly because even though I hate agreeing with the majority, I’ve walked away from most of Smith’s movies thinking “goddammit, that wasn’t as good as Clerks.”
And yet I keep watching them. With the exception of Clerks II, which I shut off partway through a plane ride because the DVD started to skip and I was so bored with the movie I decided to take it as a sign, I’ve seen all of Kevin Smith’s movies — and even though I always come away feeling like I was expecting filet mignon and was served a cold Whopper, I can’t help going back for more when the next one comes out. Why? Because even though he can’t seem to execute them properly, Smith almost always has great ideas for his films. (Ironically, the two Smith movies with the dullest setups, Clerks and Chasing Amy, are his best.) He’s like a guy who knows a million great jokes, but can’t remember any of the punchlines. Ever the optimist, I keep waiting for him to make me bust a gut.
He never quite did it with Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which reaches DVD and Blu-ray this week, but all things considered, it’s one of his stronger pictures, and certainly his best since Dogma (oh my God, did that really come out 10 years ago?), but it still never really comes anywhere near living up to the awesomeness of its setup. Part of this is simple logic — how do you follow up “Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play a pair of friends who try to dig out from under their debt by making a porno flick” with something other than 90 minutes of unfulfilled expectations? — but the movie has other problems, chief among them Kevin Smith’s inability to successfully balance sweetness and profanity the way he did when he thought no one was watching.
Like I said, I feel bad for Smith — Clerks was an awfully tough act to follow. But really, it’s his own damn fault that he hasn’t learned that movie’s biggest lesson, which is that you can push the limits of good taste without having to overcompensate for it by stapling your heart to your sleeve. After walking that middle ground so adroitly his first time out, he’s often seesawed between raunch and treacle — no matter how nasty his movies have gotten, they always feel cuddly and eager to be liked, often to their detriment.
Case in point: Zack and Miri, which represents something of a new frontier for Smith as a screenwriter, at least insofar as it doesn’t really sound like a “Kevin Smith movie” — there aren’t any of his trademark rambling monologues — and it’s built almost exclusively from stock Hollywood ingredients. At bottom, it’s really just your standard romantic comedy, with some T&A and someone getting shit on thrown in, and as a result, it’s often rather…well, dull, really, which isn’t something you’d expect from anything with the word Porno in the title.
But it isn’t bad, necessarily, particularly during the scenes when Craig Robinson is around; he’s effortlessly funny, and his character’s beefed-up role in the final act helps add a pleasantly acidic twist to what becomes, around the 45-minute mark, a pretty sentimental (and totally obvious) love story, full of groaningly obvious foreshadowing and plenty of the wooden acting we’ve come to expect from Smith’s favorite actors, including Jeff “Randal” Anderson and Jason “Holy shit, what happened to that guy?” Mewes. (Elizabeth Banks, of course, is marvelous; Seth Rogen, of course, plays Seth Rogen.) I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the brief, show-stealing appearances of Brandon Routh and Justin Long as…well, I’m not going to spoil it here, but Long has some of the funniest lines in the movie.
Ultimately, Zack and Miri is an affable enough little movie, but not one you’re likely to want to watch twice, which is why it’s a good thing that Smith and TWC have packed the DVD release with a heaping pantload of bonus content, including a collection of deleted scenes that’s almost as long as the movie itself, as well as a very in-depth making-of featurette, some webisodes, footage from last year’s Comic-Con panel, and more. It would be nice to have this kind of stuff attached to a better movie, but hey, there’s always next time…and as of this writing, it looks like Smith’s next project will be a Fred Phelps-inspired horror film titled Red State, which sounds awfully fucking cool.
See what I mean about not being able to help going back for more?
Comments