The title says it all

Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Review by Nathan Weinbender

The Weinsteins supposedly green-lit Kevin Smith’s new film based solely on its title. No script, no cast, just the title. Well, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” does have a certain ring to it.

Zack is played by Seth Rogen, Miri by Elizabeth Banks. They’ve been best friends since grade school, and they live together in a rundown Pennsylvania apartment. When they’re strapped for cash and the power is shut off, they quickly jump to the only logical conclusion: They’ll make an adult movie. Of course.

They recruit the town’s weirdos and derelicts to assist them—Zack’s friend Delaney (Craig Robinson) is the financier, the guy who videotapes the local high school sports games (Jeff Anderson) is the director of photography, and the stars are a stripper (Katie Morgan), a prostitute (Traci Lords) and Jason Mewes.

There’s much drama concerning their locations—the warehouse they buy for filming is demolished and they’re stuck shooting n the coffee place where Zack works—and whether or not our hero and heroine, who have always had a platonic relationship, will do it on camera.

It’s all fairly predictable—that Zack and Miri will eventually realize they’re perfect for one another seems inevitable—but the charm of the film comes not from what Smith says but how he says it.

He’s a terrific writer, and his dialogue hasn’t crackled like this since “Chasing Amy.” His characters have collegiate vocabularies (especially when it comes to the names of bizarre sexual acts), they spout off pop culture references and geekisms, and they deliver crisp one-liners with hardly a stammer.

I’m sure no one in the real world speaks like this—no one, I suppose, except Kevin Smith.

But there’s color to his words, and he knows how to approach crudity from an intelligent angle. He’s helped greatly by Rogen and Banks, who deliver their lines with rat-a-tat immediacy—it’s like foul-mouthed Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks with dick jokes.

I especially love how Rogen reacts when he meets a porn star who only appears in movies with all-male casts: “Like ‘Glengarry Glen Ross?’” A funny line, yes, but it’s made funnier because it’s a genuine question.

The movie, which plays like a hybrid of Judd Apatow and John Waters, was initially slapped with the NC-17, which isn’t a surprise, considering it features some of the frankest sexual dialogue I’ve heard in a mainstream film. But “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” has a sweet temperament, and its attitude towards sex is hardly exploitative.

In fact, the whole message of the film seems to be that sex without love is hardly sex at all. And when it comes time to shoot Zack and Miri’s big scene, it is so surprisingly touching that it might catch you off guard.

Grade: B

Directed and written by Kevin Smith. Starring Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Jason Mewes, Jeff Anderson, Traci Lords, Katie Morgan and Justin Long. R; 101m.