Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Chasing Amy  (1997)

Zack & Miri Make a Porno  (2008)

This review originally appeared during Fantastic Fest. Zack and Miri opens wide (no pun intended) tomorrow.

Believe the hype––at least, to a certain extent. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith’s all-around high score for the current decade, and as a date movie for the demographic looking for a formula of 5% genuine romance underneath 95% poop and dick jokes, it’s way more fun than the film that made Seth Rogen a plausible leading man, Knocked Up. But what’s really exciting about is its seemingly autobiographical subtext referencing Smith’s own career –– which, unfortunately, is thrown in the flaming trash can of traditional romantic comedy in the film’s final twenty minutes, but which nonetheless makes Zack and Miri seem more heartfelt than any View Askew production since Chasing Amy.

It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the town, everyone’s bitter and desperate to get laid. In a working class suburb of Pittsburgh, in the midst of a realistically icy, muddy, shitty winter, lifelong best friends and roommates Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, finally proving to me that she’s a different person than Rachel McAdams) work menial jobs and are nowhere near able to pay their bills. (Side note: it’s interesting that Smith, currently at his most bloated in memory––he’s been thrilling crowds for months with a story of being so fat that he broke a toilet––has made his most convincing film yet about the frustrations of being skint.) At their exceptionally depressing high school reunion set to the pop hits of 1998 (Marcy Playground and MASE, finally playlist bedmates once again), Zack and Miri discover from a former classmate’s porn star significant other that they (and Miri’s pair of oversized granny panties) have become accidental YouTube stars. Zack has an epiphany: if people are already looking at their asses on the internet for free, why not get paid for it?

By this point, Zack and Miri have had their heat, water and power shut off, so they discuss the moral finer points whilst huddled around a trashcan hobo fire in their living room. If being a DIY porn star is such a simple route to quick cash, Miri wonders, “Why doesn’t everyone do it?” In fact, Zack and Miri would appear to be uniquely qualified for the job: they’re poor, but unlike most poor people, they’re media savvy, free of the moral constraints of any particular religious or ideological affiliation, and, essentially, alone in the universe, with no family or significant other to impress or disappoint aside from each other. These are, of course, some of the same factors that will lead Zack and Miri to inevitably fall in love.

For a film in which the two leads discover their mutual true love via sex work, the convolutions of Zack and Miri’s romantic narrative are sadly old hat. What’s really exciting about the film is the glimpses it offers into the mind and soul of a garden variety suburban loser who finds his true talent behind the camera. In some ways a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland “let’s put on a show!” movie with lightsaber dildos instead of a barn, Zack and Miri feels like a personal portrait of a nerd who figures out how to be somebody by turning on other nerds for a living. There are even patches of dialogue that seem like they could have been lifted from Smith’s days preparing Clerks. “You want to shoot a dirty movie here? Where we work?” asks Zack’s incredulous fellow barista. “You don’t know how many stories I have just from working here,” Zack responds with a weary shake of the head. Later, when Zack’s own spirit needs lifting, the same co-worker reminds him that their pornographic exploits have opened them up to “a world of possibilities, where plain old people like us could do something special.” Could there be a plainer reference to Smith’s own charmed career path from suburban comic nerd to God of Suburban Comic Nerds?

But though Rogen and Banks have surprisingly convincing sexual tension and their relationship itself is one of the film’s selling points, it’s Smith’s handling of the romance in relation to the porno that ultimately steers the film into disappointing territory. In unnecessarily tearing the couple apart at the exact moment when they should be deciding to be together, Smith accomplishes two things: he makes his film twenty minutes longer than it needs to be, and he completely abandons the idea that making porn movies (or, metaphorically speaking, any kind of movie) is not only a valid occupation, but the outlet through which Zack finds himself as a creative person and as a man. In the end, Zack and Miri’s romance reaches its predictable (and satisfying) resolution, but their porno remains in limbo, and with it languishes the idea that art––however depraved––can save a loser’s life.

Behold, Roger’s Little Rule Book, Ebert’s lengthy, biting, and hilarious list of dos and don’ts for professional film critics.

All of Ebert’s suggestions are good, although I especially like the one about “No posing for photos” with famous people (”No movie star ever wants to do this. They may smile, but they’re gritting their teeth”), with the exception made for “real photos of you really with a movie star…taken at a real event by a real other person unknown to you who didn’t ask anyone if he could take it.”  But also, as Gary Susman notes at PopWatch, most of the Rules seem to directly reference Ebert’s At the Movies replacement, Ben Lyons.

It goes beyond the fact that Lyons is the undisputed king of posing for photos with stars. Ebert suggests that it’s probably neither a good idea to engage in “verbal parallelism” along the lines of “I like women in real life, but I didn’t like The Women,” nor to make unsupportable predictions like “I challenge anyone who goes to see [Hamlet 2] not to sing the words to ‘Rock Me, Sexy Jesus’ for years to come.” Both of those examples are things that Lyons actually said on the revamped version of Ebert’s old show. Etc.

Such jabs at his successor must come from a place of bitterness, but it’s to Ebert’s credit that he doesn’t make it a personal attack (well, beyond quoting Lyons inane statements virtually word-for-word — but at least he doesn’t name names, right?) The Rule Book started as damage control over that whole Tru Loved debacle (in which Ebert gave the film a negative review, only admitting at the end of the write-up that he turned the screener off after 8 minutes) . It’s sort of ingenious that Ebert managed to turn a perceived lapse in his own critical integrity into an opportunity to devise a manifesto in support of maintaining the standards of his profession in a time of crisis. What’s devastating about it, is that no matter how right on the Rules seem to the five of us who care about these things, reiterating The Way Things Should Be won’t be enough to change the way things are — there seems to be no stopping the rise of blurb-whoring advertorial and the slide of real criticism into obscurity.