Bare bore

Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make
a Porno is a standard frothy romcom

LEWD BUT LAME: Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks

by MATTHEW HAYS

There was a brief, fleeting moment when the Hollywood mainstream appeared to be seriously flirting with embracing pornography. Actors seemed to be eager to bare all in “real” sex scenes, and Paul Thomas Anderson explored the porn industry in his wondrous 1997 epic Boogie Nights.

But the mainstream has proven more fickle than many of us had anticipated. Witness the brouhaha over Kevin Smith’s new film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a frothy romantic comedy about two hapless roommates who aspire to become pornographers. Apparently, some mainstream news organizations were so put off by the p-word in the title, they declined to accept advertising for the movie. Which would explain more about why the mainstream media is in a catastrophic downward spiral than it does about porn. Repression, it appears, is alive and well.

Sadly, that controversy is probably the most titillating thing about this movie. Smith’s screenplay is rife with his trademark pop-culture-infused dialogue, the kind many took so warmly to in his debut feature Clerks. Seth Rogen is Zack, a dude who works at the coffee shop in a dead-end job. Elizabeth Banks is Miri, his equally hard-up roommate. When they attend their 10th anniversary high school reunion, she makes an awkward pass at an old crush, who reveals he’s in fact gay, and makes porn with his studly boyfriend.

As the title then suggests, Zack and Miri choose to make a low-budget porn movie of their own, hoping to make some fast cash. Which sounds like a funny concept in brief synopsis, but which does not live up to that promise at feature length. Zack and Miri goes for every bad cliché about porn imaginable, stumbling from gags about porn titles (at one point their sci-fi riff will be called Starwhores) to references about just how badly porn actors deliver their lines of dialogue.

It’s not particularly funny, unless you’re as repressed as those people who might think that “porno” is such a naughty word that it should be censored. There’s some skin here, yes, even some full-frontal male nudity. But in the end, this is just another standard romantic comedy—nothing to get hot and bothered about.

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 31