Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Thanks to the aptly named title, brilliantly appointed by Kevin Smith (writer, director, and creator of the View Askew Universe), you go into the film with a certain mindset, a dirty one to be exact. This follows the explicit what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of every pornographic film title, a fact that offers hilarious moments as Zack and Miri are eventually faced with the difficult task of creating a movie title that says it all.

Yes, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is exactly that, Zack and Miri making a porno. And believe you me, there is plenty of potty mouth to go around. But as dirty as the movie is, you will be surprised and delighted to find that this is a movie with a lot of heart, and as with all Kevin Smith pieces, a great deal of brain (no pun intended).

Zack and Miri have been BFF's since the first grade, which has rendered their relationship strictly platonic. They have never really amounted to much since graduating high school ten years ago, but know that deep down inside they are really much better than the others, or at least tell themselves that.

At the high school reunion, Zack and Miri have to endure the inevitable: the mindless chitchat and feigned nostalgia. The only reason Zack goes is to laugh at people, while Miri goes to show her high school crush what a hottie she's become. To Zack the night is a success, thanks to a hilarious cameo by Justin Long, while Miri's night doesn't quite go as planned. What they come away with is the realization that they really need to do something with their lives, if only to save them from their economic crisis, a story that is not uncommon in America these days. You guessed it. They make a porno.

As silly as it sounds, there is something truly heartfelt, albeit raunchy, about watching Zack and Miri and the rest of their crew make their porn movie. It's kind of like watching Mark Borchardt make his low budget horror flick in the hilarious documentary American Movie, only the porn Zack and Miri and company make is quite possibly the worst porn ever made (okay, okay that may be an exaggeration but you get my point).

All around is a job well done by the cast and cameos. Seth Rogan plays the everyman to a "T" and Elizabeth Banks shines as the high school outcast turned hottie. Their chemistry as platonic friends is golden, and sparks truly fly when their true feelings finally come to light. You'll see familiar faces from both the View Askewniverse and the Apatow family, creating pure hilarity as both of these comic forces collide.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is less about making a porno than it is about everyday people finding their niche in life. Their niche in life just so happens to be making pornos. Zack and Miri Make a Porno can be synonymous to Joe Six-Pack Becomes a Professional Wrestler, or Joe the Plumber Makes Over $250,000 a Year. Venues who opted not to show this film, I feel are overreacting a bit. Although Kevin Smith's latest certainly lives up to the name, what we ultimately get is a feel-good movie. And a feel-good movie has never felt so good. In the end, Zack and Miri made a porno, and Kevin Smith made an awesome movie.

Lifelong friends and roommates Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are facing hard times and a mountain of debt. When the electricity and plumbing get cut off, they seize upon the idea of making a homegrown porno movie for some quick cash, enlisting the help of their friends. The two vow that having sex will not ruin their friendship. But as filming begins, what started out as a business proposition between friends turns into something much more.

Finally! Kevin Smith and Seth Rogen have teamed up for the baddest, wildest and weirdly sweetest movie about pictures for pleasure you could ever imagine. Both guys are wizards at hilarious gutter talk; match them up with Elizabeth Banks – who can more than hold her own – and you've got a redefinition of the romantic comedy, rated R.

Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Banks) have been friends since youth. They live like cozy siblings in a rundown shared house. Zack's job serving coffee at the local latte palace doesn't exactly make him rich, so when both he and Miri hit their debt ceiling, they're forced to come up with a plan. Inspired first by Miri's accidental YouTube debut in her “granny panties,” then by a random conversation at a high-school reunion, Zack and Miri decide that the best way to score quick money is to make an adult film they can sell on the Internet. Together. For real.

This is edgy territory for a mainstream movie, and Smith barges in with everything swinging. The dialogue between Zack and Miri as they work through the specifics of producing porn is hilarious; these are people who say exactly what they're thinking. Their first shot at a scenario – a Star Wars takeoff with porn star names for all the characters – turns into a genius set piece. But as these two life-long best friends prepare to take it all off for the cameras, the business of sex suddenly gets serious. For the first time, they're exposed, and all their hardcore joking is stripped away to reveal real emotion.

So yes, Kevin Smith gets to do it both ways. Zack and Miri is raunchy, outrageous and verbally explicit. The supporting performance by legendary porn star Traci Lords is a work of pop art unto itself. And yet there is a surprisingly touching love story woven into the raunch. This is where Banks and Rogen prove their ability to balance sweet and salty, and Smith gets to have his cheesecake and eat it too.

"Zack and Miri Make a Porno" goes roughly the direction you'd expect it to go. Zack and Miri make a porno, for example. Then the two late-20s roommates, played by the supernaturally easygoing Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, discover that having sex on camera in order to pay the rent will change the temperature of whatever room they're in together. Permanently.

The film, the latest from writer-director Kevin Smith, pushes its R rating pretty hard, though as with most Smith characters this side of Silent Bob, there's a lot more raunch in the talk -- the sheer, voluminous, often hilarious verbosity -- than in the action.

Smith will, unfortunately, be going to hell for the inclusion of one outlandishly grotesque sight gag, one the movie (any movie) would've been better off without.

Then again, the filmmaker's entire career has mined the fun, the possibilities and the risks of going too far.

His is an arrested-adolescent sensibility, like that of many who have come along in his wake, notably Judd Apatow and his various guy-centric associates. But Smith can write and, despite his subject and the free-floating, genial skeeziness, "Zack and Miri" has a bright, chipper look to it, thanks to cinematographer Dave Klein, a frequent Smith colleague. Wintertime in Pittsburgh never looked so good.

When Smith wrote the script with Rogen in mind, Rogen wasn't yet a movie star. Now, coming off "Knocked Up," "Superbad" and " Pineapple Express," the actor is courting overexposure.

Kevin Smith begins with the advantage of being raised with deeply embedded senses of sin and guilt. He's 38, and he still believes sex is dirty, and that it's funny to shock people with four-letter words and enough additonal vulgarisms to fill out a crossword puzzle.

This is sort of endearing. It gives his potty-mouth routines a certain freshness; we've heard these words over and over again, but never so many of them so closely jammed together. If you bleeped this movie for broadcast TV, it would sound like a conga line of Iron Men going through a metal detector.

"Zack and Miri Make a Porno," as the title hints, is about Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) making a porno. "I don't know bleep about directing," Smith once confided to me. "But I'm a bleeping good writer." Zack and Miri are poverty-row roommates, who have lived together for years, I guess, but never have sex because you might feel funny around a good friend if you bleeped them, and a good friend is so much harder to come by than a bleep. Now they face eviction and ruin, and might have to become bleeping sidewalk mates. After some little jerk videotapes them (not bleeping but looking like (B)ILFs), they become superstars of the netherlands of YouTube and have a brilliant idea: They'll cash in on their fame by making a porn film.

Of course this will require them to bleep on camera, a sacrifice they are willing to make, as long as what happens in the porno, stays in the porno. They enlist aid from a kid (Jeff Anderson) who videos football games; the abundantly tumescent Jason Mewes (Silent Bob's friend Jay), and the well-known Traci Lords, who at last is the only grown-up in a movie.