When the dust settles, Zack and Miri Make a Porno may take the cake as the most graphic of the post-Apatow sex comedies.
The funniest? No. It's a less clever, more crass version of The Full Monty for the Internet porn generation.
Roommates Zack (Seth Rogan) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) find themselves struggling under rapidly accumulating debt. After a brief brainstorming session, they devise what they believe is the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme: direct and star in a pornographic film. Zack's coworker, played by Craig Robinson (Darryl from The Office), backs the production, and together, the three audition other "actors" for the film. Needless to say, it's not exactly smooth sailing, especially when principle photography begins.
Even when it falls into predictable skits about things like "pornography titles that spoof big budget movies," Zack and Miri manages to stay consistently entertaining. But the humor is sideswiped by sentimentality in the second half.
In fact, director Kevin Smith telegraphs the plot so blatantly that you probably know where things are going from here. (Hint: it turns out that unusually attractive girl or unusually funny guy you've been hanging around for years really is The One.) Unfortunately, while the "romantic" half of romantic-comedy gets its share of screen time, much of the humor deflates.
The explosion of Internet pornography over the last decade is probably as responsible as anything for forcing recent comedies to reach for new subject matter and assault the limits of taste (and the limits of the R rating). The sex in this film is indeed quite graphic and long stretches of simulated intercourse leave little to the imagination. But when the plot of a movie revolves around the production of a porno, simply showing someone naked no longer qualifies as a joke on its own. Often, it was difficult to tell whether the nudity in this film was supposed to be funny, titillating or desexualized because of oversaturation. And while the filmmakers certainly exploit pornography for shocks and laughs, they have surprisingly little to say about it.
This film may raise some hackles by showing pornography as relatively harmless or trivial. However, Zack and Miri comes from the American Pie school of gross-out comedy, where the offensive material conceals a surprisingly old-fashioned foundation. So while Zack and Miri is undeniably explicit and at times even hard-core, rest assured that middle class values arrive intact.
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