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Director: Kevin Smith
Year: 2008
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Longtime friends and roommates Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are having trouble paying their bills. While attending their high school reunion, they get a great idea to help them earn some money. They decide to make a porno that they can market to their fellow graduates in the hopes of making enough to pay off their debts and mounting bills.
"Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is a film written and directed by Kevin Smith, who is best known for his films "Clerks" and "Dogma," among many others. It stars Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the titular Zack and Miri. These two lifelong just friends and roommates are struggling to make ends meet. Their debts are piling up, and they have so may unpaid bills that their water and power have recently been shut off. They decide the best way to make a quick buck is for them to make a porno film and market it to their former high school classmates. After holding auditions for this porno, helping them make their adult film are Deacon and Lester, played by a pair of Kevin Smith regulars and cohorts Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes, Stacey and Bubbles, played by current and former adult film stars Katie Morgan and Traci Lords, as well as Delaney, played by regular Seth Rogen co-star Craig Robinson. At first, their intention is to base their triple-X rated film on the ever popular "Star Wars" franchise because who doesn't like "Star Wars" and porn together, right? It quickly evolves into a coffeehouse-related flick when their set and everything in it gets demolished.
Think of "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" as your standard romantic comedy, just with an outrageous pornographic twist. The fact that it's all about making an adult movie makes the content and dialogue extremely sexually explicit in nature, but this never really bother us because we're heathens. Be prepared for lots of talk about things you might not normally think about in your day to day life, and know this film is not for the faint of heart (or ears that are prone to burning). There are copious amounts of nudity, there is a lot of sex, there is a lot of foul language, so if you are offended by such things, this is definitely not the movie for you. There are quite a few good, solid laughs throughout this film, but there are also a ton of jokes that fall completely flat or are so entirely disgusting or lazy that they negate the good ones altogether. Seth Rogen plays to type once again and is always fairly decent in doing so. Elizabeth Banks does well with what she has to work with, and we really like the interactions between the always platonic Zack and Miri as they begin to think they might actually want to be more than friends.
We think the downfall with this comedy comes mostly from its script. We are huge fans of Kevin Smith and have liked most of his movies in the past, and though this effort is okay, it's not quite up to some of his tremendous, often brilliant past efforts. In fact, other than the appearance of Mewes and Anderson and the occasionally over-the-top, very obvious Smith-esque writing, we'd be hard pressed to pinpoint Smith as the mastermind behind this project without being explicitly told he was involved. That being said, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" is a fine choice for a comedy, provided you're not easily offended and like Seth Rogen.
My Rating: 6/10
BigJ's Rating: 6/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 65%
Do we recommend this movie: Sure, why not?
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