No Boner

Yep, I ‘m in the Kevin Smith fan club. Sure, I’m in the Seth Rogen fan club. Yeah, I wanna be in the Elizabeth Banks fan club. But I still didn’t cotton to Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a strange brew of high and low brow, of crudity and hilarity, of explicitness and mushiness. Much of Smith’s patented mix of aging adolescent bawdiness and slacker self-parody is on display here but the movie never gathers any true comedic steam, and the losers-make-a-porno plotline turns out be funnier as a concept than as a comedic tale. Smith, the self-promoting indie sage, cops out in the long run too, carving a conventional romantic story out of what’s supposed to be a raunchy dose of Gen X ribaldry. In the long run, many Smith followers are going to be disappointed as the movie veers towards the mainstream and essentially balks at delivering its outrageous promises. On the other hand, mainstream audiences are bound to find it sub-Apatow and slightly over-the-top (or under-the-counter) for their tastes, leaving Zack and Miri smack dab in the middle of the road.