nixsight

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that we found ourselves shocked by the depth of our enjoyment of “Knocked Up”, and that we were won over by Seth Rogen’s lovable doofus-ness and natural delivery.

It was even less time ago that “Clerks 2″ surprised us, by actually being pretty funny and engaging – something that Kevin Smith has failed to achieve often enough that it’s still a pleasant surprise when he pulls it off.

So it’s understandable that we were primed to really enjoy “Zack And Miri Make A Porno”, despite the slightly bland trailers.

You couldn’t really blame them for the lacklustre trailers – after all, even if the old theory that most movies splurge all the best bits in their trailers is taken into account, a film about two supposedly platonic friends who, you know, are making a porno, should always end up struggling to find good bits for one, because in theory most of the humour is going to be too adult for a promo aimed at the general public.

(That was how I explained the lack of real solid laughs in the ads to myself, anyway.)

Basically, Girl One and I need to work on our management of expectations. Because if we hadn’t expected much out of this movie, it might have held a few fun surprises for us.

The cast is loveable enough, though Seth Rogen noticeably less than his fellows – which is a significant problem for an actor whose career would seem to rest at this point on him being adorably, rather than unsalvageably, ramshackle. I’m still pretty sure that there’s a decent actor somewhere there, but there’s a downward arc in effort that began in “Pineapple Express” and is further described here, to the extent that midway through this movie, Girl One said that she felt like he was getting a little too smug as an actor. In “Knocked Up”, and even “Superbad”, he did a lot with superficially simple roles, but here it’s as if he’s realised that he can just turn up and be Seth Rogen, and still get paid.

It isn’t the acting that makes this movie less than stellar, though. In fact, despite taking a few scenes to nail it, Elizabeth Banks is convincing, Jason Mewes is a trooper and manages to make you believe that he’s someone other than Jay and it’s nice to see Jeff Anderson play it down a little. But man, did Traci Lords get old when I wasn’t looking.

Craig Robinson – one of our “The Office” favourites – takes man-of-the-match for his role as henpecked and bitter Delaney, and either his delivery or some anomaly of the writing process means that his performance is the only place where Smith’s script really crackles.

That’s the problem, really. This isn’t a bad film, it just doesn’t really do very much. It seems to have been built around a simple and quite sharp conceit – a film with a controversial and apparently transparent title that turns out to be a fluffy romantic comedy – albeit one with a few flashes of profanity.

But the romantic comedy aspect of the movie is too slim, with no layering to it whatsoever – you literally know how it’s going to pan out by the end of the first scene, and the movie doesn’t take any detours or unexpected routes getting you there. I’m not big on complaining about predictability in movies, because it’s almost impossible to tell a story that has an outcome that nobody could have seen coming, but I expect a director to at least try to yank my chain a little.

This is the basic structure of the romcom at the core of “Zack And Miri Make A Porno”. It contains some spoilers, and though it doesn’t give away the shocking conclusion to the movie, you should skip past if you want to retain some sense of intrigue while watching:

Zack and Miri are best friends, and losers. Everyone who knows them says that they are meant to be a couple, over and over, but they personally don’t see it.

To make their rent, they decide to make a porno movie together.

They insist that having sex with each other for the film won’t make things weird between them.
(They insist this more than once.)

Having sex with each other for the film makes things weird between them.

They insist – I dunno, a couple of times – that they won’t let this weirdness ruin their platonic friendship.

The weirdness ruins their platonic friendship.

You’ll see a trend emerging there, which despite my care to mask the movie’s conclusion, may give it away a little.

In fact, the love story at the core of this film seems to be a return to the emotional landscape of Smith’s own “Chasing Amy”, in as much as both feature a couple who resolve to be platonic friends, have sexuality as a persistent and influencing factor, and then are broken apart in a moment of masculine impulsiveness. The similarities between the films extend as far as the odd, disjointed passage of time between the “explosive” end of the penultimate act and the final act that doubles as resolution and epilogue in each film.

However, Smith knew what he wanted to say in that movie, and in this one he seems to be a little confused about it. It doesn’t help that he seems to be torn between making a Smith movie, and trying to pull off an Apatow one. Instead of going with the flawed but sincere core that he normally can’t help but put in his films, where he finds his audience by reaching out from his own personal askew view, he goes for the much more commercial Apatow style, which is more like letting the writers and cast of “Friends” and “Seinfeld” loose and freeballing in the same room with whoever did “American Pie”, and editing carefully for “awesome”.

Smith has never been a great editor, or that good at quality control – in them, moments of absolute genius often jostle for space with odd lapses in acting that aren’t caught before release. And though his movies are often thoughtful at a conception level, he’s much better at delivering fringe ideas about how people relate to each other and the world around them in a loose and non-definitive way.

He’s at sea here, so though deep down we know that he probably meant to establish ideas of loyalty and finding direction through someone having faith in your ability, or a depth of emotion to his protagonists’ ongoing platonic relationship that makes the idea of them as sexual partners, a romantic couple, or seperated altogether carry some weight, it never actually happens in the text of the film. Characters have to tell us these things out loud, in barely concealed exposition about things that were supposed to be obvious to us anyway, instead.

There’s a few bits of nudity, and a couple of gross-out moments, but when they happen, they are so adrift among the other scenes in the movie that they don’t have any real impact – none of the slow-build and unfolding agony of the “Clerks 2″ donkey-show, for example. Though when Smith rolls out the “lady does something unusual with her off-camera vagina” gag early on, I should have been concerned – it feels like that joke finally got put to rest by Winona Ryder’s performance of the ping-pong trick in the “South Park” movie.

Still and all, the film is probably worth watching for the moments of freestyle cute’n'funny from Mewes, Banks, Robinson et al, and the film didn’t completely wreck Rogen for us – just made us hope for better scripts and more forceful directors for him in the future. And Smith built up a lot of kudos with us in “Clerks 2″ which isn’t quite gone yet. Hopefully next time he’ll go back to doing his own thing again.