Zack and Miri

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Movie Details

• Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
• Release Date: 2008-10-31 Nationwide
• Running Time: 101 min.
• Director: Kevin Smith
• Cast: Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Traci Lords, Jason Mewes, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Tom Savini, Jeff Anderson, Katie Morgan, Craig Robinson, Gerry Bednob
• Producer: Scott Mosier
• Writer: Kevin Smith
• Distributor: The Weinstein Company
• Official Site: Zack and Miri Official Site

Ostensibly, this should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words, it’s quintessential Silent Bob, as hard-up meets hard-on in a movie that’s all heart once you get past the shit shot that’ll shock only those for whom Clerks II’s donkey show wasn’t oh-God-no enough. There’s a Star Wars dress-up sequence too, but the Lucasfilm homage is tossed after a few fleeting but promising moments; from there, it’s straight-up sex in a coffee shop after work hours, where Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) enlist some new fuck-buddies to shoot their amateur smut opus, Swallow My Cockuccino. But from its few scatological asides to its inevitable boob shots, nothing about Zack and Miri feels terribly fresh, much less transgressive. Amiable and engaging in person and a filmmaker for whom comic and movie nerds so desperately want to root, Smith makes two kinds of movies: romantic comedies and bromantic comedies, with Chasing Amy—his one legitimately great movie—the crossover hybrid hit. They’re all decidedly conventional affairs, save for the detours into gross-out juvenilia that, the older Smith gets, seem less sincere and feel more like pandering to the audience that goes to his movies solely to walk out with a couple of lines they can quote to each other on the ride home.