Porn identity

Had the props department at MGM in the early '40s come stocked with dildos and human harnesses, and had Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney failed to graduate past the anal-sadistic phase in childhood development, it's conceivable that something like Zack and Miri Make a Porno could have been possible - though, obviously, only as contraband loops for special-interest subscribers.

Yet what new winking meanings might have been pumped from Babes on Broadway and Girl Crazy? And imagine the sniggering fun one could have with the names "Andy Hardy" and "Betsy Booth." Hey, kids, let's put on a blowjob! Gittit? What laughs!

Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno really is Babes in Arms armed with lube tubes. It's a hackneyed, shmaltzy programmer that begs to be taken as something daring and transgressive. Yet it's as dull and mechanical as most porn, the vast majority of which is merely carnal wallpaper for ill-lit rooms and lurid digs.

Zack (über slob Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been best friends since grade school. Now, 10 years after graduating from high school (and here's an advert in support of conservative school voucher programs), they live together in something like platonic bliss.

Befitting their class (or phylum, perhaps), they both have dead-end mall jobs. Zack, by some oversight of the health department, is a barista at a Bean-n-Gone franchise (only the first of many groaning puns to come). In other words, he's assumed a typical Kevin "Clerks" Smith career trajectory.

Two events, however, will shake these best friends from their decade-long torpor: their high-school reunion (that stereotypically American rite of reflection), and the fact that they were too busy buying Plasticine sex toys online to bother paying the water and electricity bills, which ultimately throws them into a rather dry darkness.

Desperate for cash, they hatch a scheme to make a porn film, which, presumably, will make them their first fortune. After a casting call to Monroeville and Pennsylvania's meth addicts and pole dancers, they cobble together a cast (including such spent bulbs from the porn firmament as Traci Lords and Katie Morgan), and begin the task of creating a scenario.

The desired format is of the My Bare Lady variety, a classic X-rated riff on an established Hollywood film (Position: Impossible, Schindler's Fist, Shaving Ryan's Privates, et al.). Thus Star Whores becomes their DIY porn project, with the gang assuming the roles of Hung Solo, Princess Lay-her, Darth Vibrator ? you get what passes as an idea.

The result is something akin to the earnest botches in Michel Gondry's flawed but intriguing Be Kind Rewind: honestly inept stabs at making cinema. Soon, however, an accident prevents Star Whores from being realized, and so it's gosh-we-can-find-a-barn-and-put-on-a-real-show-there time for Zack and Miri. They take over the Bean-n-Gone after hours to shoot a new story that, surprisingly, leaves Starbuck's name unmolested (even Smith has limits, apparently).

The central conflict in this tripe is, yes, what will happen to Zack and Miri's relationship when they have sex together on film. That we know how this story will end 15 minutes into the film doesn't deter Smith from slowly dragging us along for another hour and a quarter like a game leg - that is, love is greater than sex, especially porn sex. It's the same sop sold in the John and Judy section of the dire Love, Actually.

The humor is numbingly puerile, sure to appeal to the type of overweight 14-year-old male that stashes socks under his pillow. Golly, I mean there's penises and some scat, and tits and rumors of tits! But it's finally all about caring and love, you see, regardless of the first 80 minutes, which is filled with dialogue of a type usually found scrawled on the walls of middle-school bogs. It's exhausting idiocy made worse by its crass sentimentality, which is a kind of porn of finer emotions.

The performances? Who knows and who cares? Rogen has his fans, and I'm sure they'll be sated. Banks has talent, and is worth giving another chance to, I suppose. There's some actual humor to be had early on with cameos by Brandon Routh and Justin Long, playing a gay porn star named Brandon St. Randy (a knowingly clever nom de porn). The rest is just loudly moronic.

It's the perfect topper to a career, however. Mine, that is. For better or worse (I'll let you be the judge), this is my last film review for The Prague Post. I used to love cinema. But the last wretched year of Hollywood's output has curbed my enthusiasm considerably. So, it's time to move on.

When Louis Kronenberger retired from reviewing theater for Time magazine after 23 years, he wrote in his farewell: "How could one not feel relieved when so much of one's job was not merely dull but degrading." Amen.

Good night, and good luck.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com