Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Given the title you'd expect a few laughs, probably at the expense of good taste and conventional sexual mores. The movie delivers on that, but it also gives you much more: a tender, almost romantic love story. Consider me impressed.

Zack and Miri are long time friends who were on the bottom rung of the high school social ladder and have stayed there ever since. Now roommates in their late twenties, they are broke. Utilities turned off/rent late broke. There seems to be no way out with the crappy jobs they hold down, and the future (and present) looks bleak.

So they decide - and give Kevin Smith credit here as a writer - to make a porno to get out of debt, and damned if you don't see it as a genuine decision and not a Hollywood plot point.

They enlist a cast of misfits to act in the film with them, finance it with a co-workers savings, and roll film. But the emotions that have built up between Zack and Miri over the years come bubbling up to the surface, and the future of the film is in doubt.

This is a very good movie, and I marvel at how Smith managed to pull off a credible and moving love story in the midst of what could have been a crass Porky's ripoff. I I tip my hat to Kevin Smith. Well done sir, well done.

3.4 out of 4