"Zack and Miri Make a Porno"

An old-fashioned romantic comedy with a double-shot of raunch, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” is not exactly a leap forward for writer-director Kevin Smith – I think we’ve seen the extent of his versatility – but it’s sweet, sincere, and frequently very, very funny. Skillfully employing raunchy exchanges that seem natural and not just out to shock, the flick focuses on friends/roommates Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) who, desperate to pay their rent, decide to try to make some easy cash by making an amateur porn movie to hopefully sell to those they graduated high school with (Zack’s rationale: “Everybody wants to see anybody fuck”). But as the days grow closer to the titular pair making the beast with two backs on camera, the more apparent it is they seem to have feelings towards each other that are more than friends. Smith may wade into pre-teen waters a bit too often here like usual, but the dude just knows how to write dialogue, and makes the mushiness at the center of all the debauchery feel earned; I just plain like the kind of movies he puts out there.

Every line in a back-and-forth between Zack and Justin Long as a gay porn star is a quotable killer (“What was the name of that film you were in again?” “You Better Shut Your Mouth or I’m Gonna Fuck It”), and for every scene that barely elicits a chuckle, there are two that will have you in fits . At first, I worried this was too much of an Apatow production to the point where it felt like Smith’s voice was lost (Gerry Bednob delivers a rant seemingly taken verbatim from one he delivered in “40-Year-Old Virgin”), but soon enough the Apatow cast members and adlibs merge nicely with Smith’s trademark dialogue and it seems very natural. I’m a little disappointed “Zack and Miri” has already bombed, since I was really hoping this would be the flick to make Banks a full-on star. Rogen and Craig Robinson (the doorman from “Knocked Up”) get the lion’s share of the laughs, but Banks is hardly the straight gal a la Katherine Heigl. Not only is she gorgeous and charming, she’s funny as shit and (as many of us knew from “Slither” and “Virgin”) she knows how to deliver a one-liner. Even if I don’t love shit jokes (the scat money shot we get didn’t gross me out, I just didn’t find it very funny), I think Smith has finally grown comfortable with his limitations, and so have I. His low-rent charm, natural, conversational filthy dialogue and group-of-friends cast assemblage paved the way for the Age of Apatow, and it hasn’t lost any of its appeal.