Watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno (finally) last night. Man, that's a funny movie. Don't remember laughing so hard at a movie since Importance of Being Earnest.
Zack and Miri are late-twenties goof-offs who've hardly moved on since high school. In fact, we find in the deleted scenes that they're living only a block or so from their high school. They've known each other since the first grade, and are living together, but have never dated.
Well, to step back a minute, perhaps I'm a bit harsh to say goof-offs. They do work; he's a barista and she knits at a stand in the local mall. But they aren't exactly what you'd call ambitious, and they're very bad about paying their bills.
In any event, they get just a bit too far behind on their bills, and get really desperate when the electricity and water get turned off. So they decide that the only way to get enough money quickly is to make a porn flick. And that's when the movie really gets going from slightly funny (and occasionally painful) to outright hilarious.
The casting scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, particularly when they show their "special talents".
The main complication is with Zack and Miri themselves. Can they have sex for the movie, and still talk in the morning?
As I said, absolutely hilarious, although I suppose very prudish people would be incredibly offended. The sex jokes sometimes go way, way over the top, and while I found that hysterical, I've certainly met people who would be deeply, deeply offended by it.
The other thing that was really cool about this was that, in a 101 minute movie, there was an additional 95 minutes of deleted scenes. The first hour or so of that fills in a lot of gaps in the movie (why was there coffee on the window of the car in the beginning, why did they bring a trophy home from the reunion, what does Miri do for work, etc), and even shows some jokes that didn't make it into the final cut. The last twenty or twenty-five minutes, though, really gives you a feel for the director's job, as they went over many variations of one scene (none of which made it into the final movie, more's the pity). It's hard to watch all of it, though, because there is a significant amount of repetition, but it's still neat to see.
As I said, it really gives you a feel for what goes into making a movie. Kudos to Kevin Smith, for sharing that with us.
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