Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie review (2008)

"Zack and Miri Make a Porno," as the title hints, is about Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) making a porno. "I don't know bleep about directing," Smith once confided to me. "But I'm a bleeping good writer."

He is. Since he likes to eat, I will describe him in food terms. He isn't a gourmet chef, supplying little nuggets of armadillo surrounded by microscopic carrots and curlicues of raspberry-avocado-mint juice. He's the kind of chef I've valued for a lifetime, the kind you see behind the ledge in a Formica diner, pulling down new orders from revolving clips. The kind of diner where the waitresses wear paper Legionnaire hats, pop their gum, and say, "What ya havin' today, hon?"

In Kevin Smith's fantasy diner, the waitresses at this joint strip naked and have noisy lesbian sex, and then Jose the busboy joins in the fun. They all scream loudly: "Bleep, you bleeping bleep! I bleep your bleep! Bleep! Bleep! I'm bleeping bleeping!"

Variety, the show-biz bible, trains its critics as keen observers of detail, and their alert senior critic Todd McCarthy observes: "There's scarcely a line of dialogue that doesn't feature the F-word, A-word, one of the C- or P-words or some variant of them."

Zack and Miri are poverty-row roommates, who have lived together for years, I guess, but never have sex because you might feel funny around a good friend if you bleeped them, and a good friend is so much harder to come by than a bleep. Now they face eviction and ruin, and might have to become bleeping sidewalk mates. After some little jerk videotapes them (not bleeping but looking like (B)ILFs), they become superstars of the netherlands of YouTube and have a brilliant idea: They'll cash in on their fame by making a porn film.