Several (many?) years ago, I sat in a mid-week 9:00 am screening to watch a little black-and-white comedy called "Clerks", reputedly made for $27000 by the director (mostly by maxing out his credit cards).
Since then, Kevin Smith has both implicitly and explicitly gone back to the same source. He's amassed quite a big reputation as a chronicler of the life of the American slacker.
Last night they premiered his latest -- "Zack and Miri Make a Porno". Like his earlier work, it's stuffed with lots of crude, sometimes scatalogical, humour along with vicious comments on pop culture (a staple of his films is an attack on all that is "Star Wars").
At the same time, he's also a pretty sentimental sort, trying to shoehorn a fairly traditional romance into the rest of the noise. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.
When it works at all in "Zack...", it's mostly because of the lead actress, Elizabeth Banks, who successfully navigated the plot and created a living, breathing character. The lead actor, Seth Rogan, never really transcends a fairly cliched character of a man-child.
The highlight of the screening was the Q&A afterwards. With most of the cast on stage afterwards, the responses to questions snapped with an energy intermittently present in the film.
The film has already locked up distribution.
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