Kevin Smith shared his take on a joke about porn films: whether the characters get married in the end is obvious. The real question is, will they finish filming the porn?
After watching “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” (2008), everything sounds a bit lewd. Coffee-related topics are especially suggestive: the phrase “Would you like cream in your coffee?” makes even hardened cynics blush, and the words “You have strong coffee!” trigger nervous, uncontrollable laughter. You start to feel like a fourteen-year-old Beavis, forever stuck (excuse me) somewhere between the anal and phallic stages of development.
Director Kevin Smith is perfectly at home there. A clever Beavis, he understands important things that the rest of humanity has long forgotten. For example, he knows that sex is wonderful, that obscenity and vulgarity are different things, and that doing what you love is more interesting than doing what you don’t. His characters remember only “be like children” from biblical revelations – and they live accordingly. In his universe, there are no real adults, and therefore no hypocrisy. The worst sin here is misunderstanding. The comedy about Zack and Miri is built on the standard laws of Hollywood comedy, only everything here is (pardon the expression) turned upside down. Usually, the characters in a romantic comedy experience mutual attraction, then a night full of passion, then they encounter some problems, but everything still ends with a wedding. Meanwhile, their friends talk about love.
Clumsy loser Zack and неудачница Miri have almost the same thing, only where a normal comedy uses the concept of “love,” they have, at their choice, the concepts of “dick,” “boobs,” and “action!”. Where normal people have a night full of passion, they have a porn scene “Oops, I spilled all the cream.” Meanwhile, everyone around them is having sex.
Zack and Miri have known each other since first grade, they share an apartment, she never closes the bathroom door, he spends all his money on an artificial vagina in the form of a flashlight. A very convenient thing: if you get caught, they’ll just think you’re screwing a flashlight. Zack and Miri don’t sleep with each other and don’t plan to. Where any other director asks the question of whether a boy can be friends with a girl, Kevin Smith immediately gets to the point. Be friends? No problem! Better tell me, can a boy screw a girl and not ruin this wonderful friendship.
The Porn Project
But they’ll have to screw: Zack and Miri don’t have money for rent, so they decide to earn money by making a porn film. They assemble a team and get to work. Seth Rogen (Zack), the cute, curly-haired chubby guy from Judd Apatow’s films, personally suggested casting real porn stars in the roles of porn stars (Traci Lords, however, has long been just a good actress), and the girls are as beautiful as only porn stars who have made it to a real Hollywood film can be. Jason Mewes (Jay, Silent Bob’s eternal partner) can make a living showing the “Dutch rudder” – a method of mutual masturbation. Appearing at the audition, he happily announces that his name is something like Lester Maniac Ballscratcher, to which the characters say: “Now that’s a porn name!” – “Oh, can you take a porn name?? Then I’ll be Pete Johns.”
Love and Coffee
Kevin Smith took a great porn name for himself: Kevin Smith. It’s immediately clear what to expect: dicks, Dutch rudders, and a chic porn version of “Star Wars,” where the robot R2D2 has very big balls. But in reality, it will all be about love, about true love. Smith clearly shows the difference between real and artificial – no, not a dick. Real, lively porn compared to the tender and touching sex of the main characters is like a soluble chicory swill compared to perfectly brewed, strong coffee.
I’ll take mine with cinnamon and cardamom, please. Yes, yes, more.