英文影评：情色自拍Zack and Miri Make a Porno
发布时间：2022-09-29 17:04:55
Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks star as best friends who fall in love while making a porn film in Kevin Smith‘s new comedy
Seth Rogen is adorable. Stop fighting it. Yes, there‘s this shtick he‘s got - the whole chubby, schleppy, nerdy guy-gets-the-beautiful-girl thing - which seems both sneaky and slightly suspicious. But it‘s that fumbling uselessness that keeps us cheering him on, and he‘s not made a bad movie yet. With every role we expect to see him a little thinner, a bit cleaner and more smug. But instead he seems to be getting fatter, messier and more adorable.
Setting Rogen down in the middle of a Kevin Smith movie is like dropping subliminal images of cute little puppies into the writer-director‘s comedy filth. If you think too hard about Seth Rogen, like wondering whether a woman as average looking as him would ever have gained such adoration in Hollywood, that suspicious feeling returns.
But here he is starring in a movie that despite its locker room language really sets a level playing field for the sexes. In fact, Rogen has only starred in movies which have a sweet sense of modern romance at their heart. Despite the packaging, Knocked Up, Superbad and The 40 Year-Old Virgin are full of old fashioned love and world weary maturity.
There are two scenes in Zack And Miri Make A Porno that show that Kevin Smith can do serious, and when he does, it feels a lot like a Judd Apatow film. There‘s that same natural, genuine style to the acting and script that makes it all relatable. This style makes Apatow‘s films feel friendly, encouraging and optimistic and - like Kevin Smith‘s work - appear to draw on personal experience.
Zack and Miri (Banks) have just been to their 10-year high school reunion. With their dead end jobs and maxed out credit cards, they can‘t pay the bills. When the electricity and water get switched off they need money fast, and with a mobile phone video of Miri changing in the backroom of the coffeehouse where Zack works making her a minor celebrity on YouTube, they hit on the idea of pulling together a porn movie. As Zack says "Everybody wants to see anybody fuck," and so they bring together a motley bunch, including real-life porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan, plus Jason Mewes, longtime collaborator on Kevin Smith‘s films, plus Apatow gang member Craig Robinson, to make ‘Swallow My Cockachino‘ with the coffeehouse security camera.
As two twentysomethings jaded by the dating game and wise to the pitfalls of romance, Zack and Miri take comfort in their friendship. Miri‘s sex life involves buying vibrators off Amazon, while Zack receives hand jobs in toilet stalls: sex, they believe, can hold no surprises. They‘re equals: equally lonely, equally desperate and equally awkward, and between the insults there‘s a mutual respect.
It‘s when they have sex for the first time on the set of their porn film that the pair realise they are more than just friends. They bat their feelings back and forth, exchange roles and by the end, Zack relents. "We tried to fuck and we wound up making love." Their porn storyline begins as a standard delivery-man-meets-bored-housewife sketch and ends with very unpornographic sex so touchingly intimate, it‘ll make you blush.
Kevin Smith taps into the frustrations of miscommunication between men and women in the aftermath of the pair‘s porn scene, showing how the heavy weight of expectation, assumption and received information from magazine articles and past experience can break an emotional bond. The director wants to say that our pornolised culture might make us talk dirty but we want something more than sex.
Smith hates game playing and he lets Rogen tells us as much - as he argues with Miri he bursts with anger at the obstacles being thrown in the way of their friendship. Smith‘s filmmaking and writing style is about cutting the crap. The crude, rude banter is just straight talking of sorts. Zack and Miri fall in love knowing all there is to find out about one another and having already seen each other naked. Smith‘s directing is messy and unpretentious, his budgets low, and the stars are his friends - his first film was made in the same circumstances as Zack and Miri‘s porno. A film as much about friendship as it is about sex, it‘s like he‘s teaching his fans how to grow up gracefully.
Setting Rogen down in the middle of a Kevin Smith movie is like dropping subliminal images of cute little puppies into the writer-director‘s comedy filth. If you think too hard about Seth Rogen, like wondering whether a woman as average looking as him would ever have gained such adoration in Hollywood, that suspicious feeling returns.
But here he is starring in a movie that despite its locker room language really sets a level playing field for the sexes. In fact, Rogen has only starred in movies which have a sweet sense of modern romance at their heart. Despite the packaging, Knocked Up, Superbad and The 40 Year-Old Virgin are full of old fashioned love and world weary maturity.
There are two scenes in Zack And Miri Make A Porno that show that Kevin Smith can do serious, and when he does, it feels a lot like a Judd Apatow film. There‘s that same natural, genuine style to the acting and script that makes it all relatable. This style makes Apatow‘s films feel friendly, encouraging and optimistic and - like Kevin Smith‘s work - appear to draw on personal experience.
Zack and Miri (Banks) have just been to their 10-year high school reunion. With their dead end jobs and maxed out credit cards, they can‘t pay the bills. When the electricity and water get switched off they need money fast, and with a mobile phone video of Miri changing in the backroom of the coffeehouse where Zack works making her a minor celebrity on YouTube, they hit on the idea of pulling together a porn movie. As Zack says "Everybody wants to see anybody fuck," and so they bring together a motley bunch, including real-life porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan, plus Jason Mewes, longtime collaborator on Kevin Smith‘s films, plus Apatow gang member Craig Robinson, to make ‘Swallow My Cockachino‘ with the coffeehouse security camera.
As two twentysomethings jaded by the dating game and wise to the pitfalls of romance, Zack and Miri take comfort in their friendship. Miri‘s sex life involves buying vibrators off Amazon, while Zack receives hand jobs in toilet stalls: sex, they believe, can hold no surprises. They‘re equals: equally lonely, equally desperate and equally awkward, and between the insults there‘s a mutual respect.
It‘s when they have sex for the first time on the set of their porn film that the pair realise they are more than just friends. They bat their feelings back and forth, exchange roles and by the end, Zack relents. "We tried to fuck and we wound up making love." Their porn storyline begins as a standard delivery-man-meets-bored-housewife sketch and ends with very unpornographic sex so touchingly intimate, it‘ll make you blush.
Kevin Smith taps into the frustrations of miscommunication between men and women in the aftermath of the pair‘s porn scene, showing how the heavy weight of expectation, assumption and received information from magazine articles and past experience can break an emotional bond. The director wants to say that our pornolised culture might make us talk dirty but we want something more than sex.
Smith hates game playing and he lets Rogen tells us as much - as he argues with Miri he bursts with anger at the obstacles being thrown in the way of their friendship. Smith‘s filmmaking and writing style is about cutting the crap. The crude, rude banter is just straight talking of sorts. Zack and Miri fall in love knowing all there is to find out about one another and having already seen each other naked. Smith‘s directing is messy and unpretentious, his budgets low, and the stars are his friends - his first film was made in the same circumstances as Zack and Miri‘s porno. A film as much about friendship as it is about sex, it‘s like he‘s teaching his fans how to grow up gracefully.