Zack and Miri Make a Porno

This movie managed to do something very odd to me, and I’m groping for words to describe it. I can’t say it offended me. I believe I’m impossible to offend with obscenity or profanity; the only words I find offensive are racist terms, and those only when used in a certain way. A black character here says “nigger” a lot, for instance, and it doesn’t offend me at all. I can’t say it grossed me out, though it seemed to be trying very hard to. I mean, when you’ve seen one hilarious girl-shits-in-a-guy’s face scene, you’ve seen them all. Ho-fucking-hum, right? What could someone possibly put on film these days that would gross me out?

I guess it mostly just made me feel tired. This film has an absolute relentlessness about it, a totally awesome lack of subtlety, as if the writer had never come across that word, as if it were in another language. Everything is hammered into you to the point that I began to feel sorry for all those involved. Not the characters, about whom I could not care less. No, I mean the writer, the director, the actors. Their pathetic obsession with sex and dirty words seemed to me to reveal either a terrible lack on their part, or perhaps a belief, on their part, that their audience lacked something. Does the audience need this sort of jackhammer grossness, obscenity, and joyless vulgarity to get a laugh these days? Judging from how well this sort of comedy does these days, I guess the answer is … maybe. If that’s all that is given to them, anyway. I can take heart only in the knowledge that when a movie like Little Miss Sunshine, or Lars and the Real Girl—both movies that don’t shy away from obscene language or sexual themes, you will note—comes along, people flock to see them, too. The difference is that is takes a bit of human feeling and originality to make films like that, and it only takes a joke writer with a sophomoric obsession with the word “fuck” in all its possible permutations to make a film like Zack and Miri. And, oh, please, don’t tell me that the ending is all warm and fuzzy and rejects the callous insensitivity shown by every character up to that point. The ending was so obvious, so set in stone, that I could have written it, line by line, about thirty minutes into the film. This is a truly terrible movie, and sadly, it is typical of about half the comedies being released these days.

And though the last thing one should expect is any nod to realism in a movie like this, Lee and I independently were offended on some basic level by the sight of people whose power had been cut off burning trash in garbage cans in their living room to keep warm. That’s a good way to either suffocate, or burn the house down. Would that either one had happened. It would have made a more satisfying ending.