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(Saw the U.S. Premier of this last night at Fantastic Fest and thought I'd share my review with ya'll)
OMG.
Ok, I thought Clerks 2 may have gone a little over the top with the whole donkey thing. Having seen Z&M, I now know that Clerks 2 was just sitting there looking at the wall thinking about going over the top, while Z&M did a flying double sommersault with kick spin over the wall and continued running for another half mile. And it did it in a single two second camera shot (I won't spoil it, but when it happened there was a five second delay afterwards before I started laughing my ass off because it was so shocking that it took me that long to accept what I just saw).
That said - Zach and Miri is about two lifelong best friends and roommates who are in dire financial straits. Both are working, but their slowly and steadily falling further behind on bills, with the threat of eviction and utilities being turned off looming. Following a chance encounter at their 10 year High School reunion with a longtime crush of Miri's (Brandon Routh - Superman Returns) and his gay lover and porn co-star (Justin Long - I'm a Mac), Zach determines that the solution to all their problems is to make a porno, because hey, everyone likes to watch people screw.
Using a loan from a co-worker (Craig "I'm in every movie this summer" Robinson), they finance the movie and work to find a cast (Jason Mewes - Jay from every other Kevin Smith movie, Katie Morgan - porn star, Traci Lords - former porn star, Ricky Mabe - nothing I've seen). However, when it comes time to figure out who is doing whom on camera, awkwardness sets in between Zach and Miri.
Ok, this was a damn funny movie, although it was a little slow to start. However, once they hit the High School reunion about 15 minutes in, it gets its legs and doesn't let up til the end. It is as crude and lewd as you'd expect a Kevin Smith movie to be, but this time with the addition of nudity (which goes both ways...seeing Katie Morgan getting bounced around="yay"...full frontal nudity of Jason Mewes, not so much.)
However, this movie really does raise the bar for Kevin Smith, not necessarily because of anything he did, but rather because of who is in the movie. I love Clerks 2, but to be honest, Brian O'Halloran (Dante) and Jeff Anderson (Randall) are not great actors. They deliver their lines and well, since the characters were written for them, they are who we'll always see for those roles. On the other hand, Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks are both very solid actors and what they bring to the material really does elevate it. There is a scene with the two of them that in the hands of a lesser actress, you would end up losing all sympathy for Miri because of what she does and it would ruin the movie, but Banks brings it all to the table and it carries the entire weight of the movie.
I WILL be seeing this one again when it hits theaters the end of October (if anything to try to catch the jokes I missed when laughing thru it the first time).
Also, I didn't stay for the Kevin Smith Q&A after the film (I needed to haul ass to get back to the Alamo to see Astropia, which was well worth it), but he did spend a little time before the movie telling a damn funny story about busting a toilet in a video store with his fat ass. Fortunately, the owner of the video store is his friend "No one has to know".
Well, that is no one has to know until you tell the story in front of a crowd of 600 people at a film festival.