Beaks here...

I've yet to hear a discouraging word on Kevin Smith's ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO ("His funniest movie since CLERKS!", "His best movie since CHASING AMY!", "His best movie ever!), and the below review from "The Amber Spyglass" is more of the laudatory same. The red band trailer certainly got me in the mood, so here's hoping the film can work me to completion.

For now, I'll hand it over to our man in Pleasantville...

Hey there. I wrote in a review a couple months ago for "Frost/Nixon" and just saw a screening of Kevin Smith’s new flick, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.” It was screening in Pleasantville, NY with a Q/A session after the movie with Kevin Smith and Janet Maslin of the New York Times.

This was the funniest movie of the year in my opinion. Before the summer I was really looking forward to “Step Brothers,” “Pineapple Express” and “Tropic Thunder,” as the hype I heard surrounding each of the films was nothing but positive, and each lived up to their hype. I knew “ZAMMAP” was coming out in late October but had heard practically nothing on it until only recently, with positive reviews coming out about it. So I was pumped going in, expecting a great Kevin Smith film, and that’s exactly what I got.

Right off the bat, the first 40 or so minutes of the film are the funniest minutes in recent memory. The pace doesn’t quit as the audience is hit with joke after joke, which at times can be annoying because everyone is laughing so hard that you sometimes miss jokes, but it’s worth it just because the those minutes are amazing. Seth Rogen is great, as he is in all his movies, even though he seems to be playing the same role in every movie, he knows how to knock it out of the park. Elizabeth Banks is great and ridiculously sexy, even in those granny panties. Craig Robinson steals every single scene he is in. I was expecting more from him in “Pineapple Express,” but Kevin Smith knew how to utilize him in this film and he is perfectly cast. The rest of the supporting cast, including Jason Mewes, was all great. They each brought a different element to the making of the porno, whether it was making a dick erect within a manner of seconds, or being able to blow bubbles with a certain body part, they all had a special talent in the making of the porno and of the movie itself.

Something that really stuck out for me was the choice of music that Kevin Smith made. Honestly, I don’t remember one of the songs, but I know that each song chosen really reflected a particular moment in the movie. Specifically, when Zack and Miri are having sex, the song being played really, really struck a chord with me.

With “ZAMMAP” I feel Kevin Smith took a little bit of his past films and rolled it into one. You get the sense of “Clerks” when Seth Rogen and Craig Robinson are working in their shit Bean-N-Gone coffee job, and there’s a quick sense of “Mallrats” when the above are walking through a mall on Black Friday. There’s a little bit of past Kevin Smith in this film. I believe that what Zack and Miri went through in order to make that porno was something like what Kevin Smith went through in order to make “Clerks.” Obviously not everything was the same, but the sense of how the porno came together was probably heavily influenced by his work on “Clerks.”

All in all, this movie was a riot, hilarious from beginning to end. The third act loses a little because of the slight switch from comedy to romance, but the movie doesn’t suffer. When this movie comes out you definitely have to check it out, as it will have you in stitches right from the start.

-The Amber Spyglass