Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno isn't really a "dirty" movie at all, the critics agree -- except for the language. "If you bleeped this movie for broadcast TV, it would sound like a conga line of Iron Men going through a metal detector," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. Still, he suggests, it's not likely to offend. "Somehow Kevin Smith's very excesses defuse the material. He's like the guy at a party who tells dirty jokes so fast, Dangerfield-style, that you laugh more at the performance than the material," he observes. A. O. Scott in the New York Times agrees. "Ii spite of an avalanche of verbal filth (and a smaller quantum of the visual variety), Zack and Miri is not very shocking at all," he says. But Kyle Smith of the New York Post calls it "the funniest movie of Smith's I've seen," noting that its "limitless raunch ... freshens everything up. Even a poo scene is pretty funny (and extremely disgusting), because it's been properly set up." And Neely Tucker predicts in the Washington Post: "Far, far into the future, when the archaeologists uncover the ruins of our civilization and marvel at our social decay, perhaps they will come across a copy of Kevin Smith's new movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno. They will undoubtedly point to it as a sad hallmark of our times. As soon as they stop giggling."