As far as it goes, Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make A Porno is smooth and winning, largely due to Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks‘ engaging, alive-in-the-moment performances as longtime pals and roommates who discover, to their surprise, that they’re in love with each other while making a low-grade, hand-to-mouth porn film.

Call this one definitely better (and certainly more smoothly shot and cut) than Clerks II, heads and shoulders above Jersey Girl, a bit funnier than Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, livelier and more entertaining that Dogma, almost as intimate and touching as Chasing Amy, much better than Mallrats and not as good as the original Clerks.
Within his familiar smart-but-easygoing-schlub persona, Rogen is on a roll these days, incapable of seeming rote or insincere, and he punches up the energy and aliveness in a way that’s obvious and ummistakable. And Banks matches him note for note with a game receptivity and good humor. As I was walking out, a journalist friend said, “Smith should thank God for Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen,” meaning that Smith is sorta kinda riding their coattails with this film, albeit in a way that bears his own ethos and sensibility.
Zack and Miri grooves right along in a good-natured, “let’s relax and be cool about being blunt and more than a little gross” sort of way.
It’s basically about the financially-strapped Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Banks), sharers of a ramshackle pad in funky Monroeville (a suburb of Pittsburgh where George Romero has shot two or three of his zombie movies), realizing that internet porn is a not-too-difficult way to raise quick cash, and giving it a try with no production money, a cheap video camera and a few friends as costars and assistants.

It struck me as a little bit weird that the sex scenes are shot with a static camera sitting on a tripod each and every time. Hand-held photography is obviously the way to go with films of this sort — get in there, get close, get it all, etc. But then none of Smith’s films have been shot with a loosey-goosey hand-held approach — visually he’s always been a very formal, almost rigid, director — so I guess it does sort of make sense.
It’s obvious that Zack’s scripting the sex scenes so that Miri won’t “do” anyone other than himsefl on-camera, and Miri being distinctly unsettled when Zack is offered an easy roll in the sack with one of the pic’s female costars, that they care deeply for each other.
Zack also experiences a creative awakening in shooting home-style porn, which gives a lift to his overall attitude and self-image. But the penultimate moment comes when he and Miri finally perform the deed on-camera, and their cohorts (and the audience, of course) realize it’s not much of an acrobatic, look-at-us! performance for all the right reasons.
It’s unrealistic, of course, that a hottie like Banks would be attracted to a schlubby guy like Rogen (unless we’re talking about the real-life Rogen, which is a whole different deal because then you’re talking a guy who’s bright, funny, famous and rich). But then Apatow has been pulling this fantasy crap in film after film, and now Smith (another rich, brilliant, super-successful geek with a weight issue) has picked up the torch.
In the real trenches of the real world, average overweight geeks do not schtup beautiful blondes with radiant ruby eyes, exquisite facial structure and perfect white teeth — end of story, end of proposition, total dreamworld. But the fact that this doesn’t get in the way of enjoying Smith’s film says something. To me anyway.
Mistake: At the end of Zack and Miri’s sex-on-camera scene Banks sits up and starts collecting herself — we’re talking seconds after Rogen has dismounted — and we see that she’s wearing jeans. Now how did that happen?

It’s 1:55 pm, I have about two hours left before my next event, and I haven’t posted any kind of reaction to at least eight films now. I’m starting to feel like an air-traffic controller dealing with more and more jets circling above and the caffeine anxiety starting to really build up. Not to mention the other eight to ten more flicks I’ll be seeing and responding to Monday through Thursday before heading home on Friday afternoon.
The un-assessed films are (a) Danny Boyle‘s initially bothersome but finally superb Slumdog Millionaire (which I took two hours to review yesterday but lost due to online access shutting off before I was able to save it); (b) Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous, which I saw and mostly liked (with reservations) in Los Angeles; (c) Jonathan Demme‘s partly inspired, partly problematic Rachel Getting Married (also seen in L.A.); (d) Andreas Dresen‘s surprisingly touching Cloud 9 (which I saw here last Thursday), (e) Claire Denis‘ low-key but precise and absorbing 35 Rhums (ditto), (f) David Koepp‘s Ghost Town (ditto), a playful mainstream studio wanker that has no business being in Toronto, really, except to satisfy the ambitions of its distributor, Paramount Pictures; (g) Matteo Garone‘s savage, inescapably “real” Gamorrah, (h) Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain, a layered and well-acted adult drama that doesn’t really hit the mark; or at least isn’t on the same plane as the Innaritu-directed films based on Arriaga scripts (h) Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Pormo, which I just saw this morning.
I’m not going to catch up. All my advance homework, hard work and dogged attempts to see everything I should see have come to naught. It’s all collapsing into a heap. I just decided to blow off the Kevin Smith Zack and Miri press conference — that will buy me an extra couple of hours.

It’s official — for some incomprehensible reason (and yet linked, I suspect, to yesterday’s computer mishegoss), I can’t access my server on my primary laptop. I can go online in any internet cafe in Kabul, Berlin or Mendocino and access it, but my 17-inch Gateway is blocked from doing so. So I’m forced today to make this i-klick cafe on Yonge and St. Joseph my office for the next few hours.

Yonge and St. Joseph, steady drizzle — Sunday, 9.7.08, 1:20 pm

Kings for a day, and then out the door.

A New York-based journalist told me two days ago that Magnolia Pictures, the theatrical arm of Mark Cuban‘s 2929 corporation, has acquired U.S. distribution rights to Steven Soderbergh‘s Che, and that “they’re moving ahead with a fall release and are making bookings right now.” (He also said something about Che being “booked into the Zeigfeld,” but that’s apparently a New York Film Festival thing.) Okay, I said to myself. Sounds plausible. But when I asked indie distribution execs Bingham Ray, Jonathan Sehring and M.J. Peckos if they’ve heard anything about this, they all said no.

The problem with the diminishing indie-film marketplace, in the view of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, is “not that there are too many [interesting art-house] movies, but that there are too few of us.” Precisely. For every impassioned fan of Ballast, Che or even The Hurt Locker, there are probably 40 or 50 popcorn-munching, attention-deficit-disordered fans of Beverly Hills Chihuahua. We live in a society that has devolved from what it once was in terms of interest in adult offbeat cinema. The U.S. of A. is a less educated, fatter, fast-foodier and less curious culture than it used to be, and it’s devolving more and more each year. Mainstream media critics and reporters all realize this, of course, but they’re not supposed to…you know, say it, and so guys like Scott go into their circumspect tap dances when the subject comes up.

In a piece that considers the meaning of Hollywood recently pulling the plug on some of the “dependents” (Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent, Picturehouse), N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis basically says all this implosion isn’t such a bad thing because it’ll give films like Ballast a better shot at reaching audiences. Here’s how she puts it:
“If all the studios followed the lead of Time Warner and got out of the indie film business, it might help a film like Lance Hammer‘s Ballast find its way into the larger world, though that’s no guarantee. And perhaps that’s the wrong way to look at it.
“Guarantees are for washing machines, after all, not art, and films like Ballast and Wendy and Lucy don’t need big distributors, a mass audience or a Spirit Award to prove their worth. Like the finest independents, they aren’t trying to emulate Hollywood, and while Michelle Williams has the lead role in Wendy and Lucy, it isn’t the kind of film that can be sold on a starlet’s smile. Like Ballast it will make its way into theaters, where it will be much loved and remembered long after it leaves.”
Ballast, which Hammer will be self-distributing, is no “audience film,” trust me. It’s a Robert Koehler-Manohla Dargis-Jim Hoberman-Scott Foundas film. I can’t imagine any viewer not feeling a good amount of respect for the earnest and unaffected acting, the pared-down austerity and authentic Tobacco Road vibe, but it moves very, very slowly — the word is actually “glacially” — and is not, by my standards, a film that wins you over as much as one that convinces you to speak well of it lest you be thought unhip by Robert Koehler, Manohla Dargis, Jim Hoberman or Scott Foundas.

“Based on a Western novel by Robert B. Parker, the Appaloosa story is so old it’s practically got tumbleweeds blowing through it,” writes Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty in a 9.6 profile of director-star Ed Harris. “Small town, terrorized by a lawless land baron, hires two gunmen to clean things up. There are a couple of gunfights, a raid on a train and, for good measure, a piano-playing lady who may or may not have a heart of gold.
“Except that, although it does have a couple of strong sequences, most of the action in Appaloosa is fast and fatal — less like the drawn-out sequences of a Sergio Leone film, and more like those `50s samurai flicks in which an entire room is left skewered in seconds. And much of the drama comes from the characters themselves.”

Four nights ago in Los Angeles, before the start of a press screening of The Women, I spoke with some guys ((three guys and a girl, to be precise) from a well-read movie site. The Toronto Film Festival came up, and they told me straight off they wouldn’t be going. One of them half-joked that “we might go if they showed more super-hero movies there.” Funny line, chuckles all around.
But I found myself thinking the next day about the xenophobic mentality of super-hero, super-CG fan boys. Half-joking means you’re being half-serious, of course, and what’s the difference between saying the above and some conservative movie critic saying he/she would be more inclined to go Toronto if they were to show more films about God, faith and Christianity? Talk about living in a segregated, heavy-fortified world.

In a Political Animal entry dated 9.6, Hilzoy says that “one thing that struck me [about John McCain‘s acceptance speech two nights ago] was the irony of a candidate who relentlessly positions himself as a selfless servant of the nation (‘I wasn’t my own man anymore — I was my country’s’), and then allocates such a large share of his convention speech to talking about himself.
“I can understand the need for Sarah Palin to dedicate time in her speech to introduce herself to the nation, given that she was an unknown quantity on the political scene at that point (notwithstanding the frenzy of Google searches over the last seven days). But at 72, after a long career in Washington, after a widely-televised campaign, and at the end of a convention in which an entire day had been dedicated to answering the ‘who is John McCain?’ question, it seems a little unusual for McCain to use his most precious block of national TV airtime to essentially read aloud from his memoirs, saying comparatively little about the country or about his platform.
“Here is an admittedly simplistic way of looking at it based on analysis of the full transcript of the speech found on his campaign website. There were a total of 271 sentences in the speech, not including the ‘thankyouthankyouthankyouallsomuchthankyou’ before he started and the ‘joinmejoinmefightwithmejoinmefightwithme’ bit in the final minute or so.
“Of those 271 sentences, a remarkable 147 (54%) were devoted to telling us about John McCain himself: his past accomplishments (‘I fought crooked deals in the Pentagon’), his qualifications for the job (‘I know how the world works’), his family and childhood (‘When I was five years old, a car pulled up in front of our house…’), his time as a POW (‘On an October morning, in the Gulf of Tonkin…’), his patriotism (‘My country saved me’), and so on.
“Another 8 sentences focused on Sarah Palin. This leaves only 116 sentences (43% of the speech) to discuss the topics that one might otherwise expect to constitute the majority of the speech: the state of the nation, his policy positions, future promises, differences between his positions and Obama’s, and so on.
“The contrast with Barack Obama‘s speech is pretty dramatic if you go back and review the transcript of both speeches. Obama dwells almost exclusively on the realm of the state of the country, the future, what America is all about, key components of the platform, etc — only occasionally sprinkling in comments about himself and his family that help to provide context and credibility.
“Using a similar analysis of the 226 sentences in the speech, 35 are devoted to Obama himself and/or his family, or about 15% of the speech. More than a third of these came in a single section containing memories about his mother and grandparents (‘These are my heroes.’).”

I’ve been attending Toronto Film Festival parties for years, and I’ve learned never to come on time because the door goons always say “we’re not ready to let anyone in yet.” The rule of thumb is that you have to stand around for 10 or 15 minutes. And it’s quite rude. If I were to throw an event like this I wouldn’t dream of asking journalist guests, all of whom are on a fairly tight clock, to stand around like chumps trying to get into Studio 54. But the people who throw these events do this damn near every time.
The invitation for last night’s Burn After Reading party said 11 pm. Fool that I am, I timed my arrival so I was there precisely on time, as was MTV’s Josh Horowitz. After bitching and whining for five minutes we were asked (along with several others) to clear the sidewalk area, and then to please stand off to the side, and then to please stand further to the side so as to not block the adjacent driveway, and then to please stand next to the metal cattle fence to the other side of the entrance.
And then one of the goons said, “No cameras will be allowed inside.” For a second or two I considered saying something smart-assy, but wisdom prevailed. But at that point I was also berating myself for not acting like a man of true character and gravitas and walking away proud.
Once inside, however, the party was very nice. Cool climate, not too crowded, delectable Asian finger food, fetching waitresses, delicious junior-sized Cosmopolitans. Horowitz and I spoke for a short while to the great Richard Jenkins (a serious Oscar hopeful for his performance in The Visitor), and also to Ethan Coen. But for the most part journalists talked to journalists and talent — Joel Coen, John Malkovich., Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton — talked to talent (and to producers, managers and agents).
I’ve taken photos at these events before and it was no big deal, but a little voice told me not to. I think it was mainly because of the white-haired, tuxedo-wearing Malkovich, whom I’m afraid of because of his intensity or something. I noticed that McDormand (who looked great) had her hand touching her cheek and chin a lot — a sign of boredom and/or slight discomfort.

At last night’s the Coen Bros./Burn After Reading party I asked a journo pal who’s seen Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna if it really needed to be 166 minutes. (Some movies, like Steven Soderbergh‘s 260-minute Che or Sidney Lumet‘s 168-minute Prince of the City, really need long running times to achieve the goals they’ve set out to achieve.) And the guy said no, it doesn’t. Spike’s tendency to over-underline is in full force here, he said.
Then I spoke this morning to another journo who’s seen it also, and he said the same thing: “It should have been two hours at most, and it’s not that good to begin with.” I’m still looking forward to this World War II/Tuscany/little kid movie — all Spike Lee joints command my attention — but these two comments were why I passed on today’s showing and went off to write instead. You have to make calls like this all the time during a festival of this size and scope. The question isn’t “is it any good or not?” but “does it absolutely have to be seen here?”

It’s been an awful tech day and basically a black bummer all around, leaving me in the foulest of moods. I wrote my review of Slumdog Millionaire in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel between noon and 2 pm, but the temporary online provider (Wayport, $15 bucks per day, bad news) killed the connection twice, and the second time my review, an 80% positive thing that was very tight and well-phrased, was lost when I tried to save it. (I have this unwise habit of composing on Movable Type.)
Then I saw Gomorrah, an Italian crime film which was as solid and raw and convincing as I’d been told. So that was satisfying, although I was still smarting from the loss of that Slumdog piece. Damn Wayport to hell.
Then I went over to the Starbucks at the Manulife Center (my office, more or less, with only one available wall plug) and was unable to log onto my MT 4.0 composing software via HE’s new Canadian server, LFC Hosting, due to some kind of blockage or viral whatsis that came, I suspect, from Wayport. I restarted three or four times, dumped cache and cookies…nothing. I have a backup computer with me, but the day has been a near-total wash in terms of filing.
I’ve been invited to re-examine the new Blindness and then come to the after-party at 11 pm, but I feel so dispirited all I feel like doing is grabbing some hot food in Chinatown and then heading back to the pad for some CNN or TCM. Zone out and forget everything.