Considering what Kevin Smith’s been up against with promoting and releasing Zack and Miri Make a Porno, you’d think it was just short of Deep Throat it terms of smuttiness. Geez, I thought, Clerks 2 had a whole donkey show in it, which was just explicit enough to make a well-known film critic walk out of the screening in disgust. What could possibly get the MPAA in such an uproar that they not only tried to slap Zack and Miri with a NC-17 twice, but came down like a ton of bricks on the poster art and television ads? Truthfully, the real crime here isn’t the raunch, it’s the fact that we have Kevin Smith masquerading as Judd Apatow.

The irony is, Smith got there first. Watch Chasing Amy again and tell me that you can’t see the same mixture of real emotion and frat humour that Apatow has used to turn himself into a brand name. Clerks for that matter despite its production values can be similarly categorized, and to an even larger degree the Clerks sequel from a few years ago. Helping with the Apatow vibe is Smith’s recruitment of regular Apatow players like Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks as the title characters and a special appearance by Justin Long fulfilling his name-implied destiny by playing a gay porn actor.

But this is golden material for Smith who makes Zack & Miri a half-biographical telling of the filming of the original Clerks while at the same time being a timely, though exaggerated, look at the people living in the current economic crisis. For reasons that are still kind of sketchy after having seen it, the title characters decide to do the title deed in order to get over their economic slump. Recruiting some amateur actors, a few willing strippers, and his coffee house workmate Delaney (Craig Robinson AKA: Daryl from The Office) as producer, the proverbial and literal fun begins.

Naturally, the whole thing turns into an epiphany situation when Zack and Miri film their scene and realize, gasp, that they’ve been in love with each other for years. Surprise, surprise. Such a development could not have been more obvious to see unless you were following along with a copy of the script in your hands. Again the real shock in seeing this is how utterly inoffensive it is despite the title; it was like watching Young People F***ing all over again. Considering that the porn industry is worth over $12 billion per year, more than the Hollywood film business, I think this is a case of pot and kettle calling each other names; the prudes are usually porn’s biggest consumers.

Indeed much of the laughs in this film come from either a) sending up the porn industry ie: bad acting, terrible production values, basically all the things Jackie Treehorn complained about in The Big Lebowski, and b) all the intense of planning put into this porno initiative. The winning scene though has to be the class reunion, with the aforementioned Long and his lover Bobby Long played by recent Superman Brandon Routh, who demonstrates himself an expert comedic straight man. In fact, I think Smith could have built an entire movie around the class reunion scene, and the way Rogen delivers the line “Finally!” when told of the e-mail newsletter updating the status of all his fellow graduates is priceless.

For me, what works best about Zack and Miri is how well it captures that pioneering, go for broke, improvisational spirit of independent film. Having worked on several indie film productions now and made a short film of my own, the trials and last minute twists of filmmaking out of your own pocket really spoke to me. To me it didn’t really matter whether or not Zack and Miri got together or if they finished the movie and made a mint and went to live happily ever after. Hockey stick boom poll though? That got me right here (I’m pointing to my heart right now). If anything, Zack and Miri Make a Porno should be enshrined for promoting entrepreneurial spirit, not shunned for the way it decides to exercise it. And besides that, it’s pretty funny too.