When I was in New York, I drove out to Red Bank, NJ, to check out the convenience store where they filmed Clerks. It's vastly smaller than I imagined, about the size of my living room. While in town, I stopped by writer-director Kevin Smith's store, where I picked up a copy of his aptly titled book "My Boring Ass Life."
It's not every book that details bowel movements. And sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a pretty good reason. Huge stretches of the book are excruciating, and I've taken to "reading" at a blazing pace. What he watched on Tivo, bowel movement, sex with his wife, playing online poker, another bowel movement, phone call from Quentin Tarantino...
Yep. Just when you think you're never going to read a page again, the man writes "Quentin returned my call." And they discussed their movies for an hour. I want this part of his life, if not the rest.
Watching Zack and Miri is kinda like reading the book. There are moments. The first half of the movie rates among his finest works. And then the movie goes utterly, uninterestingly limp. It's tempting to fault the plot device where the title characters, desperate to make ends meet, decide to make porn. It's when they start filming their crap-film-within-a-crap-film, after all, that the wheels come off the latter. But that's not the problem.
Smith gives us Miri, embodied by Elizabeth Banks, who for the first half of the movie is a marvelously appealing character, a girl guys immediately want to marry. Pure male-fantasy girl, a la Natalie Portman in Garden State. Miri's bright, sparkly, caring, hilarious, and an amazingly single loser. She and Zack are best friends, and it works.
Along comes the bowel movement. She devolves into cliche. Halfway through the movie, she falls for Zack and becomes yet another stupid female character pining for some unrepentant loser who fails all of her scheming little tests. Doe-eyed, she looks at him meaningfully, and he's oblivious. It's constant. And the woman you liked becomes a weak woman you dislike, or, if you're me, a bitter embodiment of how men simply cannot write female characters. By the movie's predictable ending, I didn't like her very much, and I was rooting for Zach to flee.
So was it with me and the movie. By its end, I didn't like it very much, and I had one eye on the exit.