Zack and Miri Make a Porno

is the sweetest foul-mouthed, dirty movie you're likely to see. Inherent in the contradictory nature of those adjectives is the contradiction that is Kevin Smith's body of work: It's fundamentally sentimental, a sweet-natured oeuvre dedicated to the values of (an extended and chosen) family, the old neighborhood, longstanding friendships, and so on. It's also potty-mouthed in the extreme, obsessed with the concerns of middle-school boys (from girls to masturbating to dumb jokes to superheros, in comics and elsewhere), and in many ways adolescent.

No wonder I love his work.

Zack and Miri explores two roommates who have been friends since kindergarten but never dated and who are now in such deep debt that their Pittsburgh apartment is facing winter with no power, heat, or water. Their debt is their own doing--like many leads in Smith's movies, these two are not the brightest and do not exhibit the best self-control--but it is still a very real problem. For reasons that the movie sells well enough, they come to believe they could make money by creating their own homemade porno film, and off we go.

The plot is entirely predictable; you know from the movie's name and the first two minutes with each character how it's going to play out.

I still loved it, in fact liked it way more than it deserves as a film evaluated by any objective standards. I think that's because, like Smith, I want to believe in a world where friends stay friends their whole lives, where they take care of each other no matter what, where the family you choose really is family in all the best senses of the term, where the notion of home matters, and where romance is always possible, if not inevitable.

I suspect most people will not like this film as much as I did, and so I have trouble recommending it broadly. At the same time, if Kevin Smith, in his frequent Internet trolling, happens to read this, I just want to say: Well done, dude, and you can come hang at my house anytime.