Ostensibly, this should be money-shot Kevin Smith: Pals make a porn to pay the bills, and, in the process of gettin’ it on for the video cam, cum to realize their years-in-the-making friendship is really a love affair. Awwwww, how sweet. In other words, it’s quintessential Silent Bob, as hard-up meets hard-on in a movie that’s all heart once you get past the shit shot that’ll shock only those for whom Clerks II‘s donkey show wasn’t oh-God-no enough. There’s a Star Wars dress-up sequence too, but the Lucasfilm homage is tossed after a few fleeting but promising moments; from there, it’s straight-up sex in a coffee shop after work hours, where Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) enlist some new fuck-buddies to shoot their amateur smut opus, Swallow My Cockuccino. But from its few scatological asides to its inevitable boob shots, nothing about Zack & Miri feels terribly fresh, much less transgressive. Amiable and engaging in person and a filmmaker for whom comic and movie nerds so desperately want to root, Smith makes two kinds of movies: romantic comedies and bromantic comedies, with Chasing Amy—his one legitimately great movie—the crossover hybrid hit. They’re all decidedly conventional affairs, save for the detours into gross-out juvenilia that the older Smith gets seem less sincere and feel more like pandering to the audience that goes to his movies solely to walk out with a couple of lines they can quote to each other during the ride home.