Believe the hype––at least, to a certain extent. Zack and Miri Make a Porno is Kevin Smith’s all-around high score for the current decade, and as a date movie for the demographic looking for a formula of 5% genuine romance underneath 95% poop and dick jokes, it’s way more fun than the film that made Seth Rogen a plausible leading man, Knocked Up. But what’s really exciting about it is its seemingly autobiographical subtext referencing Smith’s own career –– which, unfortunately, is thrown in the flaming trash can of traditional romantic comedy in the film’s final twenty minutes, but which nonetheless makes Zack and Miri seem more heartfelt than any View Askew production since Chasing Amy.

In a working class suburb of Pittsburgh, in the midst of a realistically icy, muddy, shitty winter, lifelong best friends and roommates Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks, finally proving to me that she’s a different person than Rachel McAdams) work menial jobs and are nowhere near being able to pay their bills. It’s the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the town, everyone’s bitter and desperate to get laid. (Side note: it’s interesting that Smith, currently at his most bloated in memory––before the film, he thrilled the crowd with a story of being so fat that he broke a toilet––has made his most convincing film about the frustrations of being skint.) At their exceptionally depressing high school reunion set to the pop hits of 1998 (Marcy Playground and MASE, finally playlist bedmates once again), Zack and Miri discover from a former classmate’s porn star significant other that they (and Miri’s pair of oversized granny panties) have become accidental YouTube stars. Zack has an epiphany: if people are already looking at their asses on the internet for free, why not get paid for it?

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One of several sponsored by Entertainment Weekly, this panel brings together four filmmakers who will be flogging their upcoming wares on other panels here this weekend: Judd Apatow (producer of Pineapple Express), Kevin Smith (Zach and Miri Make a Porno), Zach Snyder (The Watchmen) and Frank Miller (The Spirit).

According to the guide, it’ll be an evening devoted to “a free-wheeling conversation on the movie business, their upcoming projects, and what it means—to them—to be a geek.” But mostly, people are probably just anxious to get a seat for Kevin Smith’s annual stand-up comedy session, which begins in the same room immediately after, although if Frank Miller is yet aware of the drubbing The Spirit panel is getting online, things might get interesting…

Highlights:

–Judd Apatow is a) getting laid tonight, and b) has the studios by “a little bit of one ball.” But Kevin Smith, as his inspiration, can call him “bitch.”

–Kevin Smith admits to having gained weight since last year and laments that soon it will be so bad, “they’ll have to remove a wall of Comic-Con to get me out.” But he also insists he will be ready to die once he’s seen Watchmen, so that might not be an issue.

–Frank Miller is a cranky old man who doesn’t understand Google. But he’s pro web video!

–Zach Snyder gives details on the progress (or lack thereof) on a Watchmen video game, and explains why games based on movies are “not marketing, it can’t be an afterthought.”

Full transcript after the jump.

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I can think of no better poster child for celibacy than Parisian “provocateur” Catherine Breillat, the director of such erotic misfires as Fat Girl, Romance, and more recently, The Last Mistress, which stars another over-hyped “hottie” Asia Argento. Exiting the theater after a Breillat flick, I never want to have sex again. Ostensibly concerned with digging deep into the beating heart of female sexuality, Breillat creates characters that are writhing bundles of drama and pain, anger and confusion. There is no laughter, never any levity nor celebrations of desire at all – just academic intellectualization in lieu of visceral heat, cardboard cutout chemistry between actors, dire emotional consequences hidden in every fuck. The Breillat canon would make for a wonderful addition to those abstinence-only programs George W. loves so much.

Take for example this Breillat quote from the press notes for The Last Mistress (which the director adapted from the Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly19th-century novel): “But romance is dark, which was another reason for wanting to make this film; for the romanticism, the burning passion, the terrible suffering, but without perverting the sentiments. The heart of the story portrays an ideal that topples into disaster as soon as it is reached.” Sexy, huh?

It’s in this inevitable disaster that Asia Argento, chewing up scenery like the ice cream cone she furiously devours from her horse-drawn carriage, plays Vellini, a costumed Moorish version of the Ally Sheedy character in The Breakfast Club. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find needy, mentally deranged people the least bit sexy. I can say with utmost certainty that if I was shot in a duel like Vellini’s lover Ryno was, and my lover thrust the surgeon out of the way in order to drink the blood from my wound, it would not turn me on in the least. (But then I also don’t find pout-lipped, A&F model types like lead actor Fu-ad Aît Aattou sexy either – so maybe it *is* just me.)

For even in the most candied costume dramas there has to be some emotional truth. It’s not that I can’t relate to the trials and tribulations of love. Like Vellini I’ve been a long-term mistress, romantically involved to the point of “terrible suffering,” experienced that unbearable pain that Anais Nin likens to walking over hot coals; she wondered if this were possible without getting burned. I also know that we’re all hedonists at heart – not unrepentant masochists like Breillat’s characters would have us believe – wouldn’t go through the torture, the living hell of love, if it weren’t for the overwhelming growth, the endorphin high of desire. The worst times with someone you deeply love are better than the best times with someone you are merely fond of.

But you wouldn’t know this from any Breillat film. Which is why I’m using The Last Mistress to inaugurate my own Breillat Awards – given to the top five un-sexy, sexy indie flicks. Consider The Last Mistress the grand prize winner; here are four runners-up, in no particular order:

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About a week ago, a promo video started floating around for Kevin Smith’s upcoming Seth Rogen comedy, Zach and Miri Make a Porno. I didn’t write about it because, well, I have a hard time getting it up to care about new Kevin Smith movies. But I care about this! FilmDrunk alerts us to a post on Smith’s site, where the filmmaker explains that he was forced to remove the video from his production company’s movie news page because the MPAA insists on vetting all promo materials put forth by MPAA signatory companies, of which Porno’s distributor The Weinstein Company is one. An excerpt:

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