Zack and Miri Make a P0rno has Trini-American Gerry Bednob (Kissing Cousins, The 40 Year Old Virgin) playing yet another stereotyped desi, the owner of a Starbucks clone who distrusts his unmotivated baristas, Seth Rogen and Craig Robinson, and cusses them out in an uncle-y accent. They get back at him by filming their p0rno after-hours in his store.

Bednob in The 40 Year Old Virgin

The movie’s rolling in casual racism (’fucking Indian,’ ‘fucking Gandhi’), but it’s more a stand-in for animosity with the boss than a racial statement. It’s hard to get exercised about it when the leads are blasé when both giving and receiving. This film is slacker all the way down.

This flick’s greater sin is how false it rings. I loved Dogma — with Salma Hayek, who didn’t? — but this film is far more exploitative and less indie than the usual talky Kevin Smith flick. Trashy movies try to have their cake and eat it too by amping up the raunch but keeping the female lead technically pure. Bollywood is particularly overt about this, but Hollywood does it too.

And Zack and Miri is selling a bill of goods. It wants you to believe that a woman who looks like doe-eyed Elizabeth Banks would choose p0rn over a regular job or dating a sugar daddy. (Nobody does wounded like Banks, whether here or in W.) That a horndog like Rogen would turn down the chance to sleep with a p0rn star. That a woman deeply in love with him would volunteer to screw someone else on camera. And that a movie stocked with defecation jokes and boob shots — not that there’s anything wrong with that — is actually as chaste as a Sweet Valley High romance. It contorts itself to tick off the rom-com formula, yet its romantic thread’s sincerity begs to be taken seriously.

The movie is entertaining, but strangely unformed. In bidding for the mainstream, it’s never allowed to be as pointed as Dogma. Most of the good bits are in the trailer, though the high school reunion scene is fab; Justin Long outdoes himself, a Keanu Reeves lookalike coming into his own. See it, but don’t it to be memorable. It’s just another Hollywood wank session.

The redband trailer:

Bednob gets ‘fired’ from Knocked Up.

Another photo:

Related: Zack and Miri Make a P0rno, Definitely Jaffrey