Thanks to Eye Weekly, I had the chance to see an advance screening of the latest Kevin Smith flick, the concisely titled Zack and Miri Make a Porno. In case the marketing push / picture above didn’t tell you, The movie is a collaboration between slacker icons Smith and Seth Rogen, two comedians who deal with the same subject matter of pop culture-spouting low-ambition adults in markedly different ways, Smith favoring the long, drawn-out discourse and Rogen the rapid-fire throwaway reference. (Both love the dick jokes, though.) This clash of styles adversely affects the resulting ninetysomething minutes, but ultimately, the movie manages to entertain enough to be worth a watch.

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Whether it’s the casual, interspersed slaughter of Dead or Alive and Ichi the Killer or the unsettling buildup to the painful climax of Audition, Takashi Miike’s most seminal films can be broken down into bizarre cycles of exposition and violence. In the aforementioned movies, he cultivates tension and unnerves the viewer for just long enough that when the killing does begin, it’s almost cathartic in its brutality — after all, violence is one of the easiest things to understand.

Miike’s Izo, released in 2004, is this cycle both turned on its head and taken to its extreme conclusion, and as a result, the symbolism is heavyhanded, the exposition is lengthy, the killing is numbingly frequent, and there’s about thirty minutes in total of a guy screaming and playing acoustic guitar.

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