zach and miri make an inconsistent marketing campaign

I hate to hate a Kevin Smith movie before it comes out (although I wish someone would have told me that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back wasn’t worth it), but this whole Zach and Miri mumbo jumbo is really starting to get obnoxious. First, I see this poster at a bus stop:

And I think, “another Seth Rogan movie with weed, sex and fat jokes. But this time, there’s so much nudity that they can’t even make a real poster for it!” Man, I’m already excited because watching Katherine Heigl give birth to an unwanted child in Knocked Up was so not enough to conjure eternal mental images of Seth Rogan having sex.

I get it, he’s overweight and irresponsible and still gets laid but do we really have to bring Kevin Smith into this? Maybe he relates to the overarching message of Rogan’s films: that the heavyset guy that can make me laugh is better than the dreamy guy that is good in bed (which is false because what every girl really wants is the middle ground: a moderately attractive guy that makes me laugh while we’re in bed and smokes weed in moderation).

Anyway, the poster I saw enticed me with stick figures and the claim that the movie is so “titillating” that they can only show me stick figures acting out the filming of a porno. That whole elusive marketing campaign where you sort of know what it’s about but not really so you want to go see the movie thing might have really worked out for Zach and Miri if they hadn’t sponsored FX‘s primetime lineup last night.

While trying to catch up on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (“Who Pooped the Bed?“) and realizing how much I hate their new show, Testees, commercials for the above-mentioned movie came on at least 20 times. And I wish I was exaggerating. They played the preview that they play in the movie theaters that’s really long-winded and only really gets to the point at the end when it all comes together and then you get to whisper if you want to go to see it or not before the next one comes on. Then, right after they played that one, without even a Billy Mays buffer commercial, they played an entire scene from the movie with no movie title, motion graphics or explanation. Just Zach and Miri at a bar drinking and deciding how they’re going to make rent money when Miri suggests they make a porno and Zach takes her seriously.

I saw so many different Zach and Miri commercials last night that I am not going to go see it because I already know what happens (Zach loves Miri but she doesn’t know it and so when they go broke and decide to make a series of pornos, they end up doing the acting themselves and after a hilarious cast of sexual freaks–Traci Lords, Jason Mewes, Justin Long–help them on their adult-film quest, the two main characters end up doing it for real and fall in love). THE END.

IRONY ALERT: Instead of not being able to show me anything about the movie, as your poster claimed, I’ve already seen the whole thing. So now that you’ve forced me to spoil the plot for everyone, here’s the poster that got banned in America that led you to come up with stick figures and an ad campaign based on false secrecy:

C’mon, America. Scared of a little blowjob?