Kevin Smith has been doing a good deal of nothing good recently. Raunchy, R-rated comedy was something Smith brought back into style in 1994 with Clerks, yet the past five years haven’t been quite as kind to him. One good thing came to an end during the same time as another rose to the top. When Smith’s disaster Jersey Girl came out in 2004, Judd Apatow made The 40-Year Old Virgin in 2005. A star was born as another began to fade. I think the Apatow-produced Superbad said it best… “You’re like Orson Welles.” And so the R-rated comedy began to evolve into a blend of the sweet and the sour, leaving Clerks fans stuck in the past. Behold the future.

Clearly then, it comes as no surprise that Smith has figured out how to step back into the spotlight…make a movie that the crowd has grown accustomed to. Make a movie people think Judd Apatow made. Throw actors in it that became famous riding the Apatow train. After all, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

But most importantly, make sure you’re having fun with what you’re doing. Make sure your heart is in it just as much as the rest of the cast’s is. Because nobody can change that. Not even time.

It is for that reason that Zack and Miri Make a Porno works. Starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks of Apatow hits like The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, Zack and Miri fairly successfully conforms to the new trend of raunchy comedy while still allowing Smith to never forget what made him famous in the first place. As if you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, Rogen and Banks star as Zack and Miri, two gone-for-broke, lifelong best friends and coffee-shop employees that decide to make a porno to pay the rent. Yet along the way the two realize that a porno, of all things, might just be the spark in their lives to bring these two together.

Zack and Miri proves that this is, at the end of the day, a Kevin Smith film. With its utterly outrageous, over-the-top dialogue and surprisingly NC-17 worthy sex scenes, Zack and Miri remembers Smith’s former territory just as much as it emulates Apatow’s new one. Even the fact that Zack and Miri‘s sex scenes are filmed at night in their work setting recalls Smith’s own experience in shooting Clerks at a store where he had actually been working at the time.

Perhaps this can help explain the film’s flaws as well. Smith clearly demonstrates that he is no stranger to using crude humor to make people laugh, yet his attempt to emulate the sweeter and more sensitive side of Apatow’s trademark humor occasionally slips up. The ending, most notably, felt itself to have a hollow core, as if Smith was forcing out a way to end the film rather than allow it to resolve itself naturally.

Nevertheless, Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a fun flick right from the start with its blatant title. It’s not high class art, but it obviously isn’t trying to be. That being said, it isn’t low class either; there’s an undeniable intelligence behind it. So don’t be fooled.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is playing at the Hamilton Theater now.