REEL CRITICS:

Director Kevin Smith has ample experience presenting foul-mouthed young adults in raunchy situations. “Clerks” made his reputation. He created an unusual new format in which lowbrow citizens in low-paying jobs revealed a lot about the social realities of American life through their everyday conversations.

He made a serious attempt to jump into mainstream cinema with the off beat hit “Chasing Amy.” His current release, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” seems like a misguided effort to recapture the same audience. Seth Rogen of “Knocked Up” and Elizabeth Banks of “The 40 Year Old Virgin” are the main players in this romantic farce.

A promising beginning has them living together in a dumpy apartment. The longtime roommates know everything about each other. Their casual banter about sexuality gets captured on a stranger’s cellphone camera. It leads to wild developments where making a porno seems like a smart way out of their dire financial straits.

What follows is an absurd version of how this situation might really play out. Real-life porn stars Katie Morgan and Traci Lords stand around watching the amateurs make the lamest sex scenes ever shot. The attempt to inject wholesome values into this scenario is lost in translation. It’s a film with some funny moments up front, but has nowhere to go in the end.

 

‘Changeling’ trades low-key for excess

Two actresses are already being touted as possible Oscar nominees — one deservedly so.

Clint Eastwood has such a stellar reputation that it was hard to accept his new film “Changeling” as something of a letdown. It’s certainly an incredible story of a mother whose son disappears in 1928 Los Angeles. Amid much hoopla, the police proudly present her with her son — but it’s the wrong boy.

The woman, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) refuses to accept the LAPD’s insistence that her son has been returned to her. The events that follow are shocking and painful and tragic.

Eastwood takes great care to tell the story, but instead of his usual low-key elegance we get overcooked melodrama. Jolie is lovely (although perhaps too much so — what anguished mother would bother to take the trouble to put on so much makeup?) but the endless closeup shots of her face can’t offset her uninvolving portrayal.

Kristin Scott Thomas is another gifted actress who definitely deserves an Oscar in the French film “I’ve Loved You So Long.” As the mysterious Juliette, reunited with her younger sister after a 15-year absence, she too is given extreme closeups but her aristocratic face is a myriad of different emotions. Hopelessness, anger, fear and a deep sadness are all etched in her eyes and it’s quite a moving performance.

Directed by Philippe Claudel, this too is basically a classy soap opera, but with exquisite subtlety and a more profound depth of emotion that literally explodes upon the screen in the final minutes. It’s a story about a mother’s love, and sisterly love, and it will break your heart.

JOHN DEPKO is a Costa Mesa resident and a senior investigator for the Orange County public defender’s office. SUSANNE PEREZ lives in Costa Mesa and is an executive assistant for a financial services company.