Thanks to last summer’s double dose of “Knocked Up” and “Superbad,” combined with Judd Apatow-branded TV cult classics “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared,” I could not be more in love with Seth Rogen. And being the tried-and-true Jersey Girl that I am, I am super stoked about the upcoming Kevin Smith film starring none other than Rogen himself (yes he does work on projects not involving Apatow) “Zach and Miri Make a Porno.”

The film sounds like Smith’s getting back to his roots of honest emotion and complete vulgarity as the plot centers on two broke best friends. The female lead played by Elizabeth Banks (shown with Rogen above), who teams up with Rogen to make a porno film for some quick cash, but end up falling for each other along the way.

While production wrapped back in March, the film has hit a new, and perhaps damaging, bump in the road - an NC-17 rating.

According to an MTV.com news interview with Rogen last week, the filmmakers are working with the MPAA to win an R rating (a standard for Kevin Smith films), but Rogen and Co. sound none too pleased with the process thus far.

This begs the question, is the NC-17 rating even relevant these days?

This past awards season, Academy Award winning director Ang Lee caused quite a stir with his NC-17 drama “Lust, Caution”. The film received mixed to poor reviews and seemed to fall quickly out of sight at theaters. For some unknown reason (har har), NC-17 ratings don’t exactly spell box office bonanza these days.

Remember that other much-talked-about NC-17 movie from a few years back, “The Brown Bunny?” Yeah, I didn’t think you would.

So the question remains: if the films aren’t going to be able to reach their targeted audience, or any audience for that matter, what’s the point? Fans love Smith, and Smith loves his fans, so while other directors claim they just want the best film possible, Smith on-the-edge films targeted to a young crowd only fit under that category marginally.

Here’s hoping Smith and crew can sweet talk the MPAA into an R rating before the scheduled October release and before taking too much out of the film.

From Sign On San Diego

Kevin Smith’s upcoming comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno, with Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen, may actually be a porno. No, seriously. The MPAA is trying to slap it with an NC-17 rating, meaning you’d have a tough time seeing it down at the megaplex.

So what’s in this thing that makes it so, like, porny? We asked Seth, and here’s what he said…

“It’s like a romantic comedy,” Rogen told us this week, at the press day for The Pineapple Express, which opens in August. “It’s a romantic relationship movie—with a lot of porn and balls.”

Wait, whose balls? “My balls are not in it,” he clarified.

Still, Smith is fighting for an R rating, as he did when Clerks first got slapped with an NC-17—simply for dirty language. “You can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can’t show people having sex,” Rogen said. “I think it’s weird.”

If Zack and Miri does get an NC-17, Rogen thinks his hit flicks Knocked Up and Superbad should have, too.

“This is not anything outside of what we’ve done before,” he told us. “The word porno is in the title, and that kind of freaks people out.”

Well, that and the balls, maybe.

From E! Online

IT FEELS like moviedom’s version of an Ultimate Fighting grudge match — Bush vs. Stone.

The two men were born into wealth and were briefly classmates at Yale, but since then, the twain has hardly met. One ducked out of military service, boozed and brawled until he found God, ran a baseball team and turned to politics, ending up as governor of Texas and a two-term president, though the last years, thanks to a disastrous war in Iraq, have been pretty much of a fiasco, with his party losing Congress and his popularity ratings at historic lows.

The other earned medals in Vietnam before emerging as a bigger-than-life Hollywood filmmaker, tackling Big Issues of the day (”Platoon,” “Wall Street” and “JFK”) before seeing his own career take a downhill slide of its own, the bumps in the road smoothed over with booze and psychedelics.

Now another chapter is being written. Down in Louisiana, Oliver Stone has been shooting “W.,” his very personal take on the psychological evolution of George W. Bush, the movie everyone in Hollywood is dying to see but no one was willing to fund (Bill Block’s QED International ultimately bankrolled the movie’s $30-million budget and Lionsgate will release it this fall). It stars Josh Brolin as Dubya, with Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

Our film reporter John Horn has just returned from steamy Shreveport, La., where he watched Stone filming a father-son scene between Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell) and Bush Jr. set during Dubya’s tenure as owner of the Texas Rangers, with a local football stadium standing in for the Rangers’ home field (John’s story will run Sunday).

All too often these days, especially when the crisis management PR folks are on the case, a visit to a Hollywood set feels a lot like a trip to Los Alamos in the ’40s during the development of the atom bomb. That goes double when it comes to the set of Stone’s “W.,” especially after all the ruckus caused earlier this year when a bootleg version of the film’s script showed up on the Internet. It sounds like John got the “I Spy” treatment, to the point where he couldn’t even read the “sides” — the pages of the script that are being shot that day.

If John had only stopped by my house before he went to Shreveport, he could’ve gotten a pretty decent idea of what the script (written by Stanley Weiser) was like. Someone in the Stone camp slipped me an early version of it months ago. While there have been considerable revisions made since, I can guarantee that if you think “W.” will be an earnest, respectful rendering of the Bush years — sort of like Stone’s “World Trade Center” take on 9/11 — you would be . . . wrong!

As John put it after returning from the set, the film “is heavily focused on the president’s relationship with his father, so the best analogy that Oliver Stone came up with was: ‘Henry IV.’ Like Shakespeare, there’s a little bit of history, a little drama, a little comedy — anchored by a story about a king (George H.W. Bush) and his sometimes ne’er-do-well Prince Hal (George W. Bush).”

That’s a fair description of the script I read. It hits nearly all the high points of the Bush ascension and presidency, from his youthful frat house antics and religious convergence (we even get a scene where he claims God wants him to run for president) to Bush and Co.’s mishandling of the Iraqi postwar effort. But as John pointed out, the meat of the story involves the complicated 41-43 father-son relationship and how it impacted Dubya’s insistence on invading Iraq.

From the LA Times

Elizabeth will be on “The Tonight Show” to promote Meet Dave on Friday, July 11th! The show airs on the NBC network at 11:30pm - make sure to double check your local TV listings for exact air times in your area.

Tonight Show with Jay Leno - Friday July 11, 2008 - airs on NBC

If you can contribute a video from the show, please consider donating it to the website.

It feels like moviedom’s version of an Ultimate Fighting grudge match–Bush vs. Stone.

The two men were born into wealth and were briefly classmates at Yale, but since then, the twain has hardly met. One ducked out of military service, boozed and brawled until he found God, ran a baseball team and turned to politics, ending up as governor of Texas and a two-term president, though the last years, thanks to a disastrous war in Iraq, have been pretty much of a fiasco, with his party losing Congress and his popularity ratings at historic lows. The other earned medals in Vietnam before emerging as a bigger-than-life Hollywood filmmaker, tackling the Big Issues of the day (”Platoon,” “Wall Street” and “JFK”) before seeing his own career take a downhill slide of its own, the bumps in the road smoothed over with booze and psychedelics.

Now another chapter is being written. Down in Louisiana, Oliver Stone has been shooting “W,” his very personal take on the psychological evolution of George W. Bush, the movie everyone in Hollywood is dying to see but no one was willing to fund. It stars Josh Brolin as Dubya, with Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

Etbpstone

Our film reporter John Horn has just returned from steamy Shreveport, where he watched Stone filming a father-son scene between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. set during Dubya’s tenure as owner of the Texas Rangers, with a local football stadium standing in for the Rangers’ home field. John’s story will run this Sunday, but here’s a sneak peek at some of his interview with Stone.

Horn writes: “Racing to film, edit and release the film before the November election, Stone was not always getting even five hours of sleep a night. Even though it was nearly midnight and the crew was just finishing its lunch break, the 61-year-old director grew increasingly animated talking about ‘W.’

” ‘I love Michael Moore, but I didn’t want to make that kind of movie,’ Stone said of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ It ["W"] is not an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It’s a Shakespearean story … I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.’ ”

Later on, Horn gets Stone to offer his own armchair psychoanalysis of the president:

“Stone, who was briefly a Yale classmate of Bush, is clearly no fan of the president’s politics, but says he’s amazed by his resilience and ambition. ‘He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people,’ the director said. What further fascinates Stone is Bush’s religious and personal conversion: a hard-drinking C student who was able to become not only Texas governor but also the leader of the free world.

” ‘We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it’s never meant to demean him,’ Stone said. ‘We are playing with our own opinions and our own preconceptions of him. This is his diary–his attempt to explain himself in his own words.’ ”

From the LA Times