The 40-Year Old Virgin
This morning I stumbled out of my apartment to see a 10:30AM showing of this flick then it turned out it actually started at 11:10AM and I read the schedule wrong online so I killed time wandering around in the bookstore. Man, there's alot of books out there. So many!
Anyway, I head into the movie and noticed the theater was sort of filled with mentally challenged people (for real). A couple buses were out front and I guess it was like movie day or whatever. It was kinda fun watching the flick in that atmosphere because the audience was having such a great time. (But I'm not really sure if the people who organized the movie day realized what kind of movie this was. Because a good chunk of this flick is totally filthy. And like every time the F word or any curse word was thrown out there there'd be a rolling 'Wooooooo....' through the theater. It was alot of wooing. The whole place was bubbling with excitement over the amount of cursing. But there was also weird silences during actual nudity sex scenes which made me sort of oddly uncomfortable.) But whatever the audience seemed to have a great time with this flick and enjoyed it from beginning to end.
Me on the other hand enjoyed it umm.... not as much. I'd say I enjoyed 33-35% of this movie. There are a bunch of solid jokes that landed and stucked. The overall concept is freshish. There's some acceptable weirdness and goodass harshnicity. The side characters (although they were really 'side-characters light') didn't bother me. They all sort of brought something to the table. Carell was good. I'm not sure if really jammed a flag in the ground that says, 'Me! Leading Man Now!' but he was entertaining enough. (Sorta). But of all the main characters, I think Carell had the least amount of funny. He leaned heavily on his physical to get his laughs. Which is fine. But it was weird to see the tables turned on him. Instead of being the side character who steals the movie- he was the straight man who didn't.
The biggest downside of this movie is over time it took on sort of a weird tone. The rapid pacing starting to trip and bumble stumble. At certain points this movie was flatout bad. Scenes and whole characters were unnecessary. The 2nd half was all sloppy and lonnng. Carell started acting out of character and herky jerky. It whateverly warped into the sub-standard schlocky romance that felt forced. It had vague conservative messages about sex. (I wondered if there was some far right influence tuning it up). Directionwise and messagewise the movie started wandering around like it lost its glasses and couldn't find the door to get the hell out of the itself.
I guess when push comes to shove I ended up disappointed by this flick. In the same way I was disappointed by movies like Anchorman, Mean Girls, Bruce Almighty. Going in to them I expected to see something smartly good. They start off promising and stuff. But they all succumb to the sellout funneling of 'let's turn this dopey concept into a real movie with a real message' thing. Yawn. And typically, with this flick the last third started blatantly shaking and cracking... until it finally collapsed into a pile of mush with a quiet splut. Then the credits proudly rolled by and the house lights came up. That was that, huh? I sort of blinked my eyes and looked around like, ummm... what do they want me to do?.... Friggin clap? Ok. Fine. <clap 2x> Congrats on your hit.
Three Good Things About this Movie
- There's some genuinely funny stuff in there.
- The movie did trick me into thinking there was something special about it for
a while.
- Hot chicks throughout and boobs. And Kathleen Teener is hot.
Three Bad Things About this Movie
- It was punishingly unnecessarily surprisingly long.
- The editing was meat cleaver hack and all over the road.
- The cutesy 'off beat' soundtrack was eyerolling obvious and dopey.
I gotta say. I don't really know about this movie. I get the feeling on future viewings it will go downhill fast. As I walked out I wondered if maybe I'm just not a comedy/romance kind of guy on any level anymore. Thinking maybe I've grown too jaded for romance to sink in on a comedy the way it should. But then I remembered how I was reminded the other day that I can certainly climb onboard a dopey comedy romance! The great Overboard was on! And at the end when it got to the Katerina! Arturo! part and Goldie was excitedly putting on a lifevest to jump overboard for Kurt. I got chills and teary eyed. So it ain't me. I'm still onboard with that stuff-- it's them that's gone over.