The 40-Year-Old Virgin turns out not to be a movie but an idea. The idea is this: Not having sex until you are 40 is funny. Well, no it isn't -- it's OK. Joke after joke equating sex to hipness, to adulthood, to ease of being, to grace and to delight, all of these jokes can be ignored, because it's OK that Andy is a virgin. Except that it's NOT actually OK, and it can't be, because that's why the movie got made. OK?
The skits that illustrate, alternately, that this OK and not OK, are sometimes funny. They are sometimes, in fact, VERY funny. I laughed out loud. I like funny. But the real idea that is lurking in the movie is the massive dominance that sex has in day-to-day life -- in advertisements, in social interaction, in friendship. It's a fool's game to say when this became real. (Kids today! I tell you -- when I was nearly two years old, we had the Summer of Love! Now that was sex! Probably not for my parents, though.) But the movie abandons this. I know it isn't news, but it is real, and it is something that really matters. And the movie sets it on the wall, sets the crosshairs on it, and walks away.
In the movie, sex is on huge TV screens. Electronics are essentially used to promote sex, or, occasionally, spectacular violence. It's on the sides of buses (and is called out in jokes for it). And the realness of sex is held nicely up to the pretend sex. It's a sleeper notion, a Fast Times at Ridgemont High sort of insidious sneaky funny. The movie is really about what it says! It's just that the message is kind of tangled, like in Fast Times, or Scream, or one of the other not-so-dumb dumb movies.
But it's skits. There's a vomit joke (check), some nice product placements (check), a poker joke (check), and a transvestite (check, please). There's no real connection between characters -- no real ability to set up a real alternative to sex as a deity. But there are funny skits. Race and money and maleness are skewered much more effectively, with a sharp hammer's head swung fast, than sex ever is. By the end, I wanted more of that -- more of the vigorous improv and dialogue, like it was written by Barry Levinson's angry teenage son, who lives in LA and isn't happy about any of it. That was solid and shocking and a flare of real impact.