The 40-Year-Old Virgin: A-

Movies with titles that reveal their entire plots are usually something to be afraid of. And The 40-year old Virgin sounds like a movie that Rob Schnieder might do after bombing out in his latest Deuce Bigalow flick. That's why it's so suprising to see Steve Carrell wake up one morning as the title character, Andy, with a giant bulge in his boxers and act like it's nothing. Shocking to us but to him it is nothing. He's supressed his libido but making mountains of egg salad, collecting action figures, and staying away from women. Steve Carrell has made a name for himself as a man of outsized personality: as the anchorman in Bruce Almighty or Paul Lynnde in Bewitched, yet he restrains himself from caricture. He plays Andy in the most suprising way: as an actual human being. When some of Andy's colleagues at the store he works at figure out his "secret" they go on a quest to get him laid. Yet another one of the movie's strength's is that it doesn't fall into a one-note joke after 30 minutes. In Andy's quest to get laid we discover his central philosophy: that love and sex should never entangle. When he does finally find the girl for him, played to the hilt by Catherine Keener, sex isn't the first thing they do...it's actually the last. And though the final hurdle in their relationship comes in the most aggravatingly slapstick way their whole connection still rings true. Where Wedding Crashers took pleasure in the surreality of a relationship this movie takes its joy in the humanity. Continually buoyant and clever this is a heady sex comedy with a very very sweet center that avoids bogging itself down in both genetalia and sentimentality.