I got the first response back from one of the friends I trust most when it comes to reading my stuff; and he was very positive and encouraging. He reads a lot in this genre and has a great head for story and narrative logic, and while there is work to be done it sounds like, for him at least, we did the big things generally right; and that feels fantastic.

Now we just need some others to read it and feel that way!

For the first time since I made that bar graph, it has only four bars on it. One is a 10-minute play that I have half-completed. The other is a full-length play that is about 25% drafted. The other two are screenplays – this very personal sci-fi thing that I started 11 freaking years ago and seems to come out one agonizing page at a time. It’s now 72 pages and I might even finish it before I die because it really shouldn’t be over 95. And the other is another personal piece that has reached the point where I have to reconceptualize it from being a feature screenplay to something else because it really is The Script That Will Never End. I currently have 139 pages of that and am still nowhere near done.

I have been pressing hard on the sci-fi piece – my best friend/sometimes writing partner Adam really wants to see it and I must admit I am fed up with it not being done. I am also trying to make up for a couple of years where I feel like my screenwriting pace slipped to unacceptable levels. Of these four bars; I think that’s likeliest to rise up to victorious heights and then disappear like a Tetris row next.

Like I said, it’s really rare of me to have so few things mid-draft. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff brainstorming…but I don’t know what it would mean for me to have nearly all of the mid-process stuff done. To not have something to just fire up the computer and hang words on. I mean, from a practical standpoint it would mean I have no choice but to muscle some long-simmering stuff into position to be written. Whatever this restless energy is that has produced so much work these last 4-5 months is still inside me, and needs projects to work on. I’ve never had to come up with material for it on-demand in this way.

Adam and I are crunching on a new collaborative piece for which he has technically already written a few pages; but I know we’re going to re-write them and I’m not sure how long this thing should be, yet. So it’s not yet on the graph, though it will be soon. I also have a new short film idea that has triggered some good ideas over the last few days. That one could start producing pages surprisingly soon.

So maybe the bars will multiply again and I won’t have to face this unknown phase. Or maybe I should take this as a sign to really finish these pieces and see what happens then.

As usual, I have no idea what the hell I’m going to do tomorrow. Except write, Jimmy. These days, it’s a good bet I’ll be doing that.

I add details, I reject many. I come up with stupid ideas. Astonishingly good ideas seem to come out of nowhere. I can’t glimpse the thing directly; it’s too ephemeral – but by testing one thing at a time to see whether or not it belongs in the thing, I start to understand it indirectly. Usually, there’s at least one night where I’m torn between going to sleep and jumping out of bed to get to the keyboard and write some of this stuff down.

I can’t always tell when, but at some point, I recognize it. Maybe it doesn’t have a title, but I’ve named it in my mind – because I have a sense of what it’s about, what it feels like, what I want it to look like.

And then – there’s a new thing on the list of Stuff Nick Has to Write.

He will allow the novel to enjoy life for a few weeks, then come back and start hacking fat off of it and berating it for not being better.

I’m writing in a weirdly-unconscious place now. I guess it’s natural that, having never-written in precisely this mode before, I would discover new responses within myself. Never in my life have I sat down so consistently for so many consecutive weeks, with such singular focus on one project. And I have never written anything this big, full stop. 2013 is already in the running for the most productive year of my life in terms of writing output, and it’s still April. That’s downright alarming.

But these days, when I open up the latest chapter, this astonishing hostility kicks in. All I can think is: “You again?!” I don’t hate the book but I feel oppressed by the familiar unfinishedness of it. It’s not the same gray rut you might feel from clocking in at a job you don’t like; maybe it’s the impatience of such a long and laborious incubation. I wake up each morning to find that it’s still just a Word doc, with a blinking cursor taunting me from the tail of an incomplete sentence, and I am enraged that it hasn’t turned itself into anything else in the night.

There’s little brainstorming left to do. I am catching up to and transcribing the inevitable narrative output of an equation I already wrote. A warped argument in my brain is trying to even deny to me the satisfaction that I’m creating anything at all in these sessions, other than hopefully-smooth sentences.

And so each day I am convinced that I can’t do it. I won’t do it. Today will be that Mulligan day I built into the schedule, when the great choking gunk we call The Block will win and I will wave the white flag and I fart the day away with a Frappuccino and video games.

And I go over what I wrote yesterday. I don’t even remember half of it; because I was writing unconsciously that day, too. I make some snips and corrections, I bring myself back to that blinking cursor, and then, somehow…I just start typing. Because whatever thought is on the page isn’t finished.

I grump my way through a sentence at a time, building a moment, orchestrating an epiphany or a reveal, trying to come up with a single damned metaphor that doesn’t barf with pretension or go limp from obscurity. Using adjectives. Hating myself for using adjectives. Reminding myself that F. Scott Fitzgerald used adjectives and survived.

Sooner or later I reach the end of a sequence; the trance snaps, I look at the word count down in the corner…and somehow I’ve written my quota for the session.

Then I think to myself: “Well, sure, you got lucky with the morning session; but this afternoon you’ll be screwed…”

And I never am.

Further; I can’t explain why it is that, as soon as this painting-kicking idea struck, I decided that it should be a Rothko that the man kicks.

Ask yourself – honestly, now – could you see kicking this?

It’s actually a greater challenge to me to not wrap it up easily – it takes a lot of care to create interest and entertainment while teetering on the edge of ambiguity; and yet that’s what I feel duty-bound to do, because to me, the communication between art and its viewer is incredibly-unpredictable, personal, and powerful, and I couldn’t reduce that.

Does that mean I want to kick a painting? I’ve never felt that urge – although I confess I’ve felt myself wrestling with other strange, destructive urges in my life. The psychological definition of vertigo is the fear of falling set in tense conflict with an inexplicable desire to jump. But why would any person jump? Well – who hasn’t wanted to just say Fuck you, gravity, I’m doing this on my terms! I think we have a million varieties of vertigo, and the way that sensation manifests itself creates some unforgettable behavior; as well as some incredible art.

My favorite thing on the Internet today is this clip from a little-seen but-reportedly-awful early-80′s Australian musical superhero spoof about an alcoholic Superman-knockoff called The Return of Captain Invincible. Alan Arkin plays Cpt. Invincible, lured away from the bottle and out of retirement, and Sir Christopher Lee plays his sadistic nemesis, Mr. Midnight, who wants to use his Hypnoray to kill all non-white people.

The songs are by Richard O’Brien – the creator of The Rocky Horror Show and its film adaptation. And in this song, Christopher Lee reduces Cpt. Invincible to a fetal position with a pun-heavy rockgasm about how much he enjoys cocktails. It’s somehow weirder than I’ve described it:

Christopher Lee – Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Bond Villain, Tolkein Wizard, Sith Lord, Metal Band Frontman, real-life Nazi-hunting Special Forces Badass…also does showtunes

I’ve read stories about Richard O’Brien showing up at Rocky Horror tributes to sing (he performed the title theme and the role of butler Riff Raff in the film) and being too drunk to remember the lyrics. And when I look at something like this, I believe that something this wretchedly grandiose and wonderfully unhinged had to come from a somehow genuine place; from someone who has had to deal with the love and loathing and pleasure and destruction of alcohol in his life in a deeply personal way, and is responding to it not with denial or self-pity but nutso pizzazz.

I think it’s in the nature of creative people to try and capture the contradictory, the inexplicable, and often gloriously-unjustifiable behavior they see in others and acknowledge in themselves. Because none of our truly-interesting struggles are one-sided or cleanly-resolved. We have the most ingenious ways of fighting back against life and asserting ourselves and I really celebrate that; I find stories where everyone behaves exactly as the majority wants them to behave to be insufferable, because that majority can be used to enforce denial of what members of the majority deny with in themselves – all their delicious, weird uniqueness.

I guess that’s the closest I can come to explaining The Rothko. Maybe, if anyone asks, I’ll just point them here and hope for the best.

Corpse Bride
Directors: Tim Burton and Mike Johnson
Writers: Story and Characters by Tim Burton, Screenplay by John August and Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson
Producers: Tim Burton and Allison Abbate
Featuring the voices of: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Emily Watson, Tracey Ullman, Paul Whitehouse, Joanna Lumley, Albert Finney, Richard E. Grant, Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Jane Horrocks, Danny Elfman

The fairy tale is an enduring story format because it works with those simple broad tropes that resonate from the moment we start making sense of the world: Life and death. Doing what our parents want or growing into our own desires. The virtues of being poor and in love, and finding the right reason to marry someone. And how our sins always come back to haunt us.

And yet filmmaker Tim Burton seems to be the only storyteller working interested in creating new fairy tales rather than riffing off the old ones. Edward Scissorhands easily counts, as does his previous stop-motion animated feature The Nightmare Before Christmas. In a way it seizes control of the form for the misfits of the world – the popular people can have their glistering towers and flowing-haired princesses, Burton is perfectly content to patch together his stories from bugs and bones. And with Corpse Bride, he delivers yet another charming and gruesome fantasia which is not only a visual feast, but a beautifully simple story about how if we take the time to look at that which frightens us, we might find it’s not so bad after all.

It is not that we should be in a hurry to die, but young Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp), through an unlucky accident, discovers that after you go it’s not so lonely and terrible as you might imagine. His family, newly-rich fish merchants hoping to continue their upward momentum, has arranged his marriage to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), the pale and quiet daughter of the noble Everglot family. Just listen to these names and tell me Burton doesn’t revel in their creation – Victoria’s parents are the scowling and rotund Finnis Everglot (Albert Finney) and the imperious Maudeline (Joanna Lumley), whose hair wouldn’t clear most tunnels. Maudeline is so fearsomely addicted to propriety that when Victoria confesses in a panic that she saw Victor in the embrace of a living corpse, Maudeline replies: “Victor was in your room!? The scandal!”

The Everglots have fallen on hard times, not that they will admit it, and need the Van Dorts’ wealth to restore their family name. Victor and Victoria are only just getting to know one another, and kind of like what they see, but family pressures have the spindly, bookish Victor so nervous he keeps blowing his vows at the rehearsal, and flees into the forest to be alone. The absence of a groom with a wedding less than a day away plays right into the plans of Lord Barkis Bittern (Richard E. Grant), who has a superb name and an even better chin, and thinks the Everglots are still rich.

But about that living corpse – fairy tales are driven by fateful coincidence, and in this case Victor is practicing his vows again when suddenly a woman (Helena Bonham Carter) rises from the ground and accepts his ring. There is beauty to her – an ethereal grace in spite of her bluish hue, and the missing skin on an arm and leg, and that eyeball that keeps popping out, and the maggot living in her head who looks and sounds uncannily like Peter Lorre (Enn Reitel). And she has waited a long time to be married.

The Corpse Bride whisks Victor off to the world of the dead, which is noisy and cheerful and colorful, a stark contrast to the pale and cold world of “breathers”. New arrivals are greeted at a raucous bar/club, where host Bonejangles (voiced by composer Danny Elfman, who contributes 5 songs on top of his score) leads a production number which is like the macabre Silly Symphonies classic The Skeleton Dance turned into a showstopping New Orleans cabaret act.

Victor must choose between the promising Victoria and the living world which has so far left him miserable, and the adoring Corpse Bride and the zealous, accommodating dead. And in between we have tragic misunderstandings, the truth about an old murder, a duel, a tall tower filled with dusty books where a wise old skeleton provides potions to resolve your plot difficulties, and all the other stuff we love in our fairy tales. At one point the dead get to plan a wedding themselves, which they do with the same misguided enthusiasm with which the residents of Halloweentown tried to figure out Christmas.

While computer animation is much in vogue and has many qualities (and is used sparingly here to put extra polish on some tricky bits), the weight of these moldable puppets has an appeal of its own. They seem inherently more cinematic because of their physical reality – they actually exist and are being lit and photographed on real sets on soundstages. Those who know The Nightmare Before Chrsitmas well will still be justifiably stunned by the advances in stop motion sophistication. Everything from the camera’s freedom of movement and focus, to Victor’s piano playing to flying crows to details of water and fabric and fire – there is unimaginable smoothness and confidence to it all. To see it on the big screen is to treat yourself to the chance to truly admire its craft.

In direct comparison, Bride’s story shows a few more rickety parts but also an abundance of gags and timing bits which can only come with greater mastery of the medium. Like Nightmare, it has its frightening moments and might not be appropriate for the smallest of children. But behind each dead body is a playful spirit, the spiders have lovely singing voices, and our dogs still remember and love us even after they have been reduced to bones. That’s comforting at any age.

The Constant Gardener
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Writers: Screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
Producers: Simon Channing-Williams
Stars: Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Hubert Koundé, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy, Pete Postlethwaite, Gerald McSorley, Donald Sumpter, Richard McCabe

I used to work for a company with a “friendly” but off-the-books relationship with a neighboring company that had a large library of purportedly-confidential material in a scanned database. If my boss announced at a meeting that “we” should study up on a particular text, I would know to go to my computer and fill out a little form on the Internet. That form would go who-knows-where, where it would be printed out and delivered to some other party, who would produce the requested manuscript, then send it on to a delivery person, whose cart would happen by our area on its rounds and drop it off so I could read it.

The Constant Gardener, a strong and compelling on-screen intrigue, is partially about the world where killing is achieved by the same sort of convenient arrangement. By the end one character plaintively and rhetorically asks – “Who has committed murder?”, and the truth is that it is difficult to pin down, because the actual task has been so thoroughly delegated. There are a lot of layers between the wealthy, whose accumulation is threatened, and that blue pickup truck with the armed men in back who come round your corner one day. The rich never pulled the trigger, although it’s inarguable that they are going to fortunately benefit from the regrettable bit of nasty business. How do you avenge a killing arranged by corporate will?

That question leads to what the movie, based on the novel by cynical spy author John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Tailor of Panama), is fundamentally about, and that is the love relationship between the very proper Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), and the very improper Tessa (Rachel Weisz), who will become Mrs. Justin Quayle before her very regrettable death out on a lake in the Kenyan countryside.

Justin Quayle is unfailingly polite and sympathetic at all times. He is a diplomat to his bones, so habitually seeing someone else’s point of view that when his friend Sandy (Danny Huston) comes to inform him of the discovery of Tessa’s body, Justin’s first response is: “It must have been difficult for you”. Later, when he wants the photographers snapping Tessa’s grave to leave, he thanks them for coming with a voice of choked anguish.

He is soft by upbringing – we hear diplomacy is the family line – as well as a bit fussy and dull, preferring to keep his nose down in the garden in his spare time and not accustomed to facing problems outside his brief. Ralph Fiennes, consistently proficient in the technique of building a character, adds something else here, too – it’s a kind of innocence, a suggestion that all this time spent dutifully ignoring the problems of the complicated adult world means there is a part hidden deep inside that never quite grew up.

It rears its head when he meets Tessa, a human-rights activist who poses some hot-tempered questions to him at a lecture and, afterwards, seduces him. Something happens between the two of them – whatever motives brought them to this bed (it is suggested around the edges of the plot that hers weren’t entirely pure at first), they pass through unconsciously into a new kind of existence, where the roles they play in their very opposite lives suddenly seem like a delightful game, one they can laugh about in this sanctuary. To see Justin Quayle’s eyes light up is to see how important this is to him. She will make the same discovery with time, that whether she knew it or not she needed someone like him – someone who is focused, and dutiful, and as the title indicates, constant.

When he is dispatched to Africa she insists on coming along and says she doesn’t care in what role. He decides it should be as his wife. Now, at parties with Very Important People, she can make impertinent accusations about the misery their greed and politics spread, and when Justin’s friends ask him to control his wife, he shrugs and answers honestly that he cannot. And he smiles, not that he lets them see it.

Trained to behave, Justin appreciates the presence of misbehavior even if he is not always sure what Tessa’s doing, touring the countryside with a doctor (Hubert Koundé) so regularly that people are convinced an affair is going on. In fact, it seems no one is convinced the Quayle marriage is a true love match. And then Tessa pieces together something very threatening to the interests of some rich people, and somehow ends up dead.

In a simple thriller we would expect to see the man chasing down the clues and catching his wife’s killer. But what is more important in The Constant Gardener, where “the killer” is a sort of abstract concept, is how Justin is doing more than solving a mystery – he is honoring his grief over the loss of nuisance-making in his life by finally making a nuisance himself. His constancy is devoted now to seeing what Tessa saw – everything she saw.

Director Fernando Meirelles made a splash in world cinema with 2003’s City of God, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. As with that movie we see him intimately interested in the street-level view of life in poverty. In energetic fashion, using wildly-varying color schemes, nervous camerawork, and cutting back and forth between Justin and Tessa’s romance and his post-mortem investigations, he submerges us not only in the rhythm and temper of a Kenya ravaged by disease and poverty, but Justin’s dawning awareness of it all. Before he could only nod with his colleagues about how sad it all was – later, we can tell he is transformed by the way he processes an argument that, well, those people were going to die anyway, so why not have their deaths create a few jobs for England and help a fellow countryman keep his stock prices up?

Jeffrey Caine’s adaptation of the novel is effective though occasionally demagogic; the movie is better when yearning than it is when hectoring. Many of the actors are cast slightly-against type and thus give refreshing performances. Pete Postlethwaite is a vigorous doctor who must mix religion with pragmatism (he demonstrates how drug companies donate expired pills by the thousands, which they will write off and he must then incinerate so no one will swallow them), and Donald Sumpter is the friendly and posh Tim Donohue, who doesn’t really bother trying to pretend he is not a spy, but will chuckle modestly when people mention it at parties.

The world Le Carré’s story creates is a gripping and complex one, mixing pharmaceutical giants with rival governments, corruption at all levels, and billions upon billions of dollars that never seem to trickle their way down to the peasants scraping what living they can out of the ground. When so much is at stake, it’s no wonder people who create disturbances fall prey to misfortune. Sad, really, but who do you blame?

Transporter 2
Director: Louis Leterrier
Writers: Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen
Producers: Luc Besson and Steven Chasman
Stars: Jason Statham, Alessandro Gassman, Amber Valletta, Katie Nauta, Matthew Modine, Jason Flemying, Keith David, François Berléand, Hunter Clary

In 2002’s The Transporter there was a scene where Frank Martin (Jason Statham), an ex-British Special Forces soldier now in the lucrative field of mercenary high-speed driving, smeared his body in grease and fought a roomful of thugs while standing on bicycle pedals. As their grasping hands slipped impotently off his muscled torso I realized the movie had achieved a sort of Golden Mean of preposterousness. It was so calculatedly absurd it was practically daring you to enjoy it in spite of your better nature. Though the acting was mannered and bizarre and the plot all but incomprehensible, the movie was more fun than it had any right to be.

Something about the combination of driving stunts, fisticuffs and surly demeanor clicked enough with audiences to warrant a sequel, and a well-sponsored one at that. The true sign of The Transporter’s viability as a franchise is how lovingly-photographed the Heineken bottles in Frank Martin’s fridge are; and the ingenious way he uses an iPod and the dashboard computer of an Audi to help save Miami from the spread of a biological doomsday weapon.

If that sounds pretty unlikely to you, be warned that this sequel feels no regrets about all that grease business, and aims to top it if at all possible. In a way, while I can honestly say the makers of The Transporter care more about its plot this time around, I sm not convinced that’s a good thing in this case.

Frank has temporarily left his French countryside home and is slumming it for a month as the personal driver for Jack Billings (Hunter Clary), the young son of the U.S. Government drug czar (Matthew Modine). He ferries the kid to and from school each day, teaches him about the importance of seatbelts, and even discreetly shields the kid from the arguments between Daddy and Mommy (Amber Valletta). Mommy clearly admires Frank’s full service attitude.

Then one day Frank takes little Jack to the Doctor’s office for his checkup. When he sees that the receptionist is wearing stiletto heels and a tattoo reading “Death by Bunny” (among other clues), he suspects something is up, and he bursts in to find two Russian goons in badly-fitting doctor jackets trying to inject Jack with some unsightly green substance.

Despite Frank’s best and most violent efforts Jack is kidnapped, and the movie becomes about his capture as well as the mystery of that syringe, which contains a lethal man-made virus. Like all movie viruses it comes in designer colors – the bug in lime, the cure in violet.

Behind the various dastardly deeds is Gianni (Alessandro Gassman), who doesn’t particularly care about the outcome for his own sake but is acting as a sort of greasy megalomaniac-for-hire. The movie is thus best described as a guns-blazing salute to temps. Gianni’s sidekick/bedmate is the leggy Miss-Death-by-Bunny mentioned above (Kate Nauta) – she seems to get all her clothing from Trashy Lingerie and is certainly one of the more unique-looking villainesses in memory, sort of a cross between Famke Janssen’s Xenia Onatopp in Goldeneye and Daryl Hannah’s Pleasurebot in Blade Runner, but without half the acting chops of either, sadly.

Statham’s glowering, grumbling manner helps offset his increasingly ludicrous feats. He doesn’t act smug about all his various triumphs over physics and gravity, it’s more like he is annoyed that he’s being forced into them. Take the scene where he realizes the car he is driving has a bomb strapped to the undercarriage. A normal person might suggest diving out of the car, but that would mean abandoning the vehicle to its fate. Watch what Frank Martin does instead, and see if you can enjoy it even as you accept its utter impossibility.

The movie even shows a willingness to wink at itself – when Frank’s traditional black suit is torn, he reaches into a trunk full of weaponry and pulls out a cleanly-pressed, vacuum-sealed new suit to change into. And the French policeman (François Berléand), who showed such bemused disbelief at Frank’s antics in the previous film makes a contrived but amusing appearance, where he distracts the local cops by cooking for them.

The brawls, as choreographed by Cory Yuen (Jet Li’s frequent collaborator, back from the first movie), show the faux-improvisational delight we have seen in many Jackie Chan movies, as Frank makes non-traditional use of such found props as a fire hose, a chandelier and a boat. And one mano-a-mano that happens in a spiraling-out-of-control jet might just be the first chopsockey tribute to Fred Astaire’s dance on the ceiling in Royal Wedding.

But as I’ve said above, there is a greater emphasis on the mechanics of the story this time around, and the fighting/driving sequences show just a touch less ingenuity. And while there was a gritty appeal in its predecessor’s almost exclusively physical effects and earthbound melees, this time there are several instances of laughably amateurish digital animation, and some obvious wirework lending Frank some spring in his step.

In the end it just slightly misses achieving that same precious balance the first reached in its best moments. But its lack of pretense, and a willingness to try just about any damned thing it can think of to entertain you, makes The Transporter 2 appealing enough in the end. You can feel secure that, every time the fists start flying or the black Audi drops into gear, the filmmakers will work to earn your money.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Director: Judd Apatow
Writers: Steve Carell and Judd Apatow
Producers: Judd Apatow, Shauna Robertson, Clayton Townsend
Stars: Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Paul Rudd, Romany Malco, Seth Rogen, Elizbaeth Banks, Leslie Mann, Jane Lynch

Steve Carell’s face is like a church service you desperately want to laugh in. This is the most square, sober, white, middlebrow, milquetoast kisser you ever saw. It passes beyond dour and into new dimensions of grave earnest. He should be selling insurance to Mormons. Which is maybe why he doesn’t even have to move to be funny.

That performance-enhanced deadpan has made him a reliable second banana for years, stealing bits out from under Will Ferrell in Anchorman, Jim Carrey in Bruce Almighty, even Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. In that loose-knit troupe of modern comedy stars and filmmakers that’s been dubbed “The Frat Pack” he’s like a member of the “B” squad. The 40-Year-Old Virgin is a chance for he and other supporting “Frat Pack”-ers like Paul Rudd to take their own spotlight, and historically this doesn’t always go well. But he earns his leading man bona fides and delivers us a raunchy and surprisingly sweet-natured sex comedy in the bargain.

His first success is in creating a memorable character for himself. Andy Stitzer (Carell) has indeed passed the big 4-0 without ever knowing a woman in the Biblical sense. It’s not that he’s hideous-looking or has lacked the opportunity, but mishaps and anxieties compounded in such a way over the years as to make him prefer to stop trying.

His whole life is constructed to express a very little bit of himself in a small, protected corner where no one can see – he collects action figures, plays video games, rides his bike to and from work and stays home every night with gadgets and toys that seem lacking in purpose without anyone else around. “Is that the Six-Million-Dollar Man’s boss?” he’s asked in incredulous amazement when someone finally sees his pristine toy shelves.

He has the knowledge and experience to be a great salesman at the electronics store he works at, but stays in the stock room rather than risk interaction. He likes women, he really does; in a confessional moment he blurts out that he respects them so much he never speaks to them. This is a tricky persona to portray and get us to care about, and the movie acknowledges that a dedicated loner like Andy, were he not so gentle deep down, could be one of those walking time bombs. Certainly the only reason his co-workers invite him to their poker game is because they’ve got an empty chair.

But at that game, as he tries to take part in a conversation about the nasty, his ignorance is revealed and his secret comes out. Their reaction is key – there is a little mockery, but the overall effect is one of endearing Andy to them. They each have their own problems – David (Rudd) is still passive-aggressively mooning over his ex-girlfriend, Jay (Romany Malco) can’t stop cheating on his girl, and Cal (Seth Rogen) sees no value in emotional attachment at all. But because they each remember the nervousness and awkwardness of that time before they enjoyed communion with the fairer sex, they sympathize. They’re all emotionally-arrested dorks, so they can’t help but look at Andy and think “there, but for the grace of God…”.

So they make it their mission to arrange his deflowering; but the message of the movie is that this ultimately means much more than simple intercourse to him. It means growing up and doing something with his life and risking an emotional connection with someone that’s not based on magic tricks or watching Survivor together. So while his pals encourage him to start his training with a series of easy lays – they call it being a “Ho-Runner” – he is drawn to a single mother (Catherine Keener) who works at a store across the street selling peoples’ inessentials on eBay.

Their courtship is charming – she can sense there is something delicate about him that needs coaxing out, and she has been wounded so deeply by relationships that leap into the sack that his hesitance only makes him seem more chivalrous. The parallels between what they can do for each other emotionally and how her job can capitalize on his action figures is obvious but winning nonetheless.

There are vulgarities and gross-out scenes galore – Andy provides a potent demonstration of the complex hazards of “morning wood”, and other bodily processes are drafted into service. Not to mention the gay jokes, racial jokes, and references to the David Caruso movie Jade. It’s noteworthy how benign they can come off, though, due to the orientation of the comedy. Potentially offensive as its material is this is a movie that, deep down, likes its characters, and will not mock or humiliate them just for sport. That difference between this and other movies in which characters are vomited on is subtle but crucial.

Carell developed Andy’s character during his days with Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe and you can sense the time and effort he has put into interacting with the world the way Andy would. He is the living embodiment of a square peg, many of his laughs come not from exactly what he says, but in the carefully-calibrated way in which what he says and the thought process it indicates exist just a couple of inches to the left of what a more socially-adapted person would say. And given his naturally inert expression and posture it is a joy watching him blossom – in a drunk scene there’s something hysterical about the way he peels himself out of a bar booth, and by the end credits he’s – well, I won’t spoil that for you.

Often in a straight-ahead comedy the reviewer’s task is to expand into hundreds of words either “I laughed” or “I didn’t laugh” and attempt the impossible task of explaining why. Comedy does not let itself be wrangled so easily. I can’t say every joke in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” is a winner, but I didn’t go for any long stretch without laughing. What I can say is that it stands in the proud tradition of naughty movies made without cynicism or condemnation. It celebrates its prurience but disarms by honestly addressing the related emotions and empowering the people you root for. It’s about sex, but it’s not just about the sex.