Here, though, he resists the temptation to turn Andy into some hideous eunuch-creep. In his previous movie roles, as the addled newscaster in Bruce Almighty, the brain-dead meteorologist in Anchorman, even channeling Paul Lynde’s snarky chiffon quiver in Bewitched, Steve Carell revealed a punchy genius for outsize personality tics. It’s the bulge he’s been carrying his whole life, the one he’s too scared to relieve.
He has also never had sex, and so it’s hardly a wonder that he wakes up each morning with a giant bulge in his boxers. He’s so obsessive he owns a doll of the Six Million Dollar Man‘s boss.
That look is the definition of arrested, and so is Andy’s home, which is a plastic paradise of monster models, videogames, comic books, and action figures carefully sealed in their original packaging. Andy, who works in the stockroom of an electronics megastore, owns a bike instead of a car, and he wears cheesy polo shirts, wide belts, and excessively tidy hair that add up to what must have been a teenage geek’s idea of with-it in 1982. The title dweeb, Andy Stitzer (Steve Carell), is a tenderly polite and gawky man-child who possesses the look, and demeanor, of a mama’s boy heading off to his first day of eighth grade. Movies that shout out their premise in the title are generally something to be wary of, and The 40 Year-Old Virgin is the sort of concept you’d expect to see Rob Schneider stuck in after bottoming out in Deuce Bigalow: Man-Whore in Bangkok.
0 kommentar(er)
