Supercross and Valiant were not screened in my market.  Like I would have seen them, anyways . . .

I like jokes – the racier, the better.  To me, if something is funny, it’s funny, no matter who it offends.  And to that I always add this simple qualification: If someone tells a funny joke about a doughy, hairy, white guy who can’t get laid, I’ll be the first person to laugh.

Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin takes the aforementioned caveat to a totally unexpected level by adding the following elements to its protagonist’s bag of tricks: Comic book r eading, videogame playing, action figure collecting, Survivor watching, prog-rock listening, and the riding of one’s bike to work.  It was like watching myself on The Truman Show, but, as promised, I laughed my ass off at the entire thing, even though it hit really close to home (in my defense, I don't leave action figures in the box).

Co-writer Steve Carell, slipping effortlessly into leading man territory after stealing scenes in Bruce Almighty and Anchorman, plays the titular virgin, a stockroom employee of an electronics chain store.  Andy’s sexual inexperience is made public during an after-hours poker game with three co-workers (Seth Rogen, and The Château "brothers": Paul Rudd and Romany Malco), who immediately make it their mission to get Andy’s bone smooched ASAP.  Hilarity ensues in two forms: The edgy material you’d expect from an R-rated sex comedy; and a surprisingly touching relationship which develops between Andy and a woman who owns a small business across the street from his store (Catherine Keener, The Interpreter).

Simply put, Virgin works for two reasons: The acting and the writing.  These are all fully-realized characters, not just cardboard caricatures like we get in Four Brothers.  I’d happily sit through separate films about any of Virgin’s co-stars, especially Rogen’s stoner, Cal, who totally reminded me of Coach McGuirk from Adult Swim’s Home Movies.  Why is this guy not getting more work?  He’s fricking hysterical, as are Virgin’s throwaway lines about forgettable movies like Jade, Baby Geniuses, Maid in Manhattan and The Beautician and the Beast.  In terms of R-rated summer comedies, this picture is way more cerebral than Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, and has way more heart (and makes much better use of its running time) than The Wedding Crashers.

Wes Craven’s Red Eye probably isn’t a good film, but it’s pretty damn entertaining and – even better – at just 85 minutes, it’s refreshingly economical in this month full of unnecessarily long crap like Four Brothers (148 minutes!), The Great Raid (132 minutes!) and even The Wedding Crashers (119 minutes!).  I have to admit that I was way more excited about Eye back when theatres were showing the "teaser" ad, which presented itself as a romantic comedy, with a hint of some kind of demonic, evil presence.  Newer trailers add the whole “international terrorism” aspect, which is kind of similar to taking something cool and edgy (like a Kevin Smith film) and adding something stupid that everyone hates (like Ben Affleck).

Eye has two distinct halves: The first shows hotel manager Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams, The Wedding Crashers) meeting and striking up a casual conversation with Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy, Batman Begins) before finding out both that he’s sitting in the seat next to hers on the Dallas-to-Miami flight, and that he’ll murder Lisa’s father (Brian Cox, The Bourne Supremacy) unless she indirectly aids him in a large-scale assassination plot.  And when I say “large scale,” I really mean it because the Secret Service agent assigned to protect the assassination target is played by Survivor: The Australian Outback’s Colby Donaldson.

The second half is a more by-the-numbers run-and-chase-slash-home-invasion thing, which doesn’t offer nearly the same kind of claustrophobic paranoia we experience aboard the plane in the first half (but Acts One and Two don’t have any split-second shots of McAdams’s panties, either).  Craven is still more than capable of ratcheting up the tension, regardless of where the action is happening, thanks to debut scribe Carl Ellsworth’s efficient screenplay.

The week’s best offering, sadly, is in limited release: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the first film in Chan-wook Park’s relentlessly dark and depressing revenge trilogy, despite being released after the triptych’s second film (Oldboy).  It’s so good, I immediately watched my DVD screener a second time, just to allow myself time to take in Park’s odd camera angles, unusual lighting, deft compositions, flavorful use of color, and stupefyingly long static shots.  Oh, yeah, and there’s the little matter of the story, which put me through the emotional ringer by offering madcap laughs, gory spurts of blood, heartbreak, and a sex scene involving sign language.

Vengeance is about a young man named Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) who takes a sweaty factory job with the hopes of earning enough money to pay for his sister’s kidney transplant surgery.  See, Ryu is a deaf mute, and his sister (Ji-Eun Lim) dropped out of school to take care of him when the two became orphans, so it’s the least he can do, right?  When Ryu gets fired, he turns to the black market with the hopes of finding a suitable organ.  This doesn’t work out either, leading Ryu and his nihilistic girlfriend (Du-na Bae) to kidnap the young daughter (Bo-bae Han) of his former boss (Kang-ho Song) with the hope of getting enough ransom money (and a new kidney) in time to save his sister’s life.  Would it surprise you to learn this plan fails, as well?  It’s the kind of thing you should expect from a film with a tongue-in-cheek tagline of “Revenge was never this sweet.”

If the tagline doesn’t get you, the title should.  We don’t know who Mr. Vengeance is supposed to be, on account of feeling sympathy for pretty much every character in the movie.  The fact that they all end up seeking revenge doesn’t make it any easier to figure out, either.  What I can definitively tell you is that Park is the most exciting filmmaker to burst into my conscience in the last few years.  Just a quick note: Park’s trilogy shares only a common theme, so you don’t need to watch Vengeance and Oldboy in any particular order (the latter arrives on DVD next Tuesday).  The final picture – Sympathy for Lady Vengeance begins the festival circuit this fall.