40-Year-Old Virgin Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Although Rob Vlock's first novel, which is set on Madison Avenue, is still making the rounds at lit houses in New York City, it's already been optioned for a feature treatment -- which should help its publishing possibilities just a little. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Jay Roach, the director behind both the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents films, has optioned Off Strategy. He will produce it at Sony, and has set up Jon Poll as the director. Poll worked as an editor on many of Roach's films, and has his first directorial feature, Charlie Bartlett, getting released next February.

The two comparable titles that are floating around this project are, believe it or not, You've Got Mail and The 40-Year-Old Virgin -- just a bit of a contrast. Basically, the studio wants it to be the modern AOL-named romcom, but THR sources say the humor is similar to Virgin. The story centers on relationships and romance, but from a male perspective. Specifically, it's about "an ad copywriter who falls for a woman who turns out to be a client with whom the copywriter already has an acrimonious phone relationship." So that's where the Mail comes in -- that acrimony through the invisible nature of technology.

Now the question remains: what sort of humor from Virgin will the piece have? Is the guy a virgin? Does he have friends who play videogames while playing the "You know how I know you're gay?" game? And who would star? Personally, I'd love to see someone like Campbell Scott, but he doesn't have the huge pull necessary for romcom history, and I'm thinking they'll want to go younger. Maybe Jake Gyllenhaal?

It takes cojones to make an R-rated movie these days, when the proven money-makers are PG and PG-13 movies that can attract a wider audience and thus rake in the big bucks. Still, there is a great tradition of hard-R classics in Hollywood, dating back to the likes of Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House and Vacation in the late '70s and early '80s, and continuing down through the ages. But while these flicks continued to be produced, they rarely took off at the box office. All that is changing now, thanks to the one-two money-making punch of Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin in the summer of 2005. This summer has already seen one hard-R smash-hit in Knocked Up and will hopefully see another one in Superbad.

To salute those filmmakers and studios that still have the stones to make hard-R flicks, Moviefone has ranked the 25 Best Raunchy Comedies of all time, celebrating those R-rated movies that contain a cornucopia of cursing, drinking and gratuitous nudity and generally blow straight by the line between good taste and off-the-charts offensive. Check out the list, then hit us with your two cents: What do you think are the best raunchy R-rated comedies ever made?

On the heels of Tom Cruise and company's proud announcement yesterday that they not only have $100 million to burn, but also have already chosen his next project, tongues around the internet started wagging, trying to figure out what that film will be. The best lead, oddly enough, may have been tracked down by mainstream staple Entertainment Weekly, which reported recently that Cruise has held meetings with none other than Judd Apatow, the box office magician behind The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (he wrote and directed the first and produced the other two). While meetings in no way mean anything concrete, Apatow sounded pretty optimistic when he spoke with EW, saying "We've had great conversations -- I hope something real comes out of it."

What do you guys think of Cruise making a comedy? While my knee-jerk reaction was a negative one, when I thought about it more I realized working with Apatow might be a brilliant move by Cruise: If he can turn in a non-manic, convincingly self-effacing performance, that might go a long way towards getting him back in the good graces of those he's turned off over the past year.

• Christa McAuliffe: Reach For The Stars - Massachusetts native Christa McAuliffe has become quite inseparable from the image of the ghastly tendrils of smoke hanging over the Florida sky after the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in January 1986, but she's also remembered as a schoolteacher who never stopped teaching. It is this second image on which first-time filmmakers Renée Sotile and Mary Jo Godges focus, going beyond blindly reverent fluff and digging into the humanity that made the loss of McAuliffe and the subsequent grounding of the Shuttle so much of a tragedy. With a warm, comforting narration by Susan Sarandon and a note-perfect song track by Carly Simon (whose tapes McAuliffe brought aboard Challenger), the film captures the spirit of exploration and discovery through McAuliffe's example, and not by just stating she was a shining star we should all try hard to emulate.