The 40-Year-Old Virgin|Ventura & Balboa, Encino — Forty and Still Riding

The bicycle is the character. Before Andy says a word about himself, the film shows him riding to work along Ventura Boulevard in a helmet and a windbreaker, legs turning at a careful cadence, and in Los Angeles in 2005 that read as a diagnosis. The production filmed his street encounters along this stretch of Encino, including the corner where Ventura crosses Balboa Boulevard.

It is a wide, hostile intersection to ride: six lanes of boulevard meeting a major north-south artery, right-turn lanes that nobody signals, a bus stop, a strip of low retail on every corner. Andy takes it at the same steady speed he takes everything.

The Valley has changed around him. There are painted bike lanes on parts of Ventura now, e-bikes locked outside the coffee places, riders who look nothing like a punchline. The joke of 2005 has quietly aged into ordinary transport.

Ride it yourself if you have a bike, eastbound in the late afternoon with the light behind you. You will spend the whole crossing at Balboa doing arithmetic about a truck in your mirror — and you will understand, better than any scene explains, why a man might build a life where he never has to be seen trying.

Location per published Los Angeles filming-location guides. Photo: Ventura Boulevard, Encino (Wikimedia Commons).