Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Jan 4, 2016 16:45:05 GMT -5
The Number 23
Dir. Joel Schumacher
Premiered February 23, 2007
The Number 23 is the first entertainingly bad movie of this series.
For a long time, I’ve known that The Number 23 was a bad movie. But nobody has ever held it up as the hilarious disasterpiece that it truly is. Everything in this movie is in soft focus. Multiple takes are left unedited as continuous shots. Nothing in this movie is set up. And the number 23 has fuck-all to do with anything in the film.
As the plot is pretty much stitched together from nothing, it’s going to be hard to summarize, but here goes. Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is an animal control officer whose wife gives him a book called The Number 23 for his birthday. The book gets him unconvincingly obsessed with the 23 Enigma, a bit of inconsistent numerological nonsense that apparently leads people to see the number 23 everywhere, no matter how contrived the situation. Sparrow also begins to see loose parallels between the main character in the book and himself. I don’t know why they didn’t make the parallels stronger, because the first half of the movie ends up calmly pointing out the silliness of its own premise. Somehow, the film turns into a murder mystery in its last thirty minutes that ends up with Sparrow himself having been the killer all along.
But none of that does the movie justice, because it’s ridiculous. The plot itself isn’t set in motion until most of the way through. The editing, visuals, and acting are frequently hilarious. Jim Carrey does seem to realize how horrible this movie is and goes for outright silliness. Considering the golden age of bad movies we’re living in, I’m surprised this one doesn’t get much love.
Also in theaters:
Additional Notes:
Next Time: Wild Hogs
Also in theaters:
- Reno 911! hit the big screen with Reno 911!: Miami.
- Ioan Gruffudd attempted to end Britain's slave trade while propping up its moribund film industry with Amazing Grace.
- Pan-European horror flick The Abandoned was mostly panned but defended by Scott Tobias. It’s no Retro Puppet Master.
Additional Notes:
- Sign this was made in 2007: I actually ended up watching this with my friend visiting from the east coast, and we were making fun of a scene that looked like a bad darkwave music video. Lo and behold, “Tear Her Apart” by She Wants Revenge started playing over the scene, and we both burst out laughing. There was a lot of bursting out laughing. Meanwhile, Carrey’s character claims that it’s been 13 years since a sequence of events in his backstory that took place in 1991, so the screenplay at least was written in 2004 and nobody could be bothered to fix this.
- There’s quite a lot of saxophone in this movie. Jim Carrey never plays it, but every time it shows up onscreen, I couldn’t help but mimic the intro to “Baker Street” by Gerry Rafferty. I highly recommend incorporating this into your viewing.
- My friend also decided to make some hilarious gifs of the movie, and here are two for your pleasure:
Next Time: Wild Hogs