Also, I m Being Chased by the Letter C

Transcription

1 Also, I m Being Chased by the Letter C By Fearless Young Orphan The Number 23 (2007) Directed by Joel Schumacher The Number 23 is wrong in so many ways that I m half in love with it. Anyone can make a bad movie. Mythical powers are needed to make a movie so bad that it becomes a work of art. Unless you are paying attention, you could be fooled into thinking it s actually quite good, and only through some personal failing are you not getting it. That s because this trash has its convictions. The Number 23 believes itself to be scary and suspenseful, riddled with riddles, mysterious with mystery, apt to cause a cultural panic over an invasive, tricky little number. It takes the audience on a roller coaster ride of not one, not two, but probably twenty-three plot twists When a movie comes out awful, the blame seems to belong on the director s shoulders. Yet I m convinced that even Mr. Schumacher isn t completely responsible. There was an evil force at work (hmm, a certain number, perhaps?), which took the director, writers, actors, editors, and producers of this movie and mislead them into thinking that they were each working on a slightly different project. The end result is a mess of pieces that do not fit in any cohesive way, except that they seemed to be joined on film and there are credits at the beginning and at the end, and I think that means it is some kind of movie. Walter and Agatha Sparrow are a married couple (played by Jim Carrey and Virginia Madsen, who seem to try). He s a dogcatcher and she s owns a bakery. In my opinion, she is way out of his league, but let s assume she loves this unkempt ambition-free weirdo. They have a teenage son named Robin Sparrow (a very birdy name which implies these people are jackasses, but never mind) and he is played by Logan Lerman who recently turned up in the Percy Jackson movie as Percy Jackson, which is a way better name. Walter Sparrow appears to be a cool dad and an acceptable husband as these things go. One day on the job, Walter is bitten by a big creepy dog. He chases big creepy dog (named Ned, says the dog s collar) to a graveyard. The dog is doting on a grave. Walter can t catch him. So he is sometimes a dog-notcatcher. Also, and rather disjointedly, this is Walter s

2 birthday. His wife buys him a book at a quaint little bookstore. It is called The Number 23, written by Topsy Kretts. Another stupid name. Hold on, there are even more stupid names to come. This book sort of jumped off the shelf into her hands, she gives it to Walter, they both read it. She thinks it s a creative story. Walter is disturbed by the parallels that it bears to his own life. The book is about a detective who calls himself Fingerling (stupid though somewhat kinky name), and this detective gets involved with a femme fatale named Fabrizia (stupid name) and together they have loads of kinky sex. The movie takes us into the novel, has Jim Carrey play Fingerling and Virginia Madsen play Fabrizia, and has Jim Carrey read the crappy narrative, so we understand why the book had to be self-published. Most of the film is a jumble of these alternate storylines, and later a third will be added. Each narrative strand is also littered with flashbacks, which individually may be real or imagined by their respective narrators, and which may include dreams and/or flashbacks within the flashbacks. Watch Jim Carrey s hair, to help keep them all straight. Hair down: Walter Sparrow Hair up: Fingerling Walter is disturbed. The idiotically named Fingerling might well be talking about Walter s own life, there are so many parallels. Agatha tells Walter to stop being a goof. Life continues. Walter becomes increasingly goofy. He thinks Fingerling is talking about him and that something is going on! And now we bump into the great mystery of the number 23. A branch of numerology finds great significance in this number because many important dates, names and facts either add up to 23 or happened on the 23 rd of a month or have 23 of something involved in them. We got a buttload of examples in the messy opening credits. Fingerling the detective is called onto a case of a scantily-clad blonde about to jump out of a window (though when detectives are called to talk down suicides, I m not sure) and she informs him that the number 23 is harassing her, and that it killed her father, that it is pervading every part of her life and she can bear it no longer. The fear of this number is catching, it seems, for Fingerling catches it himself. He discovers that his own life is full of 23s, and Walter naturally makes the same discovery about himself.

3 The obsession with this number is perplexing to me, perhaps because I am not a paranoid schizophrenic. If a lot of the details of my life added up to 23, I d probably use this knowledge to entertain people at social gatherings. I might wonder at this odd little specificity in an otherwise chaotic world. I would not kill myself to escape the digits, nor would I write crazy shit on the walls of my house, lose my job, or destroy my personal relationships because my significant other isn t as a skairt of the number as I am. These are the shenanigans that Walter and Fingerling get up to, though. Walter s descent into paranoia takes about four days, maybe less. Doesn t take much at all to make him completely unbearable, so maybe he was crazy after all. Or highly suggestible. One of the stunning plot twists surely bears this out. I don t know whether to be annoyed that he loses his marbles in four days, or to be amazed that it s taking him four days to read what looks to be a pretty short book. The movie blunders into new territory as Walter becomes increasingly suspicious of his wife, who is seeking the advice of an educated, handsome friend in dealing with her asshead of a husband, exactly as Fingerling became suspicious of Fabrizia. We have reached roughly the midpoint of the film and lots of things happen: Walter tries to discover who wrote the mysterious book that is so plaguing him. The Sparrow family tracks down the man who published the book. This ratty old geezer gets one look at Walter and slits his own throat. We cannot blame him. What they deduce from this bloody episode is that just because the man published the book doesn t mean he wrote it. Walter is confronted by Ned the creepy dog again. You remember Ned? Ned takes Walter back to the grave of one Laura Tollins. This is not so much a grave as just a marker because Laura Tollins disappeared and no body was ever found. There s a man serving a life sentence in prison for her murder, though. That s Professor Flinch. What a coincidence; Professor Flinch s murder of Laura exactly matches Fingerling s jealous murder of Fabrizia. Walter goes to the prison and confronts Flinch; Flinch tells him to go to hell. Flinch didn t write the book either. Walter holes up in a ratty hotel room and acts stupid. Walter starts circling every 23 rd word on every 23 rd page of the book and it gives him a message; he needs to go to Casanova Park and dig up something under the stairs. He takes his poor son and does just that; they find a human

4 skull. They frantically call the police, but when they return to the shallow grave with the officers, the skull (presumably an entire skeleton, as we ll see later) is gone. So someone has done some fast digging. Walter here delivers the most hilarious line in the movie. See if you can catch it! While father and son have been bonding, Agatha has gone investigating the ratty old geezer who published the book. He used to be a doctor in a mental hospital. She breaks into the mental hospital easily, and goes directly to a very convenient room chock full of vital information. The entire building is empty except for these things, which are exactly what she needs to discover the HORRIBLE TRUTH. All of this has taken about half an hour of movie time. It s certainly the most active half hour of movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark. So busy has the narrative become that forgetting exactly what the hell any of these people are trying to accomplish is likely. And there s still a big chunk of movie left. We re not done. The HORRIBLE TRUTH, as if the audience hadn t guessed all this back when they saw that Jim Carrey was playing both Fingerling and Walter, is that Walter wrote the book himself!!! About stuff that happened to him! Alas, once the movie pukes up that fact, things become tedious. If only it had managed to maintain its lunacy, I d call this a dark comic masterpiece. But it s not; the last half-hour of the movie confirms your dreadful suspicion: they re serious about this. Assuming you have not left the movie by now, either consciously or unconsciously, you re treated to an excruciating denouement and an even more excruciating faceoff between Walter and Agatha, then Walter s second attempted suicide, and then another narrative by Walter that explains what happens next. Since it all sucks, I ll not bother to summarize. So we re at the end of The Number 23. You can wisely choose to pretend like it never happened to you, or you can be like me, and actually try to puzzle out what the hell. To see if you have the chops for puzzling, take this test. Answers are provided below.

5 The Number 23 Quiz 1. The pervasive theme of paranoia regarding the number 23 is relevant to this film because: a. It connects Fingerling and Walter in madness b. It s not relevant, it s a cheap gimmick that the creators used to attract attention c. It s not relevant, because the entire movie could have been made without ever mentioning it. The stupid number paranoia added nothing logical to the story, padded the movie out another freaking thirty minutes and ruined a lot of perfectly nice walls. d. It is fun to snicker at people who are afraid of numbers. 2. Ned, the dog who torments Walter Sparrow, symbolizes: a. Death b. Walter s suppressed memories (though Ned can be seen by everybody else too, go figure) c. Not a damned thing d. Who s a good boy? Who s a big fuzzy wuzzy cutie patootie? 3. Agatha s wildly coincidental discovery of Walter s book, which he doesn t remember writing and which was self-published by somebody else for some damn reason, and which looks like the worst book ever written, is significant because: a. It shows the heartless synchronicity of all things b. If she hadn t, the movie would be a lot shorter c. She s frigging with him d. She s his wife, and wives like to make their husbands read books. They think it ll make them smarter. Showed her! He didn t get any smarter. He just went crazy and wrote all over her walls.

6 4. A really scary number is: a. 14 b. 8,586 c. 9 d. 4,444, Walter is: a. An asshead b. A nutjob c. In need of a haircut d. A significant name, because W is the 23 rd letter of the alphabet, and it s the only letter in our alphabet with THREE syllables. THREE, get it? That s the second part of 23! Feel those chills going down your spine? ANSWERS: (1) d; (2) d; (3) d; (4) d (Look at all those fours! It doesn t even look like a real number!); (5) a, b and c.