Drew Vs The Volcano

My already-fragile faith in humanity was further shaken this week by an article I saw on Yahoo News....
Look at that headline:


I sat in front of my computer one morning, and when I saw the word "blame" in the headline of a story about a friggin' VOLCANO ERUPTION, I hung my head in shame and despair. It was just too much to take after a long week.

I mean, seriously -- there are actually people throwing blame around for ANYTHING in the wake of a volcano??? The airlines are all like, "WE LOST MONEY! SOMEBODY HELP!! Uh...GIVE US MONEY!!!" Just shut up and take the loss, you blood-sucking cry-babies. No more complaining about the European governments stopping all flights. Look, had Britain and others gone and allowed commercial flights to continue with all that ash in the sky, some plane probably would have crashed, and there would just be another, totally different, group of people demanding compensation. Can nothing happen anymore without somebody blaming someone else for it and asking for money?

Oh, and the other thing that bothered me about Volcano Week is that all of the news coverage I saw regarding the situation was centered on the delayed flights, and not on what was happening in Iceland (you know, where the volcano actually was). Think about it -- like, zero percent of the TV and radio reports were devoted to friggin' Iceland! I mean, DUH! There's a VOLCANO erupting there, networks! Don't you think that maybe it's a little bit newsworthy? I would have been much more interested in hearing about what was going on there than what was going on at some airport in France. Why didn't the news networks fly a bunch of reporters straight over to Iceland to cover how its citizens were...er...oh, right....Nevermind.


Well, even if they couldn't have sent reporters out there, the news people could have linked up with the Icelanders via satellite or something. Don't they have Internet in Iceland? I want to know what's going on there, man!

First of all, volcanoes are cool. An eruption from one is easily my second favorite kind of natural disaster, and I want to watch people trying to deal with such a situation. Lava shooting all over the place...the sky black as night...sounds like my kind of scene. If I heard that a Volcano was going off in, like, Ohio (or any other place within reasonable driving distance of my town), I would call in sick for the day and head over there to check it out. Secondly, I just really like Iceland. It's a fine country, and anytime they put Iceland on the TV, I'll be sure to tune in.

It's just intriguing to me that there's this crazy island nation with a higher standard of living than my own just sitting out there in the middle of the north Atlantic. It's a mysterious land of candy canes, enchanted forests, and fairies. Plus, I like its name. "ICEland." That just sounds cool, and I say all countries ought to have names that describe what they're like.

Poor Iceland. I think it's a good thing that a country like it exists out there, keepin' on keepin' on, and not bothering anybody. Hopefully, the nation will recover from its recent troubles, and the rest of the world will continue to let it be. It seems like a fascinating place, full of lovely people.


Of course, it's still not as cool as Greenland.

Hey, here's a movie that's about as hard to swallow as the talented lady you see above.

The Number 23 (2007)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0481369/


Netflix description:
Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher reunites with his Riddler (Jim Carrey) for this psychological thriller about an animal control officer obsessed with a mysterious book that seems to be based on his own life. As soon as Walter Sparrow (Carrey) opens the book, he notices strange parallels between what he reads and what he's experienced. But now he's worried that a fictional murder might materialize. Virginia Madsen co-stars.

When The Number 23 was released, the movie-going public didn't quite know what to make of it. I mean, it's a dark, psychological thriller starring Jim Carrey, of all people. Look, I love Jim Carrey, and can even enjoy him in dramatic roles (The Truman Show is one of my all-time favorite films, and you can't argue with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but when he plays an insane KILLER, even I have trouble taking it seriously. Carrey can do many things, but taking on the persona of a hard-living private investigator with a penchant for rough sexual flings with brunette bombshells ain't really one of them.

Well, in The Number 23, that's kind of what he attempts to do. Sorta. See, this film is about an average Mr. Nice Guy named Walter who one day stumbles across a mysterious novel about a detective unraveling some bizarre conspiracy surrounding (you guessed it) the number 23. This book, also called The Number 23, delves into hundreds of odd facts about that number, and Walter almost immediately becomes obsessed with it. He begins to notice odd instances of 23 showing up in his own life, and the family gets a bit concerned. Poor Walt -- the dude's existence is so boring that he can't even read three chapters of a book without turning into a clinical paranoiac.

Anyway, the film alternates between two narratives: one, Walter's real life, in which he creeps out his wife and catches dogs for a living; and the other, in which he intensely reads his little detective story, imagining himself to be its protagonist as the plot plays out in his mind. It's in those scenes where we see Jim Carrey as an ill-humored, hard-boiled P.I., and even though we know it's supposed to be fiction within fiction, the scenario still feels awkward. The bottom line is that Jim Carrey simply cannot do tough.


As Walter gets closer to the end of his novel, conspiracies start to unwind in his real life. He notices too many similarities between the book he's reading and what's going on in the world around him. People are acting suspicious, and some kind of ghost dog keeps trying to lead him to a specific area of a spooky old graveyard for reasons unknown. Plus, Walt's having dreams in which he brutally murders his own wife. That can't be good, so he decides to get the heck out of there, checking into a cheap hotel in order to finish the book and figure out its meaning. WILL Walter discover the secret behind this mysterious novel that seems to know about his innermost thoughts? CAN his family help him overcome this new obsession with the number 23?? WHO wrote that darn book???

The Number 23 has a lot of good ideas, and at times it's even fairly intriguing; but its execution is so uneven that we don't know whether to approach the deal as a gritty thriller in the vein of, say, Se7en, or as a popcorny, tongue-in-cheekish nod at such films. Director Joel Schumacher doesn't seem to have a handle on what kind of movie he really wants to make here. Every now and then, the plot will suck us in, hook, line and sinker, only to drop the ball completely a few moments later when someone utters a line so campy that it just HAS to be intended as cheese. I mean, sure -- the weird facts they throw at us about the number 23 are pretty interesting, but the lengths to which our hero goes to find it in his own life can be over the top. Like, he's adding together addresses and then dividing them by random birthdays to find 23. C'mon, Walt. You're stretching just a tad, aren't you?


Then there's the problem of Jim Carrey, who (again) I really do like, but simply cannot take seriously here. He's all wrong for this picture; we get the guy from Bruce Almighty in one scene, and Jim's alternate "Hank" persona from Me, Myself, and Irene in the next. Carey just isn't nuanced enough for a role that requires such a delicate balance of mannerisms.

It's a shame that The Number 23 turned out like it did because I think that somewhere deep in this script was a really engaging story. Hey, at times, I even found myself adding up the numbers of my birthday in various ways to see if the sum would be 23 (it never was). There was real potential here, but oddly enough, the big names that even made the movie marketable are also the very people that killed it. Schumacher and Carrey? Nah, this one should have been done by Pitt and Fincher. THEN we'd have something.

2 out of 5.

b.