reviews

This is a smart, elegant, sophisticated film that should be everything I want to see in a movie and yet fails to be because it’s missing that one enigmatic element, the hardest to capture, the most unfakeable: spirit.

Big scary black man keepin’ the little blonde white girl in chains? Oh *my.*

So this is the big question, then: Are so many American men so oppressed by the “horrors” of modern life — high cholesterol, uppity wives, smartass children, cell phones, boring jobs, the general dead-eyed awfulness of suburbia — that they need a stupid movie like this one to tell them that if they don’t like their lives they should do something about it?

To say that they don’t make movies like this anymore — splendidly, quietly angry in a folksy, old-fashioned kind of way — is to prove its point…

There’s not a lick of dialogue for maybe the first 15 minutes of this daring action Western… unless moans of pain count as dialogue.

You’ve probably heard more about *Venus* than its limited, under-the-radar release would seem to have warranted. It’s the movie that earned star Peter O’Toole his eighth Academy Award nomination. It’s the movie about a May-December romance between a dirty old man and a tough twentysomething chick. It’s a celebration of old age; it’s a vindication of spunky youth; it’s this; it’s that.

Twenty-three reversed is 32, and 3 minus 2 is 1, which how many stars I’d give ‘The Number 23’ if I gave stars, which I don’t. And that one star is dedicated purely to Jim Carrey and his rangy, ragged, totally fascinating performance as an actor on the precipice of his career– I mean, a man on the precipice of madness.