It's a Boy Girl Thing
The Number 23
It's a Boy Girl Thing
"It's a Boy Girl Thing" is a fascinating, intelligent, touching and subtle study of gender and role-playing in American society. Oops. I accidentally just reversed my viewpoint, perhaps because there's a magical Aztec statue nearby like the one that reverses the roles of the main characters in "It's a Boy Girl Thing." What I meant to say is "It's a Boy Girl Thing" is yet another dull, banal, contrived and predictable teenage romantic comedy set in the desperately unromantic world of the all-American high school. Nell (Samaire Armstrong) is a Shakespeare-loving, oatmeal-adoring, prim and proper student whose heart is set on going to Yale. Woody (Kevin Zegers), who lives next door, is a beer-drinking, girl-chasing jock whose only hope of getting into college is through a football scholarship. In other words, Nell and Woody are absolute opposites. On a school field trip to a museum Nell and Woody make the mistake of bitterly arguing in front of a statue of an Aztec deity which promptly does some serious voodoo involving swirling pink vapours that causes them to swap bodies. There is no explanation as to why the statue does this. One can only assume that it's bored sitting up there on its plinth all day long. Anyway, Nell and Woody naturally find their metamorphosis very difficult to cope with at first. Nell wakes up with erections, while Woody has to eat oatmeal for breakfast. Nell has to be the star quarterback for the school team, while Woody has to study up on Shakespeare so that he can help Nell pass her interview for Yale. Needless to say, they both gain valuable life lessons from their little body-swapping, role-reversing experience. Nell learns that Woody isn't such a bad guy after all, he just needs a break. While Woody learns that Nell isn't the uptight bitch he imagined but a kind and caring young woman. And before you can say Freaky Friday, the two of them are head-over-heels in love. "It's a Boy Girl Thing" is by no means the worst teenage romantic comedy I've seen. It has some amusing moments and Samaire Armstrong is rather charming in her role. But it's all so tiresomely predictable. At best it's a case of horribly crude caricatures progressing into merely crude caricatures. Someone really ought to study the differences between role-playing in the teenage romantic comedy and the romantic comedy proper. They're worryingly alike as far as I can make out.
( Tim Ochser )
The Number 23
In "The Number 23" Jim Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a suburban dog-catcher who receives a book from his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) as a birthday present. The book details a murder mystery featuring hard-boiled private-eye Fingerling (also played by Carrey) and a femme fatale named Fabrizia (also played by Madsen). As Walter reads the book, the film cuts to the dark and gritty film noir world of Fingerling, who narrates the unfolding plot in the machismo of the classic film noir hero. The book seems to mirror Walter's life in strange ways, or at least Walter seems to think so. He becomes obsessed with a certain bizarre significance of the number 23 in general and in his life in particular. This numeric obsession takes over his life, and he begins to see signs, patterns and conspiracies everywhere. Shaken by murderous nightmares, Walter turns his own world upside down to try to figure out what's happening and who is behind it. There's something wrong with the tone of "The Number 23." It's not quite sure whether it's a family drama or a thriller. It has neither the emotional impact of the former nor the suspenseful pacing of the latter. It is as schizophrenic as the main character is supposed to be. There's too much time spent listing all the moments in history or in Walter's life where the number 23 pops up or adds up, and it's done in such a way that we are more tired than impressed by these coincidences. And Carrey is miscast in both his roles, that of an ordinary man who deteriorates into a shell of his former self, and that of a tough-talking private dick. As a result, the film comes off as more comic than I am sure is intended. The film's concluding revelation left me feeling cheated, and the moralizing at the very end just borders on farce. Bored teens will find the myriad conspiracy theories behind the number 23 intriguing enough and will relish decoding the movie's hidden numerologies. The only number I associate with this film is 350, the number of words I struggled to come up with for this review.
( Sherwin Das )
