Movie The Number 23 (no spoilers)

T and I sat and tried to watch Primeval tonight, but it's sort of like watching old Dr Who series after watching Star Trek: TNG or something similarly widely spaced apart in technique. And Dr Who had good plot lines, too, whereas Primedrivel has no such saving grace. Last year they opened time gates to bring dinosaurs to the present, this year the dinosaurs have their own force field. On the Geological Timeline it scores below Cambrian, probably closer to Imbrian. Enough said...

Anyhow - to take the bad taste out of our brains, we luckily had booked seats to The Number 23 which is showing at Hoyts Carousel, and we booked La Premiere seats. Because we can. We appear to have sold the house, well, it's contingent upon the buyer selling her old house first but this is likely to happen quite soon.

TN23 is, by the way, a reasonable movie right up to the end, when things (to me at any rate) seemed to get a bit out of hand and out of character. But anyway. Jim Carrey always seems to me to be able to milk some humour, even in a quite serious and drama filled movie such as this. I kept half expecting Ace Ventura to show through, and maybe for a few seconds in some of the scenes, he did...

You've seen the premise, the number 23 crops up everywhere, and it picks on a person and hounds them. I figure that's silly when the number could haunt 23 people at a time and thus be more efficient while still remaining in character. But I digress.

I think there were a lot of clever "23" references in the movie background, but there could have been several more touches which would have taken the movie from enjoyable to the status of edge of your seat stuff.

So as we left La Prem we were wondering if, now that we'd seen the movie, we would start seeing the number 23 around a lot more ourselves. Didn't have long to wait. As we left the upstairs carpark at Carousel, the max headroom sign. It read "Clearance 23 00."

"Oh gawd" says T, "now you're going to find that number everywhere just to freak me out aren't you?" I said nothing and pointed to the bus coming towards us, the 878. Hmmm...

We spotted two signs for things priced $32.something (32 is 23 reversed) and two prices at $1.23. As we approached the roundabouts, I pointed out that on the approach to each roundabout you see 2 signs and the ideogram of the roundabout on those signs consists of 3 curved arrows.

That was when the dog ran towards us along the road. Once you've seen the movie you'll get this Ned reference.

And I spotted a school speed limit sign that features 2:3 0 as the afternoon start time.

Then Trish had the best example. We'd been allocated seats 11 and 12. Add up to a 2 and a 3.

Hmmm... As we rolled down the driveway it occurrred to me that our number is 25b. B is the 2nd letter of the alphabet, and 25 minus 2 is? Yep, 23. Again.

So all in all quite a good evening once we gave TV a miss. And I recommend TN23 anyway because it's a somewhat different movie.