Jim Carrey existed ten years before I thought he did

Jim Carrey didn't come into existence with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1994. Of course he didn't.

Everyone knows he was Fire Marshall Bill and other characters on In Living Color. In fact, he starred in all five seasons of the show, from 1990 until 1994. In fact, it kind of seems like In Living Color ceased to exist the moment Jim Carrey no longer needed it, though I'm not going to look into that now to see if there was any actual correlation. 

But he definitely didn't exist before 1990. Right?

Wrong. Jim Carrey was the star of a "major motion picture" five years before that. And it wasn't even his first.

If you want to drill down into his IMDB, Carrey technically first appeared in a TV movie called Introducing ... Janet in 1981. That must have been pretty bad because it's got only a 3.5 on IMDB (out of 10). That range is usually reserved only for when someone is trying to sink a movie because they think it was made by libtards or something. But it doesn't get much better from there, because his next two were the hypothetically theatrical feature All in Good Taste (2.8) and the TV movie Copper Mountain (2.2). (Seriously? How terrible does a TV movie have to be get to get 2.2 out of 10 on IMDB?)

Skip ahead four more projects I've never heard of and finally you get to the first one I had, which is also the movie I watched Thursday night: Once Bitten (1985). 

I didn't like it very much and I suspected its prospects were not very good before I even started. But as a big Jim Carrey fan -- he has three movies in my top 100 -- I had to watch it, just to see "where it all began."

I think the reason I didn't imagine Jim Carrey had done anything before In Living Color is because that's usually how it is with sketch comedians. You get hired to appear on a show like Saturday Night Live -- of which In Living Color is basically an "urban" (Black) version -- and usually you've made people laugh in The Groundlings, but Joe Public has not heard of you yet. Your charms get unleashed on the world in this variety show format, and only then do you go on to have a great (or in many cases mediocre) film career.

I guess Carrey was more of a Kenan Thompson. Why Kenan? He had a whole career with things like Kenan & Kel and Good Burger before appearing on 37 consecutive season of SNL. Carrey was only in five seasons of ILC, but it was the whole run. 

So yeah, Carrey went on In Living Color despite having an entire 14 credits in the 1980s, including two other movies I've seen: Peggy Sue Got Married and Earth Girls Are Easy. (I sort of remember him being in EGAE, because I only saw it 13 years ago. I haven't seen Peggy Sue since it first came out, when I definitely did not know who Jim Carrey was.) 

Anyway, the point of this post was not to drill down into the minutia of Jim Carrey's career. I'll save that for when he dies. (Hopefully not soon.)

No, I really just wanted to see this movie to see how many of the "Carreyisms" we know and love (some people don't love them) were already in place back in 1985, when he was only 23.

It's not a very broad performance, though it is a pretty broad movie. Carrey is sought after by a vampire (Lauren Hutton) with a flaming familiar (Cleavon Little) because he's a virgin, a conundrum that is dramatized in a funny drive-in movie scene, where Carrey tries to get busy with his prudish girlfriend (Karen Kopins). When she rebuffs him, he's confronted by all sorts of images of other drive-in patrons in flagrante delicto, including one guy in a convertible whose naked ass you can just see humping up and down. 

I wish the movie were consistently that funny. I have to be honest and say that I was very sleepy on Thursday night and I might have missed some (or very large chunks) of Once Bitten, but I did get the gist. There's nothing "big" about Carrey's performance here, but I saw certain facial expressions and other moments that reminded me of what's to come -- most of which I love.

Incidentally, I do remember the song from this movie that I thought had the same title as the movie and might have been sung by Tina Turner. 

In fact, it is indeed called "Once Bitten" but is sung by a band called 3-Speed. Who?

A pre-Father's Day cautionary tale

Today is Father's Day in Australia. Mother's Day is perfectly aligned between Australia and the U.S., but Father's Day is pushed from June to September (assuming we can consider June the default and September the deviation). Something to do with it being winter in June and ... not quite winter in September. (In fact, today is also the first day of spring, per the southern hemisphere convention of changing seasons on the first of the month. Yes they have to be difficult down here.)

When I was searching for something light and funny to watch last night -- we'd had a couple hours where emotions had run high among various people in the family -- I didn't expect that thing I would fix on would end up also being a profound warning about taking fatherhood for granted. 

In fact, I didn't land on Liar Liar on Amazon Prime until the second time going through my options. I have of course seen Liar Liar -- this might be my fourth viewing overall -- but that was by design. I knew the light and funny thing I would end up with would be something I had already seen, in order to guarantee myself the lightness and funniness I wanted, rather taking a risk with some unknown quantity.

At first I thought maybe it wasn't quite the right thing, for one reason that doesn't have much to do with anything and one that does. The random reason was that I had just rewatched another Jim Carrey film from this era, The Mask, earlier this year, and watching Liar Liar seemed like going to too similar a rewatch well. 

The more salient reason was that over the years, I seem to have forgotten just how good Liar Liar is.

Not only have I not written about it on this blog, as I can see by the fact that I'm using the "liar liar" tag for the first time, but my records should that I haven't watched it in the "rewatch era" -- in other words, the era in which I started keeping track of my rewatches. That began in in 2006, so it's been more than 18 years since I've watched this movie, though I think I did watch it three times in its first ten years of existence -- if we are indeed calling this my fourth viewing overall.

It would have to be at least four, because there was so much I remembered about this movie -- lines of dialogue, inflections of Jim Carrey's voice, laugh-out-loud bits of physical comedy. 

What I didn't remember is exactly how funny these things are -- and just how touching I find the movie's underlying sentiment. 

In fact -- and it could just be because my own son had a tough emotional moment an hour or so earlier -- I almost found myself getting a little choked up.

Liar Liar is an exaggerated version of a very real problem, or at least potential problem, among fathers and their children. Mothers, unless they defy what the statistics tell us, are very unlikely to neglect their children. You are much more likely to find mothers that go to the extreme of suffocating their children with love and affection than those that fall down on the job even a little bit. Mothers are treasures and we should probably acknowledge them a lot more often than we do. 

Fathers? Fathers can drop the ball without even trying ... often because they aren't trying. 

Even good fathers, though, can slip into a sort of middling indifference toward their duties, knowing the mother will pick up the slack, knowing that everything will get done when it should get done because of the ingrained calendars most mothers have in their heads. That's certainly true of household duties and life admin, but can even be true of some of the basic ways children need to be nurtured. 

In Liar Liar, I thought specifically about how Carrey's Fletcher Reede keeps putting off the game of catch with his son, the one where young Max is supposed to be Dodger pitcher Hideo Nomo and Fletcher is supposed to be Oakland A's star ... well, you know the line of dialogue: "I'm Jose Canseco! I'M JOSE CANSECO!" 

Putting off playing with my kids is something I have been guilty of. Although I kick a soccer ball with my younger son in the backyard about once a week in good times -- we have a game where we switch who plays goalie in the net in the back yard, and the other one takes shots until he scores -- he'd probably like that to be more like two to three times a week. And as I sit here typing this, I feel like life has gotten in the way and it's been about three weeks since we've done this.

See that's the thing, for dads it is easy enough to say that life has gotten in the way. Or even just to give off that vibe, that you're too tired, that you're too busy, that you just can't do it right now. Give off that vibe enough, and you don't actually have to say no to your kids. They see the no in your face so they don't even bother asking.

And then one day, it's the last time you ever play soccer in the back yard with your son, and you don't even know it already happened until after the fact.

The time we have with our children is precious. In the moment, we find certain demands of that relationship onerous, and we think only about our short-term gratification in not having to do the thing they want to do, so we can lie down, so we can scroll through our phone -- even so we can do things that we legitimately have to do, like prepare dinner or put away laundry.

But the children are not going to be there forever. One day they will grow up and they won't want you or need you to do any of these things. Or, in a more extreme version, Cary Elwes will try to get them to move to Boston with your ex-wife Maura Tierney, leaving you in Los Angeles wondering where it all went wrong.

Even though my biggest takeaway from the movie was how much I laughed -- still laughed, all these years later, at brilliant physical comedy by Carrey that I have seen at least four times -- the takeaway about my relationship with my sons was almost as big. I think of that heartbreaking look on Carrey's face after the scene where he has tried to get Max to unwish his single-day truth curse so Carrey can try to win his case in court. When Fletcher explains that all adults lie, even the perfect Gary (Elwes), Max says "But you're the only one who makes me feel bad." 

The look on Carrey's face that captures the shock of his recognition of the truth in Max's words ... it's one of those early moments from the actor where we must have recognized he was capable of more than mugging. And it really drove home, for me, that we rarely are so lucky to have a child spell out for us, in so many words, the ways we are failing them. In most cases, they never give it to us so bluntly, so we don't have the opportunity to mend our ways and make sure the relationship doesn't deteriorate by degrees until it no longer exists.

It's almost enough to make me go to my son's soccer game this morning ... almost.

You see, my wife has set it up so that I get a "break" on Father's Day, not having to go to the early soccer game so I can stay home and lounge in my pajamas. It's a nice gesture and I have to give her the gift of taking it, to make her feel like she is properly recognizing me on Father's Day.

But after seeing Liar Liar ... well I really want to go to that game.

Now, for context, I have only missed a few of his games this year. There have been a couple times when he's stayed over at his aunt's house for a sleepover, meaning she took him to his game the next morning. However, on one of those occasions, I actually did go to watch the game anyway, even though she brought him there. I am a good father -- pretty good, at least, I hope -- and so I've gone out of my way to see certain games, even when I didn't need to.

But the thing is, you never know when the game will be a watershed moment for them. About three or four weeks ago, my son had one of those games, where he scored not only his first goal of the season, but his second. Thankfully, I was there to see it. 

If something like that happens today, well, I'll miss it.

But I think I can make up for it. I think I can play soccer with him later, after he gets home, even if he's a bit soccer'd out. I think I can also play some one-on-one basketball with my older son, even though he doesn't need me like he once did.

Last night, though, my older son did need me. He was feeling a little lost -- those were his words -- for reasons he couldn't put his finger on. He had given my wife a little attitude and then had snapped at her. For a moment we didn't know where he had gone, and then we realized he had been in the back yard, crying.

I was there to give him a long hug. (She was too, but I was the one who saw him first.) He's 14, so I don't get to hug him often. I made it count and I said the right things to make him feel better, at least a little bit.

I am a good father -- but I could always be better. And I won't have forever to prove it.

And sometimes, we get cinematic reminders of such things from the most unexpected placed.

Continuing to revisit other people's favorites and 1990s Jim Carrey

I followed my Thursday night viewing of Bull Durham, a favorite of other baseball fans but not a favorite of this baseball fan (points to self), with a Friday night viewing of The Mask, a favorite other Jim Carrey fans but not a favorite of this Jim Carrey fan (points to self).

I had only seen each movie once, though, so it was time for a reconsideration of The Mask just as it was time for a reconsideration of Bull Durham.

It also follows a little mini theme for Carrey himself, since I only just rewatched Carrey's The Truman Show earlier this month as well, also for the first time since I originally saw it in the 1990s.

It also happens to mark 30 years since The Mask was released, though that's just a fortuitous additional benefit rather than a driving force behind the viewing.  

The Mask viewing went better than the Bull Durham viewing, and I think it had everything to do with expectations. 

In checking out the star ratings I gave these movies retroactively when I added all my movies to Letterboxd in 2012, I saw it fit to consider Bull Durham a four-star movie, while Carrey's second major feature after Ace Ventura: Pet Detective was worthy of only 2.5 stars. I wouldn't say I could flip-flop those ratings, because four stars is too high for The Mask. But 2.5 stars also might be too high for Bull Durham.

I assumed no one else really thought The Mask was all that great, but my experience recording with two younger guys for The ReelGood Podcast convinced me otherwise. They seemed to both have a genuine fondness for the 1994 Chuck Russell film, considering the "Cuban Pete" number in particular to be comedic gold. There was one podcast we did where one of the other guys made a bit of a meme of the "Chick-a-boom" refrain from the song, which of course didn't mean anything to me because I didn't remember it. Back then, a seed was planted that I should probably rewatch The Mask, which I have now finally done.

You'd think I should have liked The Mask more. I went for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective quite a bit, watching it three times during a single five-day rental (a weird sort of anomaly that I have never repeated with any other movie), and Dumb and Dumber and The Cable Guy constitute two of the three Carrey movies in my top 50 on Flickchart (the other being Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The way Carrey commits to his comedic choices is one of the things I value most about him, and he certainly commits in The Mask.

So what held me back? I think it's the same thing that keeps me from embracing Looney Tunes as much as some others of my generation and some other animation fans embrace it. I don't think seeing eyes bug out of Carrey's head or his heart bug out of Carrey's chest is as fun as some people find it. I don't think watching a man who is literally and figuratively a tornado, where everything he says is in quotation marks, is such a hoot. In short, tone it down a little please.

On this viewing, I wasn't significantly more ingratiated to the alter ego of Carrey's Stanley Ipkis, though I didn't find him actively annoying, which was good. And I found all the material where Stanley is not possessed by the mask to be better than I remembered. Since I feel I am quite familiar with the other Carrey from this era, having seen each of the movies I listed previously at least four times, watching The Mask was kind of like uncovering a treasure trove of hidden material from an actor whose other work from this era had already provided me plenty of joy.

Of course, you can't talk about The Mask without talking about Cameron Diaz, who was first introduced to us here. (She even gets an "and introducing" credit at the start, which is appropriate since this was her film debut.) Friends and I were instantly infatuated with Diaz from this movie, which isn't surprising, because the movie presents her as what we would have called a "sexpot" back then. In part because she seemed to actively avoid this sort of role afterwards, this is a unique version of Diaz that we wouldn't see again -- even the shape of her face seems to be different in the many other roles she immediately started getting after this one. So while this shouldn't be considered Diaz' signature role and it certainly isn't her best example of the craft of acting, it does hold a certain unique spot in her career as such an anomaly in the types of roles she played. It was immediately apparent the sort of star power she had, and she immediately took that star power and transformed it to speak more to the sort of persona she wanted to cultivate. That's a hard trick to pull off in your early 20s. 

I also find myself really skeeved out by the look in the eye of Peter Greene as the villain. As I was watching the movie, I realized he shares a sort of glower with someone like Aidan Quinn when he has played a villain, even with recent Oscar winner Cillian Murphy when he plays a villain. Is it just me or do you see something similar in the eyes of all three of these actors? The comparison to Quinn first hit me because I looked up Greene to see if he had been in Stakeout, and of course that was Quinn. (Which would be another movie to rewatch, though that one would be a personal favorite of mine.) In fact, it was difficult for me to believe that the only other movie I really know Greene from is Pulp Fiction, where he plays Zed. That look in his eye must be ingrained in me from that movie and not from some other performance of his that I've seen multiple times.

Okay, I think I will continue my long four-day Easter weekend with something new tonight. 

Behind the scenes with weird guys

You can't plan things like this.

The last two movies I saw -- because one was released on Thursday night, and because the other had been available for a few weeks on Netflix and was really starting to itch at my viewing desires -- were The Disaster Artist and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. (And that's the last time in this piece I will write out the full title, I promise you.)

Both films happen to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of a movie whose production was affected -- some might say poisoned -- by the antics of a highly eccentric personality. In one, the guy couldn't help doing it -- he was just playing himself, as he always had. In the other, one highly eccentric personality was channeling another highly eccentric personality, doing it purposefully in pursuit of what he perceived to be some very specific brand of the comedic sublime.

Both films are funny, instructive examinations of these particular minds, and I enjoyed both quite a bit, though stopped short of loving either.

I came closer to loving The Disaster Artist. Not only does James Franco nail Tommy Wiseau and explore in a more serious manner the things that have been the comedic objects of much of his work (latent homosexuality among them), but the film has a ton of heart. As much as it considers Wiseau an oddball and even leans into that, it also considers his optimism and can-do spirit the perfect antidote to Hollywood cynicism. The Room was a singularly disastrous film but it was also the result of a type of purity of impulse that we usually do not see in the movies.

Jim & Andy is a fascinating document, to be sure, but I'm not sure it gets much beyond that (pun not intended). It considers how far Jim Carrey went in trying to channel dada comic Andy Kaufman, not only staying in character as Kaufman even after Milos Forman called "cut!" on Man on the Moon, but also playing Kaufman's alter ego, Tony Clifton, such that the actual "Jim Carrey" was almost never present. A cameraman shot all this behind the scenes footage and it has been sitting in the vaults for 20 years. Carrey gives modern-day interviews recalling his thinking at the time, impressive beard and all.

Both films provide a very interesting examination of what happens when the cameras aren't rolling. To be sure, they are not the first films to do this -- there's a whole interesting subgenre of films which show us what actually happened on the sets of movies we love. Few of them are quite so focused on the way a single man can hijack the production, while also shaping it into the movie we love as a result.

For those who love The Room, they only love it because Wiseau was unfailingly who he was and would not listen to well-intentioned advice. In one great example, Franco's Wiseau either refuses to listen to the suggestions of the first AD (Seth Rogen), or simply has a disconnect between hearing the advice and acting on it, as he proves incapable of filming a take in which his character does not laugh as a reaction to a story about a woman being physically abused by her boyfriend. Exasperated, Rogen's character just gives up so they can move on to the next shot. It's moments of pure and unspoiled cluelessness like this that make The Room sing. Had Wiseau had an ounce more common sense, he would have made a bad movie that no one saw. Instead, he made a bad movie that everyone saw.

Less of what Carrey was doing behind the scenes on the set of Man on the Moon is directly visible on screen. As he terrorized fellow actors (most notably the wrestler Jerry Lawler, playing himself, with whom Kaufman had a real-life mostly fake rivalry), he drove many of them to the brink of quitting the project. You get little bits of the frustration of people like Judd Hirsch and Danny DeVito. You'd have no way of really knowing that by watching the movie, except that it does feel like an uncanny embodiment of Kaufman, and if Carrey had just been switching back and forth between "Jim Carrey" and "Andy Kaufman," who knows if such a transcendent performance would have emerged. There's a telling recollection by Carrey in one of the modern interviews about how Forman felt about it. According to Carrey, Forman called him one night, out of ideas about how to regain control of his actor and bring the production in line. When Carrey threw him a lifeline and volunteered to "fire" both Kaufman and Clifton and then to do impersonations of them, Forman seemed to recognize the value of Carrey's process and rejected the idea. "I don't want it to stop," Forman allegedly told Carrey. "I just wanted to speak to Jim."

In a strange way, director Chris Smith seems to be the link between these two films. Smith, the director of Jim & Andy, was also the director of a documentary classic called American Movie. Like The Disaster Artist, that was also a movie about a Wiseau-like dreamer -- who also happened to have a long mane of black hair -- using his own resources to try to make a film. Mark Borchardt had much more meager and much less mysteriously sourced finances than Wiseau -- he borrowed much of the money from a senile uncle -- but it also cost him a lot less to make his horror short Coven (which I still have not seen, unfortunately). But in his own way he was probably just as delusional as Wiseau ... with, in some respects, an equally happy outcome. The film has turned Borchardt into a cult figure in horror and independent film communities, while Wiseau has eventually turned a profit on the $6 million he spent on The Room, though no one apparently still knows where he got the money to finance the project originally.

I saw The Room four years ago just before leaving Los Angeles, but it's been nearly those 20 years since my viewing of Man on the Moon. I'm curious to watch both again to see if I can see what I now know about these films creeping in from the corners of the frame.

Carrey, Zemeckis: Stay away from Christmas

I really want to get behind Disney's A Christmas Carol. Believe me I do.

I have been a Jim Carrey supporter long past the point where it was fashionable -- if it was ever fashionable -- and I have liked Robert Zemeckis' career directorial output as much as anyone. Plus, my wife and I have a special place in our hearts for Charles Dickens' classic tale. It was at a local staging of A Christmas Carol, five years ago next month, that we first met.

But history tells me to be cautious. Christmas and Jim Carrey and Christmas and Robert Zemeckis have been a toxic combination.

Let's take Carrey first. Still have the bad taste in your mouth after Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas, directed by Ron Howard? I do, and that was nine years ago. It was loud, garish, malevolent and in all other ways crass. The Whos looked perverse, and Carrey as the Grinch was no better. That movie buckled under the weight of expanding outward to feature length from a short Dr. Seuss classic. It left few of us happy, and Carrey's over-the-top antics were one of the things ringing in our ears when we left the theater.

And speaking of the age-old difficulty of making movies out of extremely short stories, Zemeckis sapped all the joy out of Chris Van Allsburg's wonderful storybook The Polar Express five years ago. (That very same Christmas I met my wife, in fact -- I knew it all had to be interconnected somehow). Zemeckis did a pretty good job with the book's signature soft-focus look, the one I found so magical when reading this with the family when I was younger, but the filler plot was a total mess. Instead of the straightforward trip up to the North Pole from Van Allsburg's book, Zemeckis got obsessed with the train being constantly out of control, with the children aboard suspended in a constant state of mortal danger. Plus a dozen other set pieces designed only to plump up the running time. Not exactly how you want to feel during your family-oriented holiday fare. Then of course there was the most infamous element of this film, the fact that the not-quite-perfected motion-capture animation style (which has been a hallmark of every Zemeckis film since) left all the characters with dead eyes and jerky motions, most notably Tom Hanks appearing in about seven different roles.

My fear is that A Christmas Carol will represent the worst of both of these films.

The Polar Express vibe is the one that comes off more strongly from the trailer. What most people have seen of A Christmas Carol is the extended sequence in which Carrey's Ebenezer Scrooge is blasted into the air on the rocket-cone depicted in this poster. (The single-image declaration that this is not your father's Christmas Carol, I suppose.) The cone proceeds to disintegrate as Scrooge is about level with the moon, and he continues swimming/falling forward through the air, yelling out a supposed-to-be-hilarious "Humbug!" at the height of his arc. At some point in this whole affair he shrinks (?) to the size of a mouse and does a waterslide down some kind of pipe, which disgorges him on the slanted roof of a building. His momentum continues him onward through a line of icicles, which smash into his tiny face and torso as he slides downward, and he eventually lands in a sack being carried by a man on the street below. The last word we hear him emit is, again, "Humbug," but this time in the voice of Alvin or one of his chipmunks.

Huh?

Warning flags going up left and right. What the hell does this have to do with A Christmas Carol?

Obviously, Zemeckis is not in it for a straightforward retelling of A Christmas Carol. That I can appreciate. There have been no less than 27 stagings of the tale in cinematic history, all of them relatively straightforward. But the specific way in which Zemeckis plans to reimagine the story really reeks of all those out-of-control trains in A Polar Express. Not to mention the fact that Carrey plays at least four characters here, echoing Hanks' role in A Polar Express. If Zemeckis hasn't learned any lessons from where he went wrong there, it's going to be a long night on IMAX 3-D for a lot of people this weekend.

But if A Christmas Carol tanks, Carrey will have certainly played some role in it as well. I'm not sure I love the idea that he plays all three ghosts in addition to the main character -- and Bob Cratchett? And Bob Cratchett's wife? And Tiny Tim? And Jacob Marley? And Jacob Marley's chains? I'm not sure whose idea it was, but playing many roles probably made Carrey a lot more interested than if he were just playing Scrooge. To be sure, Scrooge would have given him ample opportunity to exercise his love of scenery chewing. With at least three other prominent roles in the film, will we feel as bludgeoned by his Jim Carrey-ness at the end of it all, as we did at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas?

However, now that it's officially Christmas season -- finish up that Halloween candy, because gingerbread is right around the corner -- I'd be a bit of a Grinch/Scrooge myself if I didn't try to end this post with a bit of hope. So here goes.

I have really loved Zemeckis' last two films that used his now-signature technique. Monster House (2006), which was produced by Zemeckis and directed by Gil Kenan, started me backpedaling on my doubts about the effectiveness of this motion-capture technology. It was a fun, unique summer movie for kids and adults alike. Then the following year, the Zemeckis-directed version of Beowulf drove my wow factor over the top. Watching that film in IMAX 3-D was nearly a religious experience -- rarely have I felt so surrounded and absorbed by the world a film was trying to create for me. This is not to say it's a perfect film, just that it is executed in a way that makes you feel, momentarily, like it is.

And Carrey? Well, I'd be lying if I said that Carrey was at his peak right now. Last year's Yes Man was quite the disappointment; the previous year's The Number 23, all the more so; 2005's Fun With Dick and Jane, somewhere in between those two. But the more germane subject here is what Carrey has done with outsized characters that we've enjoyed. He was wonderful in the vastly underrated Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, in a similarly Scrooge-like role. Most would agree that he gave a bravura performance as Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. And don't forget that original role way back when that put him on our map -- Ace Ventura, one of the most over-the-top characters in film history. I remember I watched the original Pet Detective at least two and possibly three times on the same rental.

My wife and I won't see A Christmas Carol this weekend -- we've got a number of movies, most notably Paranormal State, still standing in front of it. Besides, I'm not in the Christmas spirit yet. I always think it's a mistake to release Christmas movies this many weeks before Thanksgiving.

But we will see it eventually, and I'd love for it to be good, just as a symbolic celebration of our five years together.

Prove me wrong, Carrey and Zemeckis. Prove me wrong.

Numbers must always mean something

Warning: The following post exposes me as a huge nerd, and possibly a person in need of getting his head checked. At least it is meant for whimsical entertainment purposes only.

I'm a numerologist. I should just go ahead and say it. I'm a person who likes numbers and what they may signify, even when they don't signify anything.

This is an apparent contradiction for people who know me, because they know I am primarily, publicly, a man of words. But I did do better on the math portion of my SATs than the verbal, and if you're looking for an explanation for my ability to excel in the world of information technology, then my love of numbers probably has something to do with it.

It also helps explain why I love baseball, the most statistics-driven sport, and especially why I love lists. Where an item is ranked on a list means something to me beyond the surface level.

I also love dates. I remember insignificant anniversaries, and I have a subconscious auditor continually running a check for when a friend's birthday is coming up.

And so it is that I get a little geeked for movies like Knowing, which opens tomorrow. It's all about numbers and dates.

Now, I should say I am not geeked for Knowing in particular. In fact, given that Nicolas Cage is the star, I expect it to file right in there with all the other interchangeable high-concept thrillers he's made during the last, oh, 15 years. Next, anyone? And as for this type of movie -- well, The Number 23 should have steered me clear of them for good.

But I did think the release of Knowing provided a good opportunity for letting you in on the latest obsessive list I've been keeping, because it's just the kind of thing that the hero in a good numerology thriller would do. Only, the fate of the world isn't in the balance. But my numerological list is just as ridiculous as theirs, and if you saw The Number 23, you know it can get pretty ridiculous.

As I've mentioned before, I maintain a number of lists related to the movies I've seen. I won't single them out here -- I'm sure they will come up at other times, if they haven't already. But it had been awhile since I'd started keeping a new type of list -- that is, until about two months ago. This latest is probably the most absurd list I keep, but that doesn't make it any less fun to update.

It's a list of the dates I've seen certain movies -- by date. I already had a list of the order of the movies I see, which includes their dates. But I didn't have a list like the following, and let's use today as an example:

March 19: Roger Dodger (2003), The Emperor and the Assassin (2008)

I used the movie order list to help come up with this. It was a little tedious, but it was fun.

You see, I find some inherent interest -- as insane as it undoubtedly sounds -- in whether there are (certainly coincidental) similarities between movies I saw on the same day in different years. The same year doesn't count, because I might have been watching movies according to a theme that day. Or at least you couldn't say it was totally random. If I were counting movies seen on the same day in the same year, you could argue that I skewed the results to be more interesting. And in fact, if you are really skeptical of me, you could say that I will plan viewings in the future to be interesting, now that this list exists. Which is why I'm telling you about it now -- and I promise, never again. (Maybe.)

Now, I should tell you, I've only kept the movie order list since March of 2002. So the similarities I did end up finding -- some of which are really pretty funny, most of which are just stupid -- date back only to 2002.

Without further ado, I will adopt the persona of Walter Sparrow, otherwise known as Fingerling, otherwise known as Jim Carrey's character(s) from The Number 23. You'll get the dates, the movies, and the frantic conspiracy theory on why they're related. Understand the rules? Okay, there's one more: Films seen on that date that don't fit into the "pattern" have been excluded. Believe me, you'll thank me. But not as much as you'll thank me for the warning at the beginning of this piece, which may have allowed some of you with less time on your hands to skip this post altogether.

Okay, let's begin.

January 5: Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2004), With a Friend Like Harry ... (2008). A man named Harry is coming to kill me!

January 31: Bandits (2004), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2006). Those Enron guys were bandits alright! (Eh, not so much).

February 8: Lucky Break (2003), Miracle (2004). A higher power is coming to save me!

Feburay 23: The Last Temptation of Christ (2004), The Devil's Rejects (2006). God vs. the Devil!

March 7: Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (2002) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008). Long titles! Names! Colons!

March 9: The Time Machine (2002), Deja Vu (2007). I know I've seen this somewhere before!

March 23: Jackpot (2002), The Bank Job (2008). Money money money!

April 3: Sin City (2005), 300 (2007). Both movies are from source material by Frank Miller! (I do think this one is genuinely weird.)

April 14: Sorry, Haters (2007), P.S. I Love You (2008). Love vs. Hate!

April 18: Big Trouble (2002), Anger Management (2003), Kill Bill, Volume II (2004). If you don't manage your anger, there will be big trouble, possibly resulting in killing! Of Bill! Volume II!

May 12: Super Size Me (2004), 28 Weeks Later (2007). Morgan Spurlock wanted to see how unhealthy McDonald's would make him 28 days later! And 28 Weeks Later is a sequel to that!

July 7: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Transformers (2007). Machines are coming to get us!

July 19: Eight Legged Freaks (2002), Freaks (2006). Freaks are coming to get us! (Note: These are the only two films I've ever seen with the world "freaks" in the title. You just blew your own mind.)

August 4: Duplex (2005), Monster House (2006). Giant houses are coming to get us!

August 11: Dead Ringers (2006), The Number 23 (2007). Watch out for evil twins! (Plus, I had to get The Number 23 in there again.)

August 21: Still We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie (2004), The Bostonians (2005). Boston is coming to drag me back home! (Note: These are the only two films I've ever seen with the word "Boston" in the title -- and I'm from Boston. Mind blow #2.)

August 29: Hero (2004), World Trade Center (2006). Self-explanatory!

September 4: Stargate (2004), Across the Universe (2008). A stargate helps you get across the universe!

September 30: Thirteen (2003), 21 (2008). What did I tell you -- it's all about NUMBERS!!

November 8: Love's Labour's Lost (2002), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003). Beware lost love!

November 12: The Doors (2005), Last Holiday (2006), Last Days (2008). Impending death! For Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Queen Latifah's woman with a terminal illness! How long will they "last"?!

November 22: Elf (2003), The Queen (2006). Beware characters in fantasy adventures!

December 26: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005). Beware Jim Carrey!

And Jim Carrey brings us pretty much back to where we started.

I sincerely apologize for wasting so much of your time.

But don't say I didn't warn you, like a good numerological conspiracy theorist should.

Several times.