Who’s in It: Jim Carrey, Virginia Madsen, Danny Huston

The Basics: One day, the Number 23 was walking along minding its own business, and then it saw Jim Carrey and decided that it’d be a lot of fun to mess with his mind. So the Number 23 goes, “Hey, Jim Carrey, I now hypnotize you and turn you cuckoo-bananas so that you think I, the Number 23, am somehow responsible for every single thing in the history of the world and that I am also able to see your future and maybe, possibly, turn you into a murderer while you simultaneously wear a wig that makes Nic Cage’s Ghost Rider toupee look sane.”

What’s the Deal? Some movies in this life, regardless of their brain-melting silliness, demand to be witnessed. This is one of them. It does that thing where you think maybe the screenwriter is just crapping out the craziest stuff he can think of to put on paper in hopes of being fired from the project so he can live his life with an ounce more dignity. But then the producers or director or star or whoever — possibly all of them in this instance, since the film does, after all, feature Carrey and is directed by Joel Schumacher, the man responsible for The Phantom of the Opera, the looniest, most expensive Laura Branigan video ever made — just say, “Yeah, make it go faster!” And then you end up with a movie like this, where insanity is a given but tries to pretend it’s not.

The Least of the Stuff It Expects You to Swallow: That there’s a book in the world written by someone named Topsy Kretts (get it?) and that the main character — Carrey’s alter ego — is named Fingerling. When a character in the movie said that name, my soda shot out my nose. It was a fresh experience every single time.

Calculating Madsen’s Motivation for Appearing in This Movie: Property taxes + kid’s orthodontist + 50,000 mile service on the Saab + residuals from yearly cable airings during the month of October + eventual inclusion in a misguided Jim Carrey DVD box-set  caring about sustaining that Sideways “good work” momentum = 23!