Trailer Stash The new trailer for The Number 23 deconstructed. By Sara Brady Icon by Lisa Martin

And now, the latest in Jim Carrey's relentless quest for respect and adulation, also known as Jim's Never-ending Farewell to Comedy Tour: The Number 23. Premiere reported on this project a few months back, noting that the film is a thriller about a man who becomes obsessed with the number 23. It should be noted that Carrey himself has said he took the project because he is also obsessed with the number 23: He named his production company "JC23," referring to the 23rd Psalm, and what we really, really hope are his initials.

Jim Carrey in The Number 23. Click here to watch the trailer.

The trailer for the film, which reunites Carrey with Joel Schumacher many long years after their memorable pas de deux in Batman Forever, opens with Virginia Madsen walking into a shadowy bookstore. If there's anything The Pagemaster has taught us, it's that shadowy bookstores are not to be trusted. A red book, front facing out, glows at the end of a row. Jim reads, still using that dead, dull tone he stole from Bill Murray, "The Number 23. A heart-wrenching odyssey into paranoia." A million unwashed National Novel Writing Month scribes look up from their 50,000-word manuscripts and whine, "No jacking my logline, man!"

"The most horrifying metamorphosis ever told," Jim continues. I'd like to know who thinks they have a leg up on Kafka's Gregor here and who thinks a metamorphosis can be told. This trailer is about forty seconds old and I already want it to die.

"I'm buying this for you," Virginia declares. Good for you, sweetheart. Now you have only yourself to blame when he becomes a rambling paranoiac who thinks he's Jesus Christ.

"Chapter one," Jim reads. "All I could think about was The Number." The capital letters are audible, I tell you. Two kids jog in front of Jim, the numbers 2 and 3 on their jerseys lining up to read "23." Ooh. Portentous. Jim stares pervily.

"I met you when I was..." he says to Virginia. "Twenty-three," she replies gamely. Jim asks a person who appears to by Danny Huston, "So what is 23?" Probably a party drug. "There are 23 axioms to Euclid's geometry," Danny says, and pardon me if that isn't the most fascinating nugget of trivia I've heard this week. Danny does his best with that line about the chromosomes, but yawwwwwn.

"Two divided by three," Danny demands. "Point six six six. Number of the devil." That would be a nicer number if Danny had heard of rounding.

A red title fades in to tell us "All numbers have a pattern." Good for them. Maybe they should start a quilting bee. Jim continues his mad rambling: "I was born at 11:12 p.m. Eleven plus twelve!" He goes through his other pertinent numbers, getting loopier as he raves. "You've concerned yourself with minutiae and you've drawn wild conclusions from that," Virginia says. But it was you who bought the book, honey...

"All patterns contain a message," the title card reads, as Jim descends farther into Crazy Town, mumbling, "Every 23rd word on every 23rd page..." and circles the words. Someone grabs a knife and another title card slices in to say "All messages reveal a destiny."

"Waco, Texas and the Oklahoma City bombing both happened April 19," someone intones, and if you can't do the adding for yourself by this point, maybe you should stop reading. Jim continues to ramble incoherently as Virginia holds up the red book and yells, "This is not who you are."