Overall Rating
 Awesome: 41.25%
Worth A Look: 33.75%
Just Average: 17.5%
Pretty Crappy: 4.38%
Sucks: 3.13%
11 reviews, 94 user ratings
|
|
| Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events |
by Jay Seaver
"Delightfully malevolent, just like the best fairy tales."
|
Adapting Daniel Handler's "Unfortunate Events" books (written under the pen name "Lemony Snicket"), at least initially, presents rather the opposite problem that adapting the Harry Potter novels does - they are slim volumes with large text and page counts that are padded by illustration. The writing style is elliptical, filled with the types of digressions and exposition that fall away naturally when translated to a screenplay.So rather than simply cutting the books down to fit in a movie, screenwriter Robert Gordon has combined the first three books - The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window - into one movie. The joins are obvious, as the Baudelaire orphans (Emily Browning, Liam Aiken, and Kara & Shelby Hoffman) are shuffled from one guardian to another, whose ghastly demises serve to speed them on to their next stop. If Paramount and DreamWorks eventually adapt the entire series, it will take at least three more movies to adapt all thirteen of these books (two being as-yet unpublished).
I'm hoping they do. Although this movie is not quite perfect, it is highly entertaining. Its biggest flaw is an overzealously gothic design sense, which director Brad Silberling's Casper suffered from as well; I shudder to think where original director Barry Sonnenfeld or Tim Burton would have gone with it. The production design is still a little strange, setting the movie in a vaguely twentieth-century world, but also one out of fairy tales. Lots of black and dark purples, with the only really colorful segment being the green, yellow and red snakes kept by "Uncle Monty".
Amid this gloom, though, is Jim Carrey playing his role with broad insincerity and undisguised menace. His Count Olaf is a more successful villain than is often found in kids' movies, actually managing to kill people (generally off-screen) even though his disguises seem to be transparent enough for the children to see through them. Those disguises are a great deal of fun; we see Olaf take on two other personae to get close enough to the orphans and their new guardians in order to do them harm. Jim Carrey is a high-energy performer, and doing one movie a year isn't efficient use of him, especially compared to his early-nineties output on In Living Color and when he first exploded onto the movie scene in 1994/1995. He's like Eddie Murphy in that regard, where one character isn't enough to contain what he brings.
Even more remarkably, he's a generous co-star, working well with Billy Connolly, Meryl Streep, Timothy Spall, and Catherine O'Hara. His zaniness contrasts well with young Miss Browning's deadpan reactions. The filmmakers also make a great decision to not have a conventional wisecracking kid, but by giving all those lines to the infant Sunny. "Somebody's been to crazy-town" wouldn't necessarily be funny spoken out loud, but as the subtitle for a single syllable of baby-talk, it's quite funny.
The comparisons to Harry Potter are obvious, and not just because of the star-powered casts adapting an extended series of children's books. That's in part because both series draw on fairly basic archetypes - the highly intelligent children who lose their loving parents and must contend with a malevolent guardian, and must face adventure and danger despite the fact that adults are very little help. Roald Dahl hit it, and it goes back at least to Cinderella. I like this movie better than the Harry Potter movies; it not only doesn't engage in the almost criminal waste of its talented cast, but it makes its children active heroes. The Baudelaire kids aren't chosen ones, and they don't get help from behind the scenes. Instead, Violet, Klaus and Sunny extricate themselves from their perils on their own, using their talents and brains.Is A Series of Unfortunate Events macabre for a kids' movie? Yeah, a little. People die, kids are put in peril, and it is horribly dangerous to swim without waiting an hour after eating. But, really, kids who are eight years old or so can handle it. Fairy tales and folklore in their original forms are filled with grisly ends, and even if the smaller kids get scared, the movie shows that even the smallest of children can be strong and fearless.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=11348&reviewer=371
originally posted: 01/03/05 11:06:13
![[printer]](/images/icon/printer.gif) printer-friendly format
|
 |
USA
17-Dec-2004 (PG-13)
DVD: 26-Apr-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
16-Dec-2004
|
|
Articles 
subscribe to this feed![[AllPosters.com]](/images/icon/ap.gif){kind=icon}
