Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events

Miss (an unfortunate event) – Starring Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, Jude Law, Emily Browning, Liam Aiken, Shelby and Kara Hoffman, Billy Connolly, Catherine O’Hara

Based on the stories by Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events follows the unfortunate events of the Baudelaire children. Three wealthy children lose their parents in a large house fire and are sent to live with a distant relative of theirs, Count Olaf (Carrey). Count Olaf plans to kill the children and steal their fortune to avoid having to raise the children on his own. When the children are taken out of Olaf’s custody, he creates new and interesting characters to get them back. Which is all part of his plan to obtain their fortune.

I have not read any of the Unfortunate Event books but I found this movie to be visually stimulating with excellent acting. The events in the story and the story itself were not compelling enough to keep me entertained and interested. After some time I found that this movie had a lot of different circles. We would start at one point, and come full circle to an unfortunate event, and then wind up exactly where we started. This really means that the movie took the audience nowhere. A new title for this movie could be: A Series of recurring Unfortunate Events. Yikes.

Here is a comment taken from IMDB.com from Shelly Hall, a woman who has read the books and feels: “After reading the fantastically tragic, Series of Unfortunate Events, I was eager to see the movie as soon as it was released. When I left the theatre, however, I felt a profound sense of disappointment. Huge holes were left out of the story line, events were mixed up, and the whole delightful sarcasm Lemony Snicket infuses into his books [was] lost somewhere along the way. I nearly gagged at the oh-so-typical Hollywood ending, where they all live happily ever after. It was no wonder when I heard that the producers hadn’t liked Lemony Snicket’s original script, and had hired someone else to write a more typically Hollywood script. If you have never read the books, and you like Jim Carrey, you might enjoy it. If you’re a fan of the books, don’t waste your time,” (IMDB.com).

After seeing this movie, and not reading the books I have this to say… Bottom Line: Wasting money on this movie would be an Unfortunate Event.

Best Scene: Anything with the hypochondriac Aunt Josephine.

Rated PG for thematic elements, scary situations and brief language.
Dramedy
Running Time: 1 hour 53 minutes

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