Monday at the Movies - March 24, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a less than unfortunate flick.

Lemony Snickey’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) – Midway through my recent binge-reading (can this be a thing?) of the thirteen books in the series, I stepped aside for a few hours with the film, which loosely adapts the first three books (The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window).  The film and its source material find the Baudelaire orphans (Emily Browning as inventive Violet, Liam Aiken as bookish Klaus, and their baby sister Sunny) bounced from guardian to guardian after their parents perish in a fire.  The first guardian, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), turns out to be a cad of many costumes; the third, Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) is a paranoid whackadoo ruled by her fears.  In between is the kind herpetologist Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), a character who gets far too little screen time in contrast to his zanier counterparts.  The elephant in the room is Carrey; he’s at his best when he’s restrained (as in The Truman Show), but here his penchant for plasticity plays well with the character’s own fondness for disguises.  Each disguise Count Olaf dons is transparent, but it’s fun to see Carrey step behind Olaf’s theatricality and inhabit these alternate takes on the character (i.e., the meek Stephano or the gruff Captain Sham).  The three Baudelaires are mostly fine, though the film curiously steps away from Violet’s distinctive hair ribbon and Klaus’s definitive glasses.  But one of the most fun bits in the film is what I’ve always held as the cinephile’s true delight – a cast of celebrity cameos, including Streep and Connolly, of course, but also Timothy Spall, Craig Ferguson, and Dustin Hoffman doing his best Stan Lee impression.  Ultimately, the film feels a lot like a Tim Burton film – the best way, I suppose, to describe Snicket’s distinctive prose voice – but as a Burton fan and an admirer of the books, Lemony Snicket’s was engaging enough.  If only the film told us who Beatrice was!

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!