i liked it but i can’t compare to the books since i haven’t read any . i think jim carrey made a better bad guy in the grinch than this.

I enjoyed the rather old fashioned stylized costuming. I though Jim Carey did a great job. I think he found both the villainy and the humor in Count Olaf. His physical ability to get into a character is fantastic & that along with the makeup/costumes a person who didn’t know what was coming would’ve been fooled into not immediately recognizing Count Olaf too. Many segments of the film were obviously well thought out. The scenery was pretty good. The credits were some of the best I’ve ever seen.

What I didn’t like was how they tried to cram three books into one film that was barely 1.5 hours! It was way too short for all this. I felt this made them lose the essence of the books. I knew the marvelous wordplay would be hard to adapt, but I felt they started out well with the voice-over and then lost it for rather pedestrian dialogue. They should have fleshed out the stories and gone a little more into depth, otherwise it just felt like 3 sat. morning cartoon episodes. For example, you barely met Monty before he met his end. So there was no long set up of what was coming. Also, the book already has a particular sense of humor, so trying to stick in lame one-liners from Cedric/Dustin Hoffman was stupid.

Finally what I didn’t like was the ending. They tried to stick on a relatively happy/hopeful ending for a series that is literally an endless series of unfortunate events. That’s what brings you back, you watch & you think things are going to be OK, then something awful happens and they move again and the whole cycle starts again. I’m not saying they should make it entirely depressing and hopeless because it is in fact that very grain of hope that keeps you reading the books to find out what will happen.

So worth watching, good effort, but as with all adaptations of books… go read the books instead, they are much better!

The movie was good, but it would have been a lot better without Jim Carrey.

DVD rotates inside the tray – a very bright green country home, flowers every where, butterflies twittering, a happy tune being sung in the background – title rolls. “The little Elf” I thought it was an advertisement and decide to press Fast Forward in my remote. But just as I bend to pick it up, the music goes off, everything stops as though the disc has broken into two-then Lemony Snicket’s(Jude Law) voice “If you are hoping to see this kind of a movie, then I’m sorry, it’s not.” I straighten up. This is what I was looking for.

One part of me feels very happy for having read the books – mind you, the books belong to those genre which will make sense to both a child and an adult. Countless puns and literary allusions – for instance there’s a character named Mr.Poe (Possibly after Edgar Allan Poe) and a Herpetologist named Montgomery Montgomery. But this is not about the books, it’s about the movie – the first three books have been made into a movie with obvious but ‘welcomable’ changes.

SPOILER: What I mean by ‘Welcomable’ is the fact that the first book in the series titled “The Bad Beginning” ends with Count Olaf’s (Jim Carrey) failed attempt to inherit the Baudelaire fortune by staging a play – where he marries Violet. Violet comes off by saying that she didn’t sign the marriage certificate with her ‘right’ hand and so the marriage is invalid and gets away. ingenious, but flimsy. In the movie, Klaus focuses a ray of sun on to the marriage certificate using a huge lens and causing it to burn. This was much better. The movie has such small little deviations from the book, although it stays pretty close to the original story.

Jim Carrey steals the show as Count Olaf. Evil, vicious and twisted, yes, but nevertheless he is funny. Sunny Baudelaire is being wonderfully cast. The scenes involving Klaus thinking about something he’s read, is awesome, as is the opening of the movie.

I’d give four out of five – one each for the art direction, the small deviations from the book, Jim Carrey and Sunny Baudelaire. I take that one away – half each for Violet and Klaus.