Fortunately Unfortunate

I went to see A Series of Unfortunate Events today with Mom. I was a little bit worried about it since I couldn't tell if they had just condensed the whole series into one movie, even though the last book isn't out yet. So I thought that it would either be giving away the ending or else not bothering to follow the story line at all. It turned out that this movie just covered the first three books, which is good because that was a good amount of material and it gives them space to make three more movies from the rest of the series.

They managed to cover the main important points of those three books, though they moved the conclusion of book one to the end of the movie, and stuck in an extra bit about a train early on. Also, the whole deal with the spyglasses was out of the blue, and there were lots more hints about the secret organization than I remember from that early in the series. But I guess they couldn't leave that out of the first movie entirely.

Jim Carrey made a perfect Count Olaf. Emily Browning, who played Violet, was pretty neat, and Sunny stole the show in terms of cuteness, being the baby and all. I like the way they used subtitles with her -- I had been wondering how they would work that. Also, Jude Law as Lemony Snicket was kept suitably shadowy and mysterious.

What I liked most about the movie though was the overall visual effect. It was all appropriately dark and dreary, but in a very beautiful way. Some of the sets reminded me of watching the Harry Potter movies, in that I wanted to just stop everything and go there, to examine every little thing in detail. A lot of the time when I see movies of books, I don't like how the movie clashes with the images I have in my mind. But I loved this one, and it has already completely ousted anything else I had in my head in terms of pictures for these books. I also enjoyed the animation sequence during the end credits (not to mention the accordion version of Brahms' Hungarian Dance #5 -- awesome!).

I really want book 12 to come out now, and I'm also going to be looking forward to the next movie. (Further reading: my previous post about the books.)