BEFORE: Played team trivia last night for the first time in 2014, my team finished just out of the final round, in 4th place. Seems about right. But I felt somewhat better after having two beers at the event - I forgot that I can sometimes drink the cold away - heck, I've tried everything else, why not beer?
I picked this film up to put on a DVD with "Hugo" - and linking from "Brave", two actors carry over - Billy Connolly and Craig Ferguson. That's slightly unusual, but appreciated.
THE PLOT: When a massive fire kills their parents, three children are delivered to the custody of cousin and stage actor Count Olaf, who is secretly plotting to steal their parents' vast fortune.
AFTER: Along with this whole identity theme, I just realized I've got another theme/commonality developing, loss of parents. This isn't all that uncommon in kids' movies, just look at "Finding Nemo" and "Bambi", among others. But it's weird that I put these films in more or less random order - and right in a row we had Hugo, getting by after his father died; Rango, who gets separated from his owners, essentially orphaned in the desert; and "Brave", where Princess Merida has to deal with the (temporary) loss of her mother, kinda. This film was slotted next on the schedule without considering the theme, but it seems to fit right in.
This one was a bit of a head-scratcher though, it tried to be really dark in tone, with the deaths of family members, but it also tried to be comical. And that's a really difficult combination, unless you're making a spoof film like "Murder By Death" or "What a Way to Go!". This film also tried to be a straight adaptation of a story, and unfortunately, it can't have things both ways - what you end up with is a film that's neither comic enough or serious enough. Not really Tim Burton-esque, more like "The Addams Family" films, which were kind of fun but not really laugh-out-loud funny.
Obviously, they needed a name actor, somebody who can do this Count Olaf character justice, put asses in the seats, and can do a few different voices and disguises - that's probably a very short list. Jim Carrey, maybe Dana Carvey, and that's about it. The film was produced by Nickelodeon, makers of kids' shows where if you're overacting, you're still not selling it enough. Remarkably, there's some restraint in the acting of the orphaned teens - compared to Jim Carrey, they practically seem like they're asleep. Which could easily be misread as being uninteresting characters - the girl is very inventive, but the boy...umm, reads? Don't a lot of kids read? Ah, but he retains everything that he reads, and uses it. That's a pretty good role model for kids. A kid who bites things? Not so much.
There's another mystery tonight, sort of in the same vein as "Hugo", but that other film was much better at providing answers. We get sort of an answer in tonight's film to the mysterious deaths, but there are still quite a few loose ends - the spyglasses in particular. What do they mean? But I liked most of the puzzle-solving aspects of the film, since I'm a big puzzle guy.
Still, I don't quite understand who this Lemony Snicket guy is, or how he fits into the story. I realize he's a pseudonym, and the de facto narrator of the original book, but what's he doing in the film, besides writing a book? He's using an outdated typewriter, but how does that typewriter result in the visual images that we're seeing? And how does he know so much about these children to begin with, and what's his angle for presenting the story to me?
Also starring Jim Carrey (last heard in "A Christmas Carol"), Meryl Streep (last seen in "The River Wild"), Liam Aiken (last seen in "Road to Perdition"), Emily Browning (last seen in "Sucker Punch"), Jude Law (last seen in "Hugo"), Timothy Spall (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Catherine O'Hara (last heard in "Frankenweenie"), Cedric the Entertainer (last heard in "Madagascar 3"), Luis Guzman (last seen in "The Bone Collector"), with cameos from Jennifer Coolidge (last seen in "American Dreamz"), Jane Adams, Lenny Clarke (last seen in "Here Comes the Boom"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Billy Bathgate"), Jane Lynch (last heard in "Rio").
RATING: 5 out of 10 spelling errors
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