Lemony Snicket

I've just seen the Lemony Snicket film, which is probably the prettiest thing I've seen for a long time. It's no doubt common for people to compare it to Harry Potter, so I certainly won't - and mostly because Lemony Snicket should not have been a film. It was crying out to be a TV series being, as it is, a series of unfortunate events. Great fun though it was, it did the road movie thing, which is to say everything goes wrong in one place so they move somewhere else in case that's a bit better.

Also, if it had been a TV series, they probably wouldn't have got Jim Carrey. It's not that he's bad in it - indeed, I can't remember seeing him better - it's just that he's outclassed by everyone else (except perhaps Billy Connolly). Yes, I'm sure the character is hammy and ridiculous in the books, but hey, this is a different medium, and while the visuals were great, he just took it a bit too far on a couple of occasions.

Three books went into this film - there are going to be thirteen books in total (apparently), although they'll surely run out of not-quite-relatives before then, meaning that the Baudelaire children will come out from under the shadow of the adults at some point. A bit like Return Of The Jedi, without Mark Hamill.

Actually, why didn't they get Mark Hamill to play Olaf?