It was pure goth porn, and by porn I mean art direction.

I get to go see it Thursday night. I cannot wait.

I get to go see it Thursday night. I cannot wait.

Plan on staying through the end credits. I could have easily watched a whole movie just in the style of the end credits.

I agree w/ JZ wrt Carrey.

Brad & Jen have a production company where they're producing movies that don't necessarily star either of them, so y'all probably don't have to worry.

We both agreed the sets, costuming and children's performances were stellar.

Yes, this. The credits were faaabulous, and the art direction. Jilli will love it.

I agree with the RIOBOT. There was too much Carrey and not enough kids. But it was still fun, even if I did start looking away every time Olaf was onscreen.

So, if Jim Carrey drives me totally batshit, with levels of loathing comparable to Theodosia's loathing for Julia Roberts, I should probably skip the Lemony Snicket movie?

That's been my plan, Steph. Connie's husband offered the incentive of seeing him put in Wile E Coyote-style predicaments, but you have to actually watch him to see them. I'll pass—seeing his characters suffer does nothing for me unless I know Carrey himself was really feeling the pain.

Oh dear dog, that Sin City trailer looks fabulous. I'm less worried now about the adaptation than any other in a long while.

DAMN. Jerry Orbach died. Rest in peace, El Gallo.

Another reason I love Betsy: her association with Jerry Orbach is my association.

"Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow..."

Tep, Matt, unfortunately, yes. You may have to skip Unfortunate Events, as even Carrey's multiple deaths are horribly shticky and just make you want to smack his corpse with a cattle prod.

However, if you can manage to find someone who's already seen it, and seen it enough times to warn you of his imminent appearance onscreen, and you sit in an aisle seat so you can duck out when warned, the Carrey-free parts of the movie are exquisite. The kids rock. Billy Connolly and his albino snakes rock. The three-eyed toad rocks. Meryl Streep is fabulous. The cozy/busy/ramshackle/bright yet oddly menacing set design and the closing credits will make Matt sing graphic artist hosannas.

Alternatively, if you can manage the admittedly difficult trick of mentally recasting the film as you watch it and replace every instance of Jim Carrey with, say, Alan Rickman, you'll be able not only to endure the whole thing but to drink it up with considerable pleasure.

Carrey is vile. Hec is wrong like a wrong thing -- he wasn't fine, he was ANTIfine. He threw the whole thing out of balance by being too big and by NOT FUCKING ACTING, THAT ASSHEAD. It was comic villain shtick, when everyone around him was being real, and it so didn't work.

I never, for a single second he was onscreen, believed that he was anyone but Jim Carrey, or that he actually hated these three children and wanted to murder them. Which is, admittedly, a dark and scary thing to ask of an actor, but it's the whole goddamn point of the role. When he was offscreen, I was totally happy to loathe and fear him just as the Baudelaire children did, because their performances were amazing and simple and true, and I was fully invested in them and fully prepared to love or hate anyone they loved or hated... but when he was onscreen - feh. And it is not a good thing when a would-be child murdering villain is more menacing when the extremely highly-paid actor playing him is nowhere in sight.

And if I were teaching acting classes, I would totally make my students watch an Olaf scene, an Aunt Josephine scene, and their scene together. Meryl Streep was so damn funny, because she wasn't for a second trying to be funny; she was just losing herself in being Aunt Josephine, and it so happened that Aunt Josephine's phobias and fluttering and absent-minded doting on the children were screamingly funny, but it really just so happened. And in contrast, Carrey's Olaf, however actually funny he was, would have been one fuck of a lot funnier if Carrey had actually trusted the script, the director, the costumer, and his own instincts and just PLAYED OLAF instead of mugging for laughs.

God, I fucking hated him. And I've loved him in Eternal Sunshine and Truman Show and even The Mask, where the Max Fleischer-y Mask is a deliberate id-rampant antithesis to his sweetly grave and earnest human self. He can act, and he can even be genuinely funny (and a thousand times more interesting) when he does. It makes me fucking nuts when he chooses not to.

In other news, I need every one of Violet's costumes, but particularly the coats. I'm quite certain Jilli will need them all too. Coats that drape properly and look stylish over hoop skirts are all-too-rare commodities in this hoopless world.