Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events

Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events throws you in a few different directions at once. It’s kind of like those days when it’s sunny, but the ground is still wet from a recent rainfall. You’re seeing something that is possible, but the contradiction is yet another reminder that we live in a flawed world. Sorry, the holidays always do this to me.

So with Lemony Snicket’s, we’ve got three too-attractive-for-children children that force you to say things like, “that oldest daughter is going to be beautiful when she grows up,” even though you’d probably jump her now. Ah, keeping up appearances. So these kids are orphaned and are let into the custody of a distant cousin, Count Olaf. He’s a failed actor out to kill the children and get their inheritance. Jim Carrey is six notches above over-the-top as Olaf. He even gets some Peter Sellers action as he takes on other personae when it looks like the kids might escape his clutches.

But Carrey isn’t the only one to go over the top (when he’s playing a character named Count Olaf, I suppose he’s got an excuse). Director Brad Siberling goes there too, raiding Tim Burton’s cutting room floor. Siberling spends so much time on the atmosphere of the movie he doesn’t realize that, for as beautiful as the movie is, he’s made it completely and utterly depressing. Another fairy tale for the goth kids.

The secondary characters are great, too. Meryl Streep plays a woman afraid of everything and Billy Connolly (The Duke from Boondock Saints) plays a snake-loving relative.

At the end of the day, it’s a fun watch. It doesn’t seem like a kid’s movie for kids. More like a kid’s movie for adults with a Peter Pan complex. Altogether, there are eleven of the Lemony Snicket books, which means that we’ve got another potential Harry Potter series on our hands. The best thing to do is make friends now and accept the fact that you’re just going to have to get used to it.

Spanglish

There are so many things wrong with this movie that I don’t know where to begin. We could start with the fact that Adam Sandler is in it. It’s like he’s playing one of his trademarked idiot man-child characters who grew up. Now he’s got the family.

The neurotic wife, who you can’t bear, even though you know she’s a fictitious character. Her alcoholic mother who serves as the comic relief and quits getting lit for long enough to offer some sage-like advice to her nut bag daughter. The maid and her daughter who can barely speak English and the fact that it’s all supposed to be heartwarming. I’m surprised that my head didn’t explode like the guy in Scanners.

Spanglish is the sort of movie that leaves people with permanent nervous twitches. It ruins lives, ends marriages, and kills libidos. No one with good sense and a penis should voluntarily see this movie. Of course this sort of thing just has to come out right before Christmas. Just when you thought you were going to finally be able to make it though the holidays without a visit to a mental facility. Now you’re going to have to drink twice as much just to serve as an emotional solvent for your soul.

If you do wind up seeing Spanglish, you can be saved. Just stay drunk from Christmas Eve through New Year’s and you should be all right. It may seem like amputating a limb that you have a mild case of ringworm on, but sometimes you just have to let those hard-to-reach-chips go.

Flight of the Phoenix

Flight of the Phoenix was an assignment that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to. It features Dennis Quaid as the main character in a remake of a lesser-known Jimmy Stewart movie. The reason it’s lesser known is because it’s not particularly good.

So, an ominous assignment with overtones of extreme personal boredom. It’s like a trip to the DMV with previews. I can see the future of this movie: out on DVD by Valentine’s Day, in the $5.47 bin at Wal-Mart by Memorial Day. An all around bad idea from the start.

And it was. Oil riggers whose plane crashes. Multiple obstacles to overcome. Terrible special effects. Giovanni Ribisi trying to go mainstream. You know the drill (Get it?).

So it’s for occasions like this that I keep the Jehovah’s Witness literature in my bookbag. I went around to the six other people in the theater, telling them that Dennis Quaid was a Witness. It was good enough for him, so it was good enough for the theater patrons. I recruited four out of the six. The only reason I didn’t nab the other two is because they were already members.

The two that were already enrolled in The Program took me out for a Chinese buffet lunch afterward. They also offered me a great rate on a refinance loan and told me I couldn’t lose.

We got drunk on cheap wine and saw Flight of the Phoenix again. Somehow it was better on Mad Dog 20/20.

Ocean’s Twelve

I’m not afraid to admit that the original Ocean’s Eleven is one of my favorite movies. Not the Rat Pack piece of crap from the ‘60s. What’s so exciting about watching a bunch of guys who are friends in real life get smashed and sing songs together? Then when the booze runs out, they knock off a casino.

I’m talking about the original remake. Or whatever you want to call it. It was clever, well-directed, had great dialogue, great characters, and it was a lot of fun. Any movie that makes me forget that Julia Roberts is in it has to be doing something right. If you missed it, it’s about eleven guys who knock off the vault to three major Vegas casinos

It’s three years later. The guy they knocked off tracks them down and gives them three weeks to pay him back with interest or its curtains. So they head to Europe in hopes of puling off a few big jobs to save their lives, only to find a bored French millionaire hitting their marks before they do.

Ocean’s Twelve has some of the pizzazz that the last one had, but for the most part it falls short. It was well directed and well made, but it gave me that aching balls feeling that I got when watching Frank and Dean. You feel like you’re watching a bunch of friends sitting around.

And somehow you’re supposed to be excited by all of this. Ocean’s Twelve spends so much time trying to be more clever than its predecessor that it almost comes off as pretentious. I was fully aware of the presence of the fish-faced Julia Roberts this time around. But she was only in it about twenty minutes, so I didn’t mind too much. And the whole Brad Pitt/Catherine Zeta-Jones thing seemed even more contrived than her marriage to Michael Douglas.

And to make matters worse, it took longer to end than Return of the King.

If you’re going to see Ocean’s Twelve for the sole purpose of drooling at Clooney and Pitt, you shouldn’t be too disappointed. But if you’re in that other ten percent, expect to listen to the fairer sex pound away at their parts and dehydrate themselves away in the throes of ecstasy as you’re pummeled with clever cameos.

Blade: Trinity

Having a somewhat pleasant time at and not being too grossly disappointed by the first two Blade movies, I figured there’d be no problem with Blade: Trinity. Sometimes it really hurts being wrong.

Blade was like a cross between Shaft, James Bond, and Dracula. How could you drop the ball with that formula? Like so many television shows have done in the past, they added other characters. “The Brady Bunch” had cousin Oliver, and “The X-Files” had Robert Patrick.

And so did Blade. Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds play a couple of fellow vampire hunters who help Blade take on the granddaddy of all vampires, Dracula himself. Now, you think this is going to be pretty sweet, but it really isn’t. Even though the first two Blade movies weren’t exactly cinematic masterpieces, they had a certain graceful lyricism to them. The violence was poetic, even if the special effects took a little time to evolve.

But Blade: Trinity just has moments that are the pinnacle of cheese.

For instance: Whenever Abigail (Biel) has one of the patented fight scenes characterized by breakneck editing and a Hong Kong wire team, we now get a plug for the ipod. I remember when people used to crack their knuckles or roll their necks before a fight. Now the hip thing is to put in your earbuds, blare whatever passes for rap these days as you smite your opponents with style, but without mercy.

I have a friend who likes to ask your opinion, but he doesn’t really want it. He merely wants a confirmation of his plan of action. I could never rationally endorse that behavior until now. Blade: Trinity is the kind of movie that if I had not seen it already, I would ask anyone who’s seen it his or her opinion on it (and everyone who’s seen it says it’s booty). A hundred and fifty people could tell me it sucks and I’d still go see it.

And very much like my friend who I just mentioned, I’d walk in the door or run into someone who’s opinion I had asked for and say, “you were right, that sucked.”