LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS

LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS. Brad Silberling, dir. Daniel Handler (books), Robert Gordon (screenplay). USA: Nickelodeon Movies, Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks, Scott Rudin Productions (prod.) / Paramount (US dist.), 2004. Rick Heinrichs, prod. Design. (See IMDb for stellar cast and other information.) **+Noirish, po-mo, very self-conscious and allusive film—the children are from the Baudelaire family, and the villain is "Count Olaf," with Jim Carrey doing a Nosferatu number—classified by IMDb as "Adventure / Fantasy / Comedy / Family (more)." Significant here for narration by Lemony Snicket while sitting at a portable typewriter, inside a clock tower from, vaguely, "early modern" times in the sense of the late 19th c. Cf. and contrast clockwork in HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (listed this section); in LEMONY SNICKET, the clockworks are decorative, intertextual, and suggestive—including suggesting an image of clockwork that has become a kind of fantasy trope and reinforcing the point that in LEMONY "time is on a crazy path" (Farah Mendlesohn), in a po-mo mise-en-scene gleefully mixing periods: in architecture, style, and technology.