Well Anons, it's out on Netflix or your favorite pirating site after a book series for children that ran from 1999 to 2006 and an underwhelming movie in 2004, we're onto a Netflix series that covers the first 4 books The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window, and The Miserable Mill, with the end of the last episode covering the very beginning of the fifth book The Austere Academy, over the course of 8 hour long episodes.
What did you all think? I thought it was decent, not terrible, but not great either. I'm not totally on board with the world building itself. It feels like a rip on something Burton-esque but lacks the charm or dedication to pull it off. The villains for the most part aren't frightening enough to be threatening and are too stupid to be taken seriously. The androgynous faggot is particularly annoying. The world itself is a touch too whimsical for my tastes, which is something that the 2004 movie is also guilty of, and still feels odd because it's something I don't recall at all from the books.
The script is also taking liberties with the books which is not really a bad thing considering the first four are rather short and bare. The Quagmires are interwoven and the strings that appear later, the spyglasses, V.F.D., the Sugar bowl gets a wink, make the story more interesting, but come with a plot holes surrounding how ill informed the characters are. Montgomery and Josephine are particularly bad about this.
Random dialogue quirks that feel like they're supposed to be funny hit flat. The narrator will say a character is thinking something and a character will say what the narrator said they were thinking. A character will say a sentence with an intermittent difficulty SAT word and then define the word in the next sentence to the reply "We know what [word] means." Poe's coughing fits translate into him coughing in peoples faces.
Who did Olaf better Jim Carrey or NPH? Or are they too different to compare? Carrey's Olaf wasn't a very frightening character, but he was fun. NPH's is more dastardly, but still suffers from the same issues as his troupe in that he's not very threatening. And the kids playing the orphans are really boring. Again.