A Series of Unfortunate Events: Laughing at Count Olaf

When I was thirteen I had only read the first two books in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I liked them, but they were a bit small and I was just about to really get out of the age range that those early books are intended for. The movie coming out felt like a way to make me more interested in the series as a whole.

But that didn’t happen. And frankly, I think it was Jim Carrey.

He looks entirely pleased with himself.

Count Olaf, in my mind, never came off as funny in those books. He was a sinister presence, a direct confrontation with the grim and dirty world that plagued the Baudelaire’s. Sure the adults failing them in sometimes idiotic ways was always humorous to a degree of silliness, but Count Olaf always refused to play into that. So getting a comedic actor to play Olaf, always felt wrong to me.

I recently reread the first two books of the series (apparently this is an inevitable curse for me) and dropped them again. This was in part because I wasn’t reading very much and because of the repetitiveness, but the point is that Count Olaf still felt like a very foreboding and awfully real to life dark figure.

So Jim Carrey didn’t work for me. Count Olaf was, frankly, ridiculous in that movie and they made unnecessary plot changes that destroyed some of the wit and pace of the books (I mean it was three books in one).

But luckily now we have the TV series, with its completely serious casting of Neil Patrick Harris.

Barney?

Well…

Okay, so I’m going to say this first: I really like the TV Series. I thought it was great and that they perfectly captured the tone of the books. But they still did not capture my mental imagination of Count Olaf. And at this point, I can’t really keep arguing for it, because Daniel Handler is basically in charge of the show.

And to be fair, what I’m wanting for Count Olaf would be no fun. No fun at all.

Count Olaf the way I read him is a nasty horrible man. And he still is, but if he quipped like Carrey or Harris I would probably like him more. Instead, when I read scenes such as him talking about post-marriage rape (essentially) in the first book, and holding a knife literally against a child’s leg in the second book, I’m not laughing.

The TV Series has done a lot else great with adaptation. But that’s for another post. Until then, just know, that if the ridiculousness of Olaf in the film adaptations so far leaves you wanting, there’s always a much more unfortunate path in the books.

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The series discussed above is available on Netflix. But, you might also be interested in seeing how such a series could be executed through the written word as well. By clicking on the image below you can purchase the first book in the series, and see if you like it.

Totally Uncontroversial: The Best Thing from The OA

The OA, the latest (way to date yourself) series on Netflix is riddled with problems. I know, I know, people like it. I like it. The sometimes spotty plotting and sparse characterization don't detract from one thing though: it's honest exploration of nearly every realm of spiritualism.

Now, to be fair, that's a bit of a misnomer. The concept of taking every single religious philosophy and merging them into a monogamous marriage of humankind's best and brightest ideas is something that's been done multiple times. And honestly, most of the time writer's use a short cut. It's a fictional God, or it's about humans versus a Devil figure. Instead, The OA takes the hard route. It crafts together symbolism stitched from a variety of viewpoints into a whole. Christian, Islamic, Norse, Roman, and Judaism all serve as sources of lessons, morals, philosophies, and explorations in The OA and without spoiling a late-game twist, paints a picture of the centre of all of them by means of a medium.

That is to say, the one best thing from the OA is the dance.

The dance.

Laugh, but understand that laughing is the first in a long line of human reactions to this... okay, is that a Kamehameha?

I'm kind of amazed how split people are on this. If nothing else, I would think the thematic blindness of the popular perspective of shows and writing and films exposes itself in those that don't realize the dance absolutely epitomizes the entire crux of the show. One could even argue the show writes in a reason for it to seem made up on the spot and advance only in broken pieces the way it does. We're supposed to look at the unexplained gaps as the elements of a spiritual story, where gaps and holes exist, reason to question exist, and reason to doubt are pertinent.

But the dance is the doing away of all that. Whether you believe OA's backstory or whether you buy into the show telling you that it was all made up, the idea of prisoners doing a nonsensical dance, filled with the metaphor of swallowing a dove, spreading yourself out, reaching out to those on either side, these are the messages of the entire show.

Even the climax ends it on the crux of the dance. Spiritualism is a weapon against the biggest craziest tragedies of the world. Without talking about the problem of plotting in light of the climax, it can be safely said that them dancing is one of the strangest most satisfying climaxes I've seen in a show this year (that is, 2016). It's the rule that storytelling works on, but dance... how cinematic is dance? How can you accomplish this story by a means other than television? You can't. Not really.

Basically, when something hugely thematic or important to a story and can only be accomplished in that medium, that's when you've found out exactly how something has transcended its artform.

And that is the best thing from The OA.

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Mass Surveillance Part 2: Snowden (2016)

Film Review for Snowden (2016)
Directed by: Oliver Stone
Written by: Oliver Stone, Kieran Fitzgerald
Based on the book by: Anatoly Kucherena, Luke Harding
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Zachary Quinto, Melissa Leo, Rhys Ifans, and others

Review

You know the story of Edward Snowden, and Oliver Stone's film, much like his previous political films, sets to tell the human story of someone at the center of conspiracy. In this case, Edward Snowden a young man who injures himself in the armed service grows to serve his country in other ways. He is a computer science genius, shown to us in the typical "smartest guy in the room" type of incredulous test-study thing, before becoming a major worker in the CIA. It's during his time that he comes into contact with the NSAs surveillance network and his paranoia grows until he decides to whistleblow.

Considering that Edward Snowden's whistleblowing and what he divulged happened in the real world we are mostly familiar with this story. Citizenfour, the documentary whose real filming is dramatized in this film, was released about a year after Snowden's leak, the reputation of which had garnered a serious reputation as a blow against America. Declared an act of treason, the most important weight to drag to this film is the idea that Snowden somehow wronged us.

The film itself is surprisingly "meh."

Let's be clear, the character of Edward Snowden is not interesting, not in real life, not in the film. He was a worker, he got scared of his work, and he smuggled and whistleblew. That's literally the story, to the point that when he first came out many media outlets and the government did their best to try and redact his claims, to say he was just a disgruntled office worker who was mad about a relocation. There's an untouched arc that could've worked, where Snowden transitions from being a soldier to being a treasounous whistleblower, but for some reason the film refuses to ever tap into this. The Snowden from the very first conversation with his love interest is the exact same person at the end of the film.

Shailene Woodley has piss-all to do in this film besides look and act like Shailene Woodley. Has anyone even interviewed Snowden's wife/girlfriend person? You can't tell in this film, as she literally falls out of the sky as cool girl to have sex with, even when she's mad there's still some sexy things you can do with and for her. I've never seen so much screentime so grossly misused as with the romantic partnership between these two.

Let me be clear: I do not find the fear and paranoia of Mass Surveillance in and of itself interesting. It has to be made interesting for me. What I'm not interested in is Joseph-Gordon Levitt staring at his webcam. That's not interesting, especially when the only shot in the film dedicated to making that scary is a single shot of a woman who only goes to her undies. Invasive? Yes! Frightening? Paranoid? Thrilling? No. The opening shot of Carrie physically represents a far more uncomfortable reality of the relationship with nude vulnerability and viewership.

At least Orwell understood that rummaging through self-reported facts can create an entirely fictional criminal. That was sort of scary. But Snowden fails to think beyond some strange moral line. It seems to insist, "The government shouldn't be able to do this," and that in and of itself is only scary to a particular type of jingoistic gun toting paranoid that I'm not.

Snowden for some reason fails to comprehend what subject its even talking about. Nearly everything in the film, down to the basic paranoia that we established must be there in this genre, is missing. Instead we get a very boring slow portrait of a very boring man. And it did not have to be this way.

I think of Fruitvale Station, certainly a much more emotional powerhouse film, but a biographical film about a man unjustifiably shot at a train station while handcuffed. It's important to realize that the action of being killed is not what is focused on in that film. Instead, it takes a tour of what a young black man's life might look like, where he might have gone wrong, where he might have gone right. Then they kill him. And that's it. That's the point.

There is nothing interesting in the continued discussion this film has about Edward Snowden. Yes, what he did was great. No, nothing anyone has done before will be as important for the transperancy of the country. But there's a character there, a story, and a biography, not just of one man but of everybody, and when it's painted with this bland a brush for the characters, it serves absolutely no justice to the real people in America who may begin to feel threatened by this type of thing.

Art is an argument, a political stance, and the one in Snowden is so laughably weak that the concept of being "scared" only exists in the next project Stone decides to direct.

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And finally, you can hang around the Facebook page or Twitter to keep up on Social Media. This doubles as the easiest way to harass me, but you wouldn’t do that would you?

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I didn't like Snowden, and when I don't like something, I'm not going to recommend it to you either. Instead, if you like conspiracies and/or Oliver Stone, make sure you've seen his career making masterpiece, JFK. It's longer than Snowden, but definitely better.