Good Series For Quarantine: Post 7

    Hey everybody! Welcome back for my final post of this school year! As it's the last one, I thought I might spice things up a bit and do a different kind of series: a movie series. Well, it's really more of a show. In any case, this week I am going to be doing the Series of Unfortunate Events series (hm yes) made by Netflix. The original author of the series is of course the pen name Lemony Snicket.

    The book series was originally 13 books, but the series has 25 episodes. Why is that? Because they made the series intelligently and did not try to cram too much into a single movie. This means that they have 1250 minutes of run time approximately, compared to the absolute scraping top max of 180 minutes with a single movie. This is, of course, because they made a show and can have each book as an episode. However, their intelligence did not stop there. They had the foresight to split each book into two parts to get everything they wanted into it. This was a good idea because it turns out that it takes a little under 2 hours for each book, and a single hour-long episode wouldn't be quite enough to cover all of it. This combined with how accurate it is to the book is why this is one of my favorite movie series. I find this series very refreshing to watch and not be constantly thinking, "Ugh, why didn't they put that in," or, "Ugh, why did they put that in," and so forth. It just makes it so much more pleasant to watch and relax rather than critiquing everything that they got wrong, like in Harry Potter, or the even worse Percy Jackson (which was pretty much unwatchable because it was so bad). Both these series had good stories, but the movies just kind of ruined them.

    Speaking of stories, we haven't even talked about the story in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even though I'm sure many of you are already familiar with it, let's do that now. The story starts by introducing the three main characters and protagonists, Violet, Claus, and Sunny Baudelaire. Violet is a good spatial thinker and loves to invent things, while Claus is the bookish one, who loves to read and absorb knowledge like a sponge. Sunny is just a baby, but has remarkably sharp teeth and can chew through many things, like rope for instance, which is the only part of this story that doesn't seem to make very much sense. In the first scene, Violet, Claus, and Sunny are at the beach, and their parents are back at home in their mansion. Then, Mr. Poe, a friend of theirs, comes to tell them that their parents have died in a mysterious fire. From that point, their lives turn into, well, a series of unfortunate events. They now have a new guardian who is the main antagonist in the story, Count Olaf (I always found this funny after watching Frozen). It soon transpires that Count Olaf is simply trying to get ahold of the fortune that they have been left by their parents. Count Olaf and his henchmen and women chase and take the Baudelaires all over the place, always being thwarted by the Baudelaires with each attempt. Another of my favorite parts of the series is how they have an actor to represent the author narrating the story as someone that nobody sees. I also love the humor that is thrown into the darker storyline to remind you that none of this is real and adds a few laughs. Finally, I think that this story has a very clear commentary on how adults never listen to children and refer to the adult for the truth. It is slightly exaggerated, but I think that it is good that it is being shown as an issue. This brings us to the end of my last post (and it did turn out quite long didn't it). Thank you to everyone who read my posts, I hope you enjoyed them!

    -David