Oh, the bells, bells, bells!

While I've loved Mr. Poe's works since the eighth grade, it should be known that when I begin quoting The Bells, I can only be talking about one thing: Lemony Snicket. And while I do have a far longer history with the tales of the Baudelaire orphans, I discovered my love for A Series of Unfortunate Events right around the same time that I fell in love with A Telltale Heart, as a matter of fact.

It certainly took me a long time to really fall for the series. I don't remember my reaction to The Bad Beginning being read aloud to my class in the third grade; I was intrigued by similar class readings of The Wide Window in the fifth; being quite pleased by the warnings on the back covers of the books not to buy them, I bought a copy of The Ersatz Elevator and began reading it in the sixth, but never finished it; still more amused by the title of Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography, I bought and read all of that the next summer, and was thrilled by the mysteries it presented but frustrated by the lack of answers it provided.

It wasn't until I saw a couple of promotional pictures for the movie version in Girls' Life magazine, at the age of thirteen, that I decided to borrow a copy of The Hostile Hospital from my school library one day, and read the whole thing. The spark had suddenly been lit; I continued reading chronologically through to the latest book at the time, The Grim Grotto, and then started from the beginning of the series and worked my way back up to the one before THH, The Vile Village. I'd knock off most of the books in a day or two each, sometimes even reading while walking between my middle school and home, too eager to finish to even put the book down for those fifteen minutes. I paid more attention to TBB and TWW, I finally finished my copy of TEE, and I read the Unauthorized Autobiography again, with a whole new appreciation for its secrets. And I read it again. And again.

And then I saw the movie, the day it came out, skipping the afternoon of the last day of school before the Christmas break, wearing a long, flowing black skirt from the Salvation Army in honour of Violet's gorgeous black dress in the movie. And I bought the DVD and the soundtrack as soon as they came out. Somewhere along the line I also wound up in possession of a copy of every book in the series - and two copies of The Bad Beginning. But one of them came with the movie and doesn't have the same awesome cover or pages, so it mostly gathers dust on my bookshelf.

Have I mentioned that I love the deckle edges of the pages? The overall presentation of the books is such a huge part of their appeal, without a doubt. It was one of the factors that encouraged me to reread The Bad Beginning before the first Harry Potter book on Monday, honestly.

As it happens, over time we sometimes grow apart from our previous fandoms, though we harbour no dislike for them, just like with friends who we stop hanging out with or talking to even though we haven't had a fight or anything. Often your friend is too busy with cheerleading and band, and you're too busy with drama and choir and finding things to do while putting off your homework, and all of this prevents you from spending a few hours together. Likewise, when the final ASoUE book came out in the tenth grade, I was so busy with and distracted by failing math and science, singing in the choir, and performing in the school production of West Side Story that I never wound up getting further than three chapters in. To this day I have not finished the thirteenth book, aptly titled The End. I have now gotten myself to a point where I've forgotten so many details of the books that if I want to fully appreciate the last book, I would have to reread the entire series. But this summer I intend to spend a lot of time reading, and since I finally have both the motivation and the time, I can actually do it.

What inspired my plunging back into the world of Snicket this week, however, was an article I stumbled upon, announcing that there are talks of a new ASoUE movie being produced, in stop motion animation. I'm feeling a little skeptical about the whole idea; while the 2004 movie, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, was in no way perfect, I became pretty attached to Liam and Emily's portrayals of Klaus and Violet, and I had my heart so set on a sequel with them that I can't imagine a different kind of sequel now. The bit about Liam Aiken's voice now being "deeper than God" still makes the whole article worth it for me, but I'm not sure what to think about a stop motion Lemony Snicket movie, let alone a sequel now, five years later. Too little too late, or something like that. Why couldn't they just have made a sequel then...and cast me as Isadora? Was that so much to ask?

Anyway. I hadn't actually seen the movie in about four years - thanks to my copy of the DVD having been stolen by a certain "friend" I had back in the eighth grade - but on Sunday, motivated by this strange suggestion of a new movie, I walked myself over to Blockbuster and rented the movie that I was so excited to see back in December '04, popped it into my DVD player, and watched it once again.

The movie certainly has its flaws. While the individual ASoUE books are much shorter than say, the Harry Potter books, which are each made into separate movies, three whole books being packed into one movie does seem a little bit crazy, and it left them with the problem of giving the movie a truly viable climax. It was for the sake of structure that they moved the climax of the first book to the end of the movie, after the events of the second and third books, and wrote an entirely new seen to take place before the switch to the second book. It makes for a lot of rather convoluted elements to this movie, for readers of the books. Klaus asking himself, "What would Violet do?" and making the grappling hook and climbing up the tower himself instead of Violet doing it the night before the play is only one example of the bizarre changes made in the movie, and I don't even really understand why they had Klaus burn the marriage certificate instead of Violet using her left hand to sign it; did they just want to make a flashier climax for the cinema? Gag me with a spoon. The books are more subtle and intelligent than that, and they treat their audience as informed, intelligent adults, even though they are supposedly "children's books." And you can be sure that none of them have a happy ending. The last line of The Bad Beginning sees the children feeling a great sense of hopelessness, despair, and fear, while the ending of the movie has them riding off into soft, warm light with their impostor of a narrator calling them "fortunate" and uplifting music playing in the background! It's a travesty!

All that said (loudly), I do not hate the ASoUE movie; there's a reason why I was so desperate for a sequel, and it's not that the thirteen-year-old me wanted to play Isadora so I could pat Liam Aiken's hand a lot. (That was just a factor. I would've settled for Carmelita, too.) Even as I watched this movie for the first time in years on Sunday night, I found myself tearing up again and again (four times, to be exact), because the heart-wrenching story of the Baudelaires still moves me, even when it's dilluted by a movie like this. I did, however, feel myself invigorated with new motivation to reread The Bad Beginning and refresh myself on the correct details of the story (I could recognize parts that were changed in the movie, but couldn't actually remember how they happened in the book), and since it is an incredibly short book (compared to the Philosopher's Stone, at least), I was able to read it front to back on Monday - and it wasn't even three o'clock yet by the time I was finished!

It made me happy to be reading an ASoUE book again, kind of like it's a part of me that it feels nice to go back to. I feel bad that I've forgotten so many details about the books, and all of the old theories I would have had about who was related to who and what would happen in the end (or The End). I can't even revisit the old forum I used to post all of those theories on, since it's been through upgrades and server crashes and the whole thing is gone now. I still have an essay on my computer that I wrote outlining and explaining my theory about Beatrice's identity, but even reading it two years after I first wrote it, I couldn't understand my previous logic anymore. Perhaps I'll take another crack at it once I've finished rereading the series, though.

Pasta putanesca, Sunny's babbling, Lemony's context-appropriate definitions of words - it all takes me right back, and makes me want more. I don't know if there will be another ASoUE movie, or even another book in the Snicket universe, for all I know. (I still need to read that potato latke book that was written under the Lemony Snicket penname after the ASoUE series was finished, but I'm sure that it had to have been written under that penname for a reason. R-right?) What I do know is that after two and a half years of being too stressed out and busy to make time for the book series that I once called my religion (you do these things when you're fifteen and would rather make up your own religion than subscribe to an existing one - hey, I'd still be willing to re-accept Daniel Handler as my god), I am finally going to finish The End, no matter how long it takes me to reread the rest of the series first. I look forward to getting to my favourite books (The Slippery Slope was always my number one - I slept with it under my pillow for awhile, paperback of course - but The Grim Grotto is also up there), dread getting to the desert of books seven to nine (the desert makes me nervous), and I have no idea what to expect from the ending. My friends have told me that [possible spoiler] The End doesn't really give us any answers [end possible spoiler], but I'm holding out hope that I will at least be satisfied by it - and if not, that there will be more to come. But hey, not going to be greedy. For now, I will dilligently work my way back through the series, as I should have done long ago.

Next up: The Reptile Room, with the wonderful Uncle Monty and the Zombies in the Snow references. There's a quote I loved from that movie that was in the Unauthorized Autobiography, but I can't even remember it now. I certainly have some catching up to do. Kind of like catching up with an old friend.