'Lemony Snicket's' a fortunate film

The delights of this movie will be completely lost on adults. Kids, as so many parents are coming to realize, have a beautiful capacity for appreciating gloom and doom, even if it doesn't ultimately lead to clear-cut salvation. \nThe film tells the story of the three terribly unfortunate Baudelaire orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sunny. Their parents are killed in a mysterious fire and they are sent to live with the evil Count Olaf. The kids become necessarily embroiled in the mess of being heirs to a fabulous fortune, and their new guardian, the deliciously wicked Olaf, makes it clear that he is out to get their money. \nThe three children are played beautifully by Emily Browning, Liam Aikin and Kara and Shelby Hoffman, but the clear star is Jim Carrey. His Count Olaf is completely and totally unredeemable. The viewers don't love to hate him, they just hate him. Meryl Streep is a nice touch as the uber-phobic Aunt Josephine and Billy Connolly is wonderful as the bombastic herpetologist Uncle Monty. \nThe most notable point of rally is the beautiful look of the film. It looks as if the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, is the lovechild of Tim Burton and Baz Luhrmann. Gloom, clearly, is his strong suit. Even the sunshine is dank and limp. The music, by the indefatigable Thomas Newman ("The Shawshank Redemption," "Road to Perdition"), is spot-on perfect. Every last little detail, from overblown Victorian costuming to vaudevillian makeup, was taken care of. \nSo how is such a gloomy movie so wonderful? Hard to say, really. It's not schadenfreude, because the children are beautiful and clever and hardly deserving of their misfortunes. It's more a matter of seeing the score read "Kids: 6, Adults: 0." And these kids get by on sheer wit. Klaus, an incomparable bookworm, joins forces with Violet, who has a penchant for invention, to save the day throughout the movie. Sunny may only have two teeth, but her biting skills are unparalleled.\nHands down, this movie is expanding the horizons of what theoretically-children's films can be.