Includes the first Lemony Snicket book "The Bad Beginning" (Hardcover with dust jacket)

If you spliced Charles Addams, Dr. Seuss, Charles Dickens, Edward Gorey, and Roald Dahl into a Tim Burtonesque landscape, you'd surely come up with something like Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. Many critics wondered why Burton didn't direct this comically morbid adaptation of the first three books in the popular series by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. "Lemony Snicket," … mehrplayed here by Jude Law and seen only in silhouette) instead of TV and Casper veteran Brad Silberling, but there's still plenty to recommend the playfully bleak scenario, in which three resourceful orphans thwart their wicked, maliciously greedy relative Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), who subjects them to... well, a series of unfortunate events. Along the way they encounter a herpetologist uncle (Billy Connolly), an anxious aunt (Meryl Streep) who's afraid of everything, and a variety of fantastical hazards and mysterious clues, some of which remain unresolved. Given endless wonders of art direction, costume design, and cinematography, when you add a throwaway cameo by Dustin Hoffman, Law's amusing narration, and Carrey's over-the-top antics, the first Lemony movie suggests a promising franchise in the making.

Extras:
Disc One:

Director Brad Silberling Commentary
Brad Silberling and the Real Lemony Snicket Commentary
Bad Beginnings:
“Building a Bad Actor”
“Making the Baudelaire Children Miserable”
“Interactive Olaf”
Orphaned Scenes: 11 “Dismal Deletions” and 5 “Obnoxious Outtakes”

Disc Two:

A Terrible Tragedy - Alarming Evidence from the Making of the Film:
“A Woeful World”
“Costumes and Other Suspicious Disguises”
“Violet’s Functional Designs”
“CAUTION! Incredibly Deadly Vipers”
“The Sad Score”
Volume. Frequency. Decibels:
“The Unsound Sound
Designer”
“You Probably Shouldn’t Listen to These”
Sinister Special Effects:
“An Alarming Conspiracy Involving Sunny”
“An Even More Alarming Conspiracy Involving Sunny”
“The Terrible Fire”
“Trains, Leeches and Hurricanes”
Gruesome Galleries:
“Shadowy Stills”
“A Woeful World” weniger