I thought Brad Silberling did a pretty commendable job of remixing Daniel Handler’s first few books for his 2004 film adaptation—and I suspect Jim Carrey will be hard to beat in the Count Olaf role—but the trailer looks solid, so count me in as cautiously optimistic for this next month.

Here’s Handler answering one of a series of unfortunate questions for Boing Boing, this one on the necessity of good story:

There is a wave of American fiction, ascendant now, with charms to which I am immune, in which all strangeness, in story and language, has been seemingly purposefully scrubbed. Nobody—author, character, reader—seems to be having any trace of fun. There is an overemphasis on character-building at the expense of plot or even incident, such that we know everything about a person to whom nothing is happening. This is boring. It is also not like life.