I watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events with the girls yesterday evening and loved it. Loved Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep and even Dustin Hoffman’s cameo appearance.

The film is based on this series of comic books.

On its steampunk qualities:

Although the books can be classed as ‘steampunk‘, in that they involve young people struggling against great odds in an anachronistic setting, the addition, in later books, of the mysterious organization known as V.F.D. have begun to push the story into the new genre of post-steampunk (in the same way that later additions to the cyberpunk genre are now classed as postcyberpunk). –wikipedia

On its macabre and black comedy qualities:

The books can also be classified as absurdist fiction, due to their eccentric characters, quirky writing style and generally improbable storylines. Some might argue that these books could also be classified as black comedy, because of the mix of humorous and macabre elements.

In the words of my favorite Amazon critic Jeff Shannon and one of my favorite film critics tout court:

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 (in mostly mixed reviews) wondered why Tim Burton didn’t direct this comically morbid adaptation … but there’s still plenty to recommend the playfully bleak scenario, … a variety of fantastical hazards and mysterious clues, some of which remain unresolved. Given endless wonders of art direction, costume design, and cinematography… –Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

One more thing: loved the self referentiality of the intrusive narrator of the film (such as is commonly displayed in 18th and 19th century literature.)