Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring released in 2001, when I was seven years old. At the time, my media diet consisted mostly of watching The Powerpuff Girls and obsessively reading and re-reading the first four Harry Potter books.1 I would like to say that my father was thoughtful and felt that I would have enjoyed another fantasy series with wizards and magic but knew that a three-plus-hour theater experience was tall ask for a seven year old. Unfortunately, I know him, and I think it more likely that he is cheap and thought the movie looked cool, so when Fellowship released on home media, we trucked to the neighborhood knock-off Blockbuster and rented it on VHS. That night, I crowded with my two older siblings around a (by today’s standards) laughably small tube TV and tucked in with no expectations or understanding of what the movie would be about.
This blog started on bearblog.dev as cassie.land. Bearblog is a great platform, but I wanted a challenge in my life, I guess, so I taught myself to use Hugo and moved to esotericbullshit.net (cassie.land was repurposed for my NAS). I love the esotericbullshit moniker and URL — it makes me laugh — but as it turns out, it’s kind of hard to share your link when it contains profanity.1 Perhaps that’s copium for a growing domain purchasing addiction, but I intend to make this one stick.
And Then? And Then? What Else? has become a slog, but I press on nonetheless. There’s little here to amuse or excite; even devout Lemony Snicket fans will be disappointed I think by the lack of new information or even commentary concerning the books. Handler confirms that the Baudelaires are named for the poet, that the melodrama of the books is inspired by Edvard Gorey, and that he openly disdains the film — hardly revelations by any means. Most egregiously, he seriously downplays the accusations of sexual inappropriateness against him and attempts to use his own childhood sexual assault as a shield against them.