Hugo (PG)
"Mustache twirling is so out of style"
A PG Martin Scorsese film? Yes, and one of his most beautiful
productions he has made. The sets and lighting are incredible (you
have my permission to skip the 3d though, Marty uses it to great effect,
but I really don't feel it adds anything, it really still feels like a
fad). The film touches on alot of things, literature, Paris, nostalgia,
magic, wwI, etc. A boy and girl orphans
run around a train station in postwar Paris, getting into adventures
about the mysteries of a clockwork automaton. At it's core, it's a film
about the love of film though. This is where the movie really shines, a
swan song to those films that most people never bothered to watch, the
heroes from the silent era, the earnest and innovative pioneers who
developed the techniques and amusements we enjoy daily. Hugo is not
perfect, its a little meandering and a tad long, there's some subplots
that seem to go nowhere, the child actors are a bit child-actory (but
not enough to bother), and in all honestly nothing much actually
happens. Sacha Baron Cohen plays a great sinister slapstick inspector
from a bygone era, Kingsley is of course filled with delightful
gravitas. I've never seen a film that looks like it, the colors and
movements are incredible. I've never read the book it's based on, but
the inner film student in me was geeking out, and the irony of
Scorsese's most SFX laden film which is itself a film about the magic of
film and SFX wasn't lost on me.
8.5 bushy eyebrows out of 10 (for a kids film, that's pretty damn good) (GREAT)
8.5 bushy eyebrows out of 10 (for a kids film, that's pretty damn good) (GREAT)
