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True! Never quite figured why he took this on. But then knowing his insatiable appetite for all kinds of cinema this is probably a genre that he wanted to attempt once!
Easily would take this over TinTin especially because I strongly dislike the performance capture animation Spielberg has adopted from Zemeckis for this…
True though I have never been his greatest fan other than when he does Jaws or Close Encounters or Jurassic Park. I’m a great admirer of Empire of the Sun, specially the Shanghai bits and certainly Schindler’s List has to be respected but he’s not in the Scorsese or Coppola ranks for me.
E.T, Minority Report, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Catch Me If You Can, and of course Schindler’s List are all classics imo.
Thought Scorsese was working on Lincoln with Leo, This one was definitely a surprise for me. Ofcourse, Checking this out. (with many others that remain to be seen).
I love Chloe Mortez, but I would much rather watch Tintin again than watch this. Not only does this look very atypical of Scorsese, it is also very unimpressive visually for what is supposed to be a 3D fantasy adventure.
Will Hugo’s Rave Reviews Yield Audiences and Oscar Nominations?
by Anne Thompson | November 22, 2011
It’s no surprise that film critics are loving “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s valentine to the birth of cinema and reinvention of the art of 3-D (November 23). In fact, as I was rejiggering my Oscar chart I recognized that in a field of small-scale movies this year, the $150-million period adventure has a strong shot at quite a few technical nominations, going up against the likes of “The Adventures of Tintin,” “The Tree of Life,” “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part Two.”
The film’s champions include 3-D advocate James Cameron, who says that “Hugo” boasts “the best 3-D photography I’ve seen,” as well as Time’s Richard Corliss, who calls the film a “masterpiece.”
Paramount has done well getting the word out. In fact, Silence is Golden these days, as not only Scorsese but “The Artist” returns us to a nostalgia for the dawn of cinema. But just because cinephiles like this movie doesn’t mean family audiences will sit still for it, even if the story hangs on a young orphan boy. But reviews like the ones below (it’s trending at 92% on the Tomatometer for now) will certainly help turn this narratively stiff but visually sumptuous treat into a must-see for adults and Academy members.
The New Yorker:
“In ‘Hugo,’ the hero has a terrifying dream, perhaps an unconscious recollection of that event. Reality, filmed illusion, and dreams are so intertwined that only an artist, playing merrily with echoes, can sort them into a scheme of delight.”
Roger Ebert:
“‘Hugo’ is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life. We feel a great artist has been given command of the tools and resources he needs to make a movie about — movies.”
Peter Travers:
“I will say that in Scorsese’s hands, 3D becomes an art. With the help of the gifted cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor supreme Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese sweeps us headlong into the action as Hugo runs rings around the stationmaster (a hilarious Sacha Baron Cohen) and sneaks us into the station’s secret corridors and inside the clock, with its jaw-dropping view of Paris.”
Todd McCarthy:
“‘Hugo’ dazzlingly conjoins the earliest days of cinema with the very latest big-screen technology. At once Martin Scorsese’s least characteristic film and his most deeply felt, this opulent adaptation of Brian Selznick’s extensively illustrated novel is ostensibly a children’s and family film, albeit one that will play best to sophisticated kids and culturally inclined adults,..The film’s craft and technical achievements are of the highest order, combining to create an immaculate present to film lovers everywhere. It would be hard to say enough on behalf of Richardson’s cinematography, Dante Ferretti’s production design, Sandy Powell’s costumes, Rob Legato’s extensive visual effects, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, Howard Shore’s almost constant score and the army of technical experts who made all of Scorsese’s perfectionist wishes come true.”
Peter DeBruge:
“In attempting to make his first film for all ages, Martin Scorsese has fashioned one for the ages. Simultaneously classical and modern, populist but also unapologetically personal, ‘Hugo’ flagrantly defies the mind-numbing quality of most contempo kidpics and instead rewards patience, intellectual curiosity and a budding interest in cinema itself. Given the sheer expense of this lavish production and its marketing, Scorsese’s playfully didactic, nouveau-Dickensian adventure could spell a money-losing gamble in the near term; wind the clock forward half a century, however, and “Hugo’s” timeless qualities should distinguish it as an achievement with the style and substance to endure…Scorsese introduces Hugo’s world via a series of virtuoso camera moves, seamlessly enhanced by 3D and state-of-the-art CG…’Hugo’ overflows with allusions, both cinematic and literary, reflecting the combined passions of Scorsese and writer John Logan, whose screenplay feels as alive with love for words as Scorsese is passionate about pictures.”
November 22, 2011
Movie Review | ‘Hugo’
Inventing a World, Just Like Clockwork
By MANOHLA DARGIS
“Hugo,” an enchantment from Martin Scorsese, is the 3-D children’s movie that you might expect from the director of “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” It’s serious, beautiful, wise to the absurdity of life and in the embrace of a piercing longing. No one gets clubbed to death, but shadows loom, and a ferocious Doberman nearly lands in your lap. The movie is based on the book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” but is also very much an expression of the filmmaker’s movie love. Surely the name of its author, Brian Selznick, caught his eye: Mr. Selznick is related to David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind” — kismet for a cinematic inventor like Mr. Scorsese.
Mr. Scorsese’s fidelity to Mr. Selznick’s original story is very nearly complete, though this is also, emphatically, his own work. Gracefully adapted by John Logan, the movie involves a lonely, melancholic orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who in the early 1930s tends all the clocks in a Parisian train station. Seemingly abandoned by his uncle, the station’s official timekeeper (Ray Winstone), Hugo lives alone, deep in the station’s interior, in a dark, dusty, secret apartment that was built for employees. There, amid clocks, gears, pulleys, jars and purloined toys, he putters and sleeps and naturally dreams, mostly of fixing a delicate automaton that his dead father, a clockmaker (Jude Law), found once upon a time. The automaton is all that remains of a happy past.
Hugo has been repairing the automaton with mechanical parts salvaged from the toys he has stolen from a toy store in the station. All that he needs now to bring the windup figure to life — it sits frozen, with a pen at the ready, as if waiting for inspiration — is the key that will open its heart-shaped lock. After assorted stops and starts and quick getaways, Hugo finds the key during an adventure involving the toy-store owner and his goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). A beloved, wanted child, she brings Hugo into her life, which is how he discovers that the cantankerous shopkeeper with the white goatee and sad, watchful eyes is Georges Méliès (a touching Ben Kingsley).
The name means nothing to Hugo and may not mean much to most contemporary viewers, but it means a great deal to this lovely movie. A magician turned moving-picture pioneer, Méliès (1861-1938) began his new career after seeing one of the first public film projections in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895. Until then, early moving pictures had been commercially exhibited on Kinetoscopes, peephole machines that enabled viewers to watch brief films, one person at a time. The image was tiny — less than two inches wide — and moving pictures didn’t become cinema as we know it until wizards like the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created machines like the cinématographe, which projected larger-than-life images on screens that people watched as an audience.
While the Lumières dazzled with nonfiction films that they called actualités, Méliès enthralled with fantasies and trick films like “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). In this comic 16-minute science-fiction masterwork, a gaggle of scientists in knee breeches fly in a rocket to the Moon, where they encounter acrobatic creatures with lobster claws amid puffs of smoke and clever cinematic sleights of hand. In the film’s most famous image, the rocket lands splat in the eye of the Man in the Moon, causing him to squeeze out a fat tear. It was perhaps a prophetic image for Méliès, who, after falling out of fashion and into obscurity, ran a toy store in the Montparnasse station in Paris, which is where he was later rediscovered.
Mr. Selznick opens and closes his book with some soft pencil drawings of Earth’s Moon, that luminous disk on which so many human fantasies (the Man in the Moon included) have been projected. In the book the Moon is something of a screen against which Méliès’s most celebrated cinematic fantasy unfolds. Mr. Scorsese doesn’t exploit this lunar metaphor (perhaps he believes the Moon belongs to Méliès), yet he locates plenty of cinematic poetry here, particularly in the clock imagery, which comes to represent moviemaking itself. The secret is in the clockwork, Hugo’s father says to him in flashback, sounding like an auteurist. Time counts in “Hugo,” yes, but what matters more is that clocks are wound and oiled so that their numerous parts work together as one.
The movie itself is a well-lubricated machine, a trick entertainment and a wind-up toy, and it springs to life instantly in a series of sweeping opening aerial shots that plunge you into the choreographed bustle of the train station. The first time you see Hugo he’s peering out from behind a large wall clock at the human comedy in the station. He’s staring through a cutout in the clock face, an aperture through which he watches several characters who play supporting roles in a spectacle that is by turns slapstick, mystery, melodrama and romance, including the menacing station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a friendly flower vendor (Emily Mortimer), a woman with a dachshund (Frances de la Tour) and her suitor (Richard Griffiths). When Hugo gazes at them, he’s viewer and director both.
So much happens in this initial whoosh that it feels as if you’d hitched a ride on a rocket too. After the camera divebombs through the station, it follows Hugo as he speeds down halls, a ladder, a chute, a staircase and yet more halls, bringing to mind a Busby Berkeley set and Henry Hill’s long walk into the nightclub in “Goodfellas.” The camera keeps moving, as does Hugo, who, chased by the station master and his Doberman, sprints past James Joyce and Django Reinhardt lookalikes. It’s Paris of the Modernist imagination, though really it’s movieland, where gears loom like those in “Modern Times” and a man who’s part machine oils his bits like the Tin Man (while longing for a heart).
Mr. Scorsese caps this busy introductory section with Hugo looking wistfully at the world from a window high in the station. The image mirrors a stunning shot in his film “Kundun,” in which the young, isolated Dalai Lama looks out across the city, and it also evokes Mr. Scorsese’s well-known recollections about being an asthmatic child who watched life from windows — windows that of course put a frame around the world. This is a story shared by all children, who begin as observers and turn (if all goes well) into participants. But “Hugo” is specifically about those observers of life who, perhaps out of loneliness and with desire, explore reality through its moving images, which is why it’s also about the creation of a cinematic imagination — Hugo’s, Méliès’s, Mr. Scorsese’s, ours.
“Hugo” is the tale of a boy, one of fiction’s sentimental orphans, and the world he invents, yet, unsurprisingly, its most heartfelt passages are about Méliès. The old filmmaker is as broken and in need of revival as the automaton, and while you can guess what happens, it’s the getting there — how the clock is wound — that surprises and often delights. Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen. There is something poignant and paradoxical about Mr. Scorsese’s honoring a film pioneer in digital (and in 3-D, no less), yet these moving pictures belong to the same land of dreams that Méliès once explored, left for a time and entered once again through the love of the audience.
“Hugo” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The death of a parent, some child peril and a fierce dog.
and here’s Denby (again I’m even less a fan of his) with a fine set of thoughts:
“For Scorsese, the early movies are a procession of miracles: the directors realized that sixteen frames passing through a camera every second could yield illusions, disappearances, transformations, magic. In recent years, while making his own movies, Scorsese has dedicated himself to film history and preservation. He has put this ardent attention at the center of a beautifully told and emotionally satisfying story for children and their movie-loving parents. “Hugo” is both a summing up of the cinematic past and a push forward into new 3-D technologies. James Cameron’s “Avatar” was a luscious purple-green spectacle—a fantasy of the natural world. “Hugo” is a fantasy of the mechanical world: much of it is devoted to the workings of a clock, a camera, an automaton, and a train station that functions like a huge machine. No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.”
There will be a third film after Before Sunrise/Sunset. I liked Before Sunset even more than Before Sunrise – so I’m not apprehensive about the quality of the third film at all.
There is also a Bollywood film being made which sounds heavily ‘inspired’ by these films. It’s called London, Paris, New York and seems based on the same premise as the Before films.
Found this to be a wonderful charm, though the film is most interesting when it’s on Méliès both because of Kingsley’s very moving performance and because this is where one finds the most passionate evidence for why Scorsese made this film to begin with. This has been said to no end by now but this is a very beautifully written love letter to the cinema and Scorsese thoughtfully marks Hugo’s own story with touches (the hero hanging off a clock above a cityscape, dodging a derailed train that juts out at the audience, the moon very prominently displayed at every turn) that overtly mirror silent cinema moments referenced in the film. Most importantly the 3D is essential – and one can argue endlessly about what films use the technology better than this but I’d be hard pressed to find a movie that uses it as thoughtfully or where the use of it feels as vital to the movie’s existence. Because Scorsese needed a modern equivalent to the sort of marvels that Méliès introduced in his own work which in the end was the cinema’s first attempt at “magic”. Scorsese’s film and the grand illusions of the technology he relies on ultimately represents an extension and a present-day incarnation of that original intent.
Scorsese’s film is an overwhelmingly beautiful homage to cinema, especially silent cinema and one of its greatest visionaries. The director creates a very unique world here (the 3D is integral to this project). And one where he ‘catalogs’ so many classic cinema moments and shots from beginning to end. The ‘machinery’ of the medium so extraordinarily twinned with that of ‘time’ in one central conceit. In the same way the automaton as machine and ‘image’ hearkens back to ancient themes (and of course relies on so many other cinematic archives). ‘Everything’ is present in this ode to cinema and in an ambition successfully realized I think the work becomes one of the best examples of ‘pure cinema’ which so much of silent cinema exemplified. There has probably never been a film with so many nooks and crannies and crevices and hideouts! And all those superb tracks. The train-station world so charmingly represented with all its paraphernalia and eccentricities. It is truly a marvelous representation of Scorsese’s boy-like wonder before cinema, a quality he’s always retained. I will be watching it again.
Saw The Artist tonight – it’s a gem of a movie that made me think very much about Hugo. These films are kindred spirits in many ways. They both address the same era of filmmaking and have similar concerns about the preservation of the old while ultimately embracing the modern, they are both enthralled by the grandeur and magic of the cinema, and they both have an abiding love for the silent era of filmmaking. Not to privilege my viewing, but I really think there’s something to be said about seeing these movies back to back. They really speak to one another.
Funny you should mention that…saw Shame last night. Even with its problems I thought it was easily one of the year’s very best and really one that hasn’t been talked about enough for its political symbolism. A movie set in present day New York, centered on a successful businessman who at the end of the day is really trapped by a certain kind of overconsumption seemed to my mind much more interesting than the movie most critics have seen here – that is, a literal portrait about sex addiction. The first shot of this film has Fassbender’s character looking at a homeless man on a train before turning away and looking at an object of blind desire. In some ways this moment speaks most to what this movie is about, and for my viewing set the stage for what followed. Fassbender is as expected incredible here.
yeah it’s a pity I can’t get to it right away.. on that note still have to watch the Almodovar (the British R2 comes out end of Dec but I’d prefer watching it in a theater).. it was playing here for a couple of weeks but somehow didn’t get to it.. on the other hand made it for 7aum arivu.. have been planning to put up a brief note on it ever since but haven’t got around to it.
Wrote this “masterly (sic!) piece ” on Hugo
Think it needs to reach more audience for an alternate viewpoint
Btw wasn’t awake for half of this movie—-
Hugo 3D
Setting -THE premier cinema where the original premier was held
There are certain films that one treads with caution and it’s this “tree of life ” like expectations which makes it difficult
These are films where you want to like them and give them a chance
But again highlights why/ how superlative reviews don’t hold for me/certain viewers
Dont get me wrong–all the usual points (mostly technical ) on which this film has been /surely will be celebrated are indeed magnificent
But didn’t really grip me throughout.
Then one wonders–Was it the heavy meal (or drinks ) or the usual sleep deprivation
But I was dozing off for more than half of it. Due to the lateral dozing off–The humans around me may have got some wrong ideas about the real intentions ….lol
My take usually is different mostly-so not that surprised ut didn’t expect it to be for this film
And don’t think the “slow” proceedings is to blame—have loved slower–infact static films in the past.
Also feel this is scorseses personal film having influences of his own childhood. Heard he couldnt go out as a child due to asthma. I am curious to know how many acts kids have loved this film–since I didn’t see any in the audience.
Plus there is this “herd mentality”
This will join the queue of films which one cannot dare to not love (vocally)–to heck with it!!!! I’m not on anyones payroll forget scorcese lol
For all its worthy intentions and technical brilliance, Hugo is a hard film to love: not only for children, who may find the largely immobile plot a slog, but also to viewers of any age who’d rather be charmed than merely wowed.
Technically film is brilliant and 3D well used
Special mention of the excellent depiction of Paris in that era.
Amongst the actors, could see only one and nothing else—the great sir Ben Kingsley . Needs another post to encapsulate what I feel about him as an actor and his understated act here. Incidentally his affect and mannerisms uncannily reminded me of bachchan (sr obviously)–never heard anyone mention it before
Late in the film, Scorsese draws an explicit parallel between cinema and magic tricks, and it’s painfully apt. For most parts, this is a coldly impressive contraption that provokes cries of “Ooh, that’s clever”, but not a great deal else.
July 15, 2011 at 9:12 AM
A Scorsese film hasn’t seemed this un-Scorsese-like since Kundun.
July 15, 2011 at 9:51 AM
True! Never quite figured why he took this on. But then knowing his insatiable appetite for all kinds of cinema this is probably a genre that he wanted to attempt once!
July 15, 2011 at 10:43 AM
Scorsese is a genius. expecting something interesting here
October 26, 2011 at 11:43 AM
Though I’m not exactly clamoring for this I’d probably take it over TinTin all else being equal.
October 26, 2011 at 12:44 PM
Easily would take this over TinTin especially because I strongly dislike the performance capture animation Spielberg has adopted from Zemeckis for this…
October 26, 2011 at 2:36 PM
Tintin has released in Europe and got great reviews so far. Spielberg can never be underestimated.
October 26, 2011 at 2:54 PM
True though I have never been his greatest fan other than when he does Jaws or Close Encounters or Jurassic Park. I’m a great admirer of Empire of the Sun, specially the Shanghai bits and certainly Schindler’s List has to be respected but he’s not in the Scorsese or Coppola ranks for me.
October 30, 2011 at 7:51 PM
E.T, Minority Report, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, Catch Me If You Can, and of course Schindler’s List are all classics imo.
November 21, 2011 at 1:31 PM
Thought Scorsese was working on Lincoln with Leo, This one was definitely a surprise for me. Ofcourse, Checking this out. (with many others that remain to be seen).
November 22, 2011 at 9:14 AM
I love Chloe Mortez, but I would much rather watch Tintin again than watch this. Not only does this look very atypical of Scorsese, it is also very unimpressive visually for what is supposed to be a 3D fantasy adventure.
November 22, 2011 at 2:39 PM
Will Hugo’s Rave Reviews Yield Audiences and Oscar Nominations?
by Anne Thompson | November 22, 2011
It’s no surprise that film critics are loving “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s valentine to the birth of cinema and reinvention of the art of 3-D (November 23). In fact, as I was rejiggering my Oscar chart I recognized that in a field of small-scale movies this year, the $150-million period adventure has a strong shot at quite a few technical nominations, going up against the likes of “The Adventures of Tintin,” “The Tree of Life,” “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part Two.”
The film’s champions include 3-D advocate James Cameron, who says that “Hugo” boasts “the best 3-D photography I’ve seen,” as well as Time’s Richard Corliss, who calls the film a “masterpiece.”
Paramount has done well getting the word out. In fact, Silence is Golden these days, as not only Scorsese but “The Artist” returns us to a nostalgia for the dawn of cinema. But just because cinephiles like this movie doesn’t mean family audiences will sit still for it, even if the story hangs on a young orphan boy. But reviews like the ones below (it’s trending at 92% on the Tomatometer for now) will certainly help turn this narratively stiff but visually sumptuous treat into a must-see for adults and Academy members.
The New Yorker:
“In ‘Hugo,’ the hero has a terrifying dream, perhaps an unconscious recollection of that event. Reality, filmed illusion, and dreams are so intertwined that only an artist, playing merrily with echoes, can sort them into a scheme of delight.”
Roger Ebert:
“‘Hugo’ is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life. We feel a great artist has been given command of the tools and resources he needs to make a movie about — movies.”
Peter Travers:
“I will say that in Scorsese’s hands, 3D becomes an art. With the help of the gifted cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor supreme Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese sweeps us headlong into the action as Hugo runs rings around the stationmaster (a hilarious Sacha Baron Cohen) and sneaks us into the station’s secret corridors and inside the clock, with its jaw-dropping view of Paris.”
Todd McCarthy:
“‘Hugo’ dazzlingly conjoins the earliest days of cinema with the very latest big-screen technology. At once Martin Scorsese’s least characteristic film and his most deeply felt, this opulent adaptation of Brian Selznick’s extensively illustrated novel is ostensibly a children’s and family film, albeit one that will play best to sophisticated kids and culturally inclined adults,..The film’s craft and technical achievements are of the highest order, combining to create an immaculate present to film lovers everywhere. It would be hard to say enough on behalf of Richardson’s cinematography, Dante Ferretti’s production design, Sandy Powell’s costumes, Rob Legato’s extensive visual effects, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, Howard Shore’s almost constant score and the army of technical experts who made all of Scorsese’s perfectionist wishes come true.”
Peter DeBruge:
“In attempting to make his first film for all ages, Martin Scorsese has fashioned one for the ages. Simultaneously classical and modern, populist but also unapologetically personal, ‘Hugo’ flagrantly defies the mind-numbing quality of most contempo kidpics and instead rewards patience, intellectual curiosity and a budding interest in cinema itself. Given the sheer expense of this lavish production and its marketing, Scorsese’s playfully didactic, nouveau-Dickensian adventure could spell a money-losing gamble in the near term; wind the clock forward half a century, however, and “Hugo’s” timeless qualities should distinguish it as an achievement with the style and substance to endure…Scorsese introduces Hugo’s world via a series of virtuoso camera moves, seamlessly enhanced by 3D and state-of-the-art CG…’Hugo’ overflows with allusions, both cinematic and literary, reflecting the combined passions of Scorsese and writer John Logan, whose screenplay feels as alive with love for words as Scorsese is passionate about pictures.”
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/hugo-reviews
November 22, 2011 at 2:41 PM
Pleased about this.. will check it out.. was in any case far more interested in this than the Spielberg effort.
November 22, 2011 at 2:42 PM
Yeah the film has been getting unanimous and very loud preliminary praise.
“James Cameron, who says that “Hugo” boasts “the best 3-D photography I’ve seen,” ”
At least from a technical standpoint, you can’t get better press than that.
November 22, 2011 at 2:49 PM
wow!
November 22, 2011 at 2:45 PM
It’s currently doing 95% at rottentomatoes
November 22, 2011 at 3:15 PM
satyam, any idea aout when it is releasing in India.. Would really e interested in this.
I watched Tintin and liked it. The 3d effects were good, but I think the comic book lovers would’ve found it etter..
Btw I’s love to watch Asterix eing made into a movie rather than Tintin works
November 22, 2011 at 3:39 PM
I believe it’s around Christmas in India..
November 22, 2011 at 3:40 PM
yeah used to love Asterix.. was never a TinTin reader..
November 22, 2011 at 4:25 PM
The most wtf show in telly has to be “signed by Katy price !!”–ROTFLOL
Wondering if “rum diary” is any good…
One can/should never underestimate spileberg—he is Mr cinema
Btw may revisit one of my faves “Schindlers list”
November 23, 2011 at 11:07 AM
November 22, 2011
Movie Review | ‘Hugo’
Inventing a World, Just Like Clockwork
By MANOHLA DARGIS
“Hugo,” an enchantment from Martin Scorsese, is the 3-D children’s movie that you might expect from the director of “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” It’s serious, beautiful, wise to the absurdity of life and in the embrace of a piercing longing. No one gets clubbed to death, but shadows loom, and a ferocious Doberman nearly lands in your lap. The movie is based on the book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” but is also very much an expression of the filmmaker’s movie love. Surely the name of its author, Brian Selznick, caught his eye: Mr. Selznick is related to David O. Selznick, the producer of “Gone With the Wind” — kismet for a cinematic inventor like Mr. Scorsese.
Mr. Scorsese’s fidelity to Mr. Selznick’s original story is very nearly complete, though this is also, emphatically, his own work. Gracefully adapted by John Logan, the movie involves a lonely, melancholic orphan, Hugo (Asa Butterfield), who in the early 1930s tends all the clocks in a Parisian train station. Seemingly abandoned by his uncle, the station’s official timekeeper (Ray Winstone), Hugo lives alone, deep in the station’s interior, in a dark, dusty, secret apartment that was built for employees. There, amid clocks, gears, pulleys, jars and purloined toys, he putters and sleeps and naturally dreams, mostly of fixing a delicate automaton that his dead father, a clockmaker (Jude Law), found once upon a time. The automaton is all that remains of a happy past.
Hugo has been repairing the automaton with mechanical parts salvaged from the toys he has stolen from a toy store in the station. All that he needs now to bring the windup figure to life — it sits frozen, with a pen at the ready, as if waiting for inspiration — is the key that will open its heart-shaped lock. After assorted stops and starts and quick getaways, Hugo finds the key during an adventure involving the toy-store owner and his goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz). A beloved, wanted child, she brings Hugo into her life, which is how he discovers that the cantankerous shopkeeper with the white goatee and sad, watchful eyes is Georges Méliès (a touching Ben Kingsley).
The name means nothing to Hugo and may not mean much to most contemporary viewers, but it means a great deal to this lovely movie. A magician turned moving-picture pioneer, Méliès (1861-1938) began his new career after seeing one of the first public film projections in Paris on Dec. 28, 1895. Until then, early moving pictures had been commercially exhibited on Kinetoscopes, peephole machines that enabled viewers to watch brief films, one person at a time. The image was tiny — less than two inches wide — and moving pictures didn’t become cinema as we know it until wizards like the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière created machines like the cinématographe, which projected larger-than-life images on screens that people watched as an audience.
While the Lumières dazzled with nonfiction films that they called actualités, Méliès enthralled with fantasies and trick films like “A Trip to the Moon” (1902). In this comic 16-minute science-fiction masterwork, a gaggle of scientists in knee breeches fly in a rocket to the Moon, where they encounter acrobatic creatures with lobster claws amid puffs of smoke and clever cinematic sleights of hand. In the film’s most famous image, the rocket lands splat in the eye of the Man in the Moon, causing him to squeeze out a fat tear. It was perhaps a prophetic image for Méliès, who, after falling out of fashion and into obscurity, ran a toy store in the Montparnasse station in Paris, which is where he was later rediscovered.
Mr. Selznick opens and closes his book with some soft pencil drawings of Earth’s Moon, that luminous disk on which so many human fantasies (the Man in the Moon included) have been projected. In the book the Moon is something of a screen against which Méliès’s most celebrated cinematic fantasy unfolds. Mr. Scorsese doesn’t exploit this lunar metaphor (perhaps he believes the Moon belongs to Méliès), yet he locates plenty of cinematic poetry here, particularly in the clock imagery, which comes to represent moviemaking itself. The secret is in the clockwork, Hugo’s father says to him in flashback, sounding like an auteurist. Time counts in “Hugo,” yes, but what matters more is that clocks are wound and oiled so that their numerous parts work together as one.
The movie itself is a well-lubricated machine, a trick entertainment and a wind-up toy, and it springs to life instantly in a series of sweeping opening aerial shots that plunge you into the choreographed bustle of the train station. The first time you see Hugo he’s peering out from behind a large wall clock at the human comedy in the station. He’s staring through a cutout in the clock face, an aperture through which he watches several characters who play supporting roles in a spectacle that is by turns slapstick, mystery, melodrama and romance, including the menacing station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a friendly flower vendor (Emily Mortimer), a woman with a dachshund (Frances de la Tour) and her suitor (Richard Griffiths). When Hugo gazes at them, he’s viewer and director both.
So much happens in this initial whoosh that it feels as if you’d hitched a ride on a rocket too. After the camera divebombs through the station, it follows Hugo as he speeds down halls, a ladder, a chute, a staircase and yet more halls, bringing to mind a Busby Berkeley set and Henry Hill’s long walk into the nightclub in “Goodfellas.” The camera keeps moving, as does Hugo, who, chased by the station master and his Doberman, sprints past James Joyce and Django Reinhardt lookalikes. It’s Paris of the Modernist imagination, though really it’s movieland, where gears loom like those in “Modern Times” and a man who’s part machine oils his bits like the Tin Man (while longing for a heart).
Mr. Scorsese caps this busy introductory section with Hugo looking wistfully at the world from a window high in the station. The image mirrors a stunning shot in his film “Kundun,” in which the young, isolated Dalai Lama looks out across the city, and it also evokes Mr. Scorsese’s well-known recollections about being an asthmatic child who watched life from windows — windows that of course put a frame around the world. This is a story shared by all children, who begin as observers and turn (if all goes well) into participants. But “Hugo” is specifically about those observers of life who, perhaps out of loneliness and with desire, explore reality through its moving images, which is why it’s also about the creation of a cinematic imagination — Hugo’s, Méliès’s, Mr. Scorsese’s, ours.
“Hugo” is the tale of a boy, one of fiction’s sentimental orphans, and the world he invents, yet, unsurprisingly, its most heartfelt passages are about Méliès. The old filmmaker is as broken and in need of revival as the automaton, and while you can guess what happens, it’s the getting there — how the clock is wound — that surprises and often delights. Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen. There is something poignant and paradoxical about Mr. Scorsese’s honoring a film pioneer in digital (and in 3-D, no less), yet these moving pictures belong to the same land of dreams that Méliès once explored, left for a time and entered once again through the love of the audience.
“Hugo” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The death of a parent, some child peril and a fierce dog.
November 23, 2011 at 11:09 AM
Not the greatest Dargis fan but this is among her better pieces. And one that truly excites me about he film.
November 23, 2011 at 11:16 AM
and here’s Denby (again I’m even less a fan of his) with a fine set of thoughts:
“For Scorsese, the early movies are a procession of miracles: the directors realized that sixteen frames passing through a camera every second could yield illusions, disappearances, transformations, magic. In recent years, while making his own movies, Scorsese has dedicated himself to film history and preservation. He has put this ardent attention at the center of a beautifully told and emotionally satisfying story for children and their movie-loving parents. “Hugo” is both a summing up of the cinematic past and a push forward into new 3-D technologies. James Cameron’s “Avatar” was a luscious purple-green spectacle—a fantasy of the natural world. “Hugo” is a fantasy of the mechanical world: much of it is devoted to the workings of a clock, a camera, an automaton, and a train station that functions like a huge machine. No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.”
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2011/11/28/111128crci_cinema_denby?printable=true#ixzz1eXu5bXr1
November 23, 2011 at 11:17 AM
An Evolving Discussion on Silent Cinema
November 23, 2011 at 11:41 AM
An utterly charming movie in the very same context (and its own tribute to silent cinema) is Malle’s wonderful Zazie dans le Métro.
November 23, 2011 at 11:10 AM
By the way it’s 2.5 hrs.. so Scorsese has attempted something ‘epic’ here!
November 23, 2011 at 12:02 PM
http://www.avclub.com/articles/ethan-hawke-ready-for-a-third-before-sunrise-film,65490/
There will be a third film after Before Sunrise/Sunset.
I liked Before Sunset even more than Before Sunrise – so I’m not apprehensive about the quality of the third film at all.
There is also a Bollywood film being made which sounds heavily ‘inspired’ by these films. It’s called London, Paris, New York and seems based on the same premise as the Before films.
November 27, 2011 at 1:42 PM
Found this to be a wonderful charm, though the film is most interesting when it’s on Méliès both because of Kingsley’s very moving performance and because this is where one finds the most passionate evidence for why Scorsese made this film to begin with. This has been said to no end by now but this is a very beautifully written love letter to the cinema and Scorsese thoughtfully marks Hugo’s own story with touches (the hero hanging off a clock above a cityscape, dodging a derailed train that juts out at the audience, the moon very prominently displayed at every turn) that overtly mirror silent cinema moments referenced in the film. Most importantly the 3D is essential – and one can argue endlessly about what films use the technology better than this but I’d be hard pressed to find a movie that uses it as thoughtfully or where the use of it feels as vital to the movie’s existence. Because Scorsese needed a modern equivalent to the sort of marvels that Méliès introduced in his own work which in the end was the cinema’s first attempt at “magic”. Scorsese’s film and the grand illusions of the technology he relies on ultimately represents an extension and a present-day incarnation of that original intent.
November 27, 2011 at 4:20 PM
Just got back from it myself. Agreed everywhere.
Scorsese’s film is an overwhelmingly beautiful homage to cinema, especially silent cinema and one of its greatest visionaries. The director creates a very unique world here (the 3D is integral to this project). And one where he ‘catalogs’ so many classic cinema moments and shots from beginning to end. The ‘machinery’ of the medium so extraordinarily twinned with that of ‘time’ in one central conceit. In the same way the automaton as machine and ‘image’ hearkens back to ancient themes (and of course relies on so many other cinematic archives). ‘Everything’ is present in this ode to cinema and in an ambition successfully realized I think the work becomes one of the best examples of ‘pure cinema’ which so much of silent cinema exemplified. There has probably never been a film with so many nooks and crannies and crevices and hideouts! And all those superb tracks. The train-station world so charmingly represented with all its paraphernalia and eccentricities. It is truly a marvelous representation of Scorsese’s boy-like wonder before cinema, a quality he’s always retained. I will be watching it again.
November 30, 2011 at 10:55 PM
Saw The Artist tonight – it’s a gem of a movie that made me think very much about Hugo. These films are kindred spirits in many ways. They both address the same era of filmmaking and have similar concerns about the preservation of the old while ultimately embracing the modern, they are both enthralled by the grandeur and magic of the cinema, and they both have an abiding love for the silent era of filmmaking. Not to privilege my viewing, but I really think there’s something to be said about seeing these movies back to back. They really speak to one another.
November 30, 2011 at 11:45 PM
thanks.. this is an intriguing comment..
December 3, 2011 at 9:12 AM
between this, Dangerous Method and now Shame one pays the price for living away from civilization (not in the city!).
December 3, 2011 at 9:26 AM
Funny you should mention that…saw Shame last night. Even with its problems I thought it was easily one of the year’s very best and really one that hasn’t been talked about enough for its political symbolism. A movie set in present day New York, centered on a successful businessman who at the end of the day is really trapped by a certain kind of overconsumption seemed to my mind much more interesting than the movie most critics have seen here – that is, a literal portrait about sex addiction. The first shot of this film has Fassbender’s character looking at a homeless man on a train before turning away and looking at an object of blind desire. In some ways this moment speaks most to what this movie is about, and for my viewing set the stage for what followed. Fassbender is as expected incredible here.
December 3, 2011 at 9:31 AM
yeah it’s a pity I can’t get to it right away.. on that note still have to watch the Almodovar (the British R2 comes out end of Dec but I’d prefer watching it in a theater).. it was playing here for a couple of weeks but somehow didn’t get to it.. on the other hand made it for 7aum arivu.. have been planning to put up a brief note on it ever since but haven’t got around to it.
December 3, 2011 at 5:14 PM
Wrote this “masterly (sic!) piece ” on Hugo
Think it needs to reach more audience for an alternate viewpoint
Btw wasn’t awake for half of this movie—-
Hugo 3D
Setting -THE premier cinema where the original premier was held
There are certain films that one treads with caution and it’s this “tree of life ” like expectations which makes it difficult
These are films where you want to like them and give them a chance
But again highlights why/ how superlative reviews don’t hold for me/certain viewers
Dont get me wrong–all the usual points (mostly technical ) on which this film has been /surely will be celebrated are indeed magnificent
But didn’t really grip me throughout.
Then one wonders–Was it the heavy meal (or drinks ) or the usual sleep deprivation
But I was dozing off for more than half of it. Due to the lateral dozing off–The humans around me may have got some wrong ideas about the real intentions ….lol
My take usually is different mostly-so not that surprised ut didn’t expect it to be for this film
And don’t think the “slow” proceedings is to blame—have loved slower–infact static films in the past.
Also feel this is scorseses personal film having influences of his own childhood. Heard he couldnt go out as a child due to asthma. I am curious to know how many acts kids have loved this film–since I didn’t see any in the audience.
Plus there is this “herd mentality”
This will join the queue of films which one cannot dare to not love (vocally)–to heck with it!!!! I’m not on anyones payroll forget scorcese lol
For all its worthy intentions and technical brilliance, Hugo is a hard film to love: not only for children, who may find the largely immobile plot a slog, but also to viewers of any age who’d rather be charmed than merely wowed.
Technically film is brilliant and 3D well used
Special mention of the excellent depiction of Paris in that era.
Amongst the actors, could see only one and nothing else—the great sir Ben Kingsley . Needs another post to encapsulate what I feel about him as an actor and his understated act here. Incidentally his affect and mannerisms uncannily reminded me of bachchan (sr obviously)–never heard anyone mention it before
Late in the film, Scorsese draws an explicit parallel between cinema and magic tricks, and it’s painfully apt. For most parts, this is a coldly impressive contraption that provokes cries of “Ooh, that’s clever”, but not a great deal else.