Hugo

What a beautiful movie. The one thing I had heard about this movie that stuck out to me was: "a great artist has been given command of the tools and resources he needs to make a movie about — movies". Ebert is talking about Scorsese. And it kind of hit me, that filmmakers, no mater how renowned, don't get to make all the movies they want to, for purposes of budget or content, not all movies are going to be financially, of course, and are never made. I am glad this movie was given the budget it needed to be spectacular. Here we have Martin Scorsese, the man behind a whole lot of Robert Deniro and Leonardo DiCaprio movies, is making a movie about an orphan and a shop-keeper. 

But there is so much more to it than that. Asa Butterfield is Hugo, an orphan living in a Paris train station. When he's not keeping the clocks running on time, he is trying to fix an automaton, a robot of sorts, that he and his dad found and started restoring. Hugo then meets Georges, and his foster-daughter Isabelle, and we learn a lot about the history of movies from there. It also stars Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Chloe Grace Moretz.

The historian and movie-lover in me loved the clips of movies from the early 1900's; I was blown away when they said every frame of a scene was painted by hand so it could be in colour. And the film itself is a wonder for the eyes, filmed in 3-D, I watched it in two dimensions, but was taken aback but how whimsical the setting was, I thought for a moment that it was animated a la Robert Zemeckis.

My one complaint would be of Asa. He does a wonderful job of bringing the character of Hugo to us, but there is something I just found not very likable about him. Maybe it was the startling blue of his eyes contrasting with the black of his hair that just made him seem mischievous. I can't explain it entirely, but like E.B. in Hop, I was disappointed that I didn't really care about the main character. I did care deeply about Georges, played by Ben Kingsley, and he is the player in this movie that really makes it complex and a movie that parents as well as their children will enjoy.

Hugo is smart, historical, beautiful, and captivating.