I saw it last night. We were two of about ten people in the theater, at 6:15 on a Saturday, in 3D. I have a feeling this movie might not do very well.
[spoiler]And if ever a film deserved to fail, it’s Hugo. It SUCKED! It was AWFUL! That emperor is stark naked.
It was boring as hell, incoherent at best, the kid who played Hugo was almost as annoying as the kid who played Chloe, and the plot lurched between pointless and excruciatingly dull.
The director was just grabbing stuff at random to put in the movie. He stole the clock-dangling scene from Safety Last and put it in for no reason at all. When Harold Lloyd did it, it was exciting. When Hugo did it, I was hoping he would fall so we could go home early.
The big mistake was putting in the scenes from the early silent films. Those had some interest and energy and a lot of imagination. So by contrast, it showed what a bomb the Hugo movie was.
Ghastly. I don’t care if it wins every Oscar in the rack, it still sucked.[/spoiler]
Regards,
Shodan
Heh, I saw this a week or so ago and when I saw a new post from Shodan in this thread I thought “man, he must have hated this movie…”.
As to this:
The original was actually shown during Hugo - it was the movie that Hugo and Isabelle (not Chloe - that is the actress’s name) were watching when they snuck into the theater. So it wasn’t “stolen”, it was a direct callback to the previously shown Harold Lloyd scene.
I enjoyed Hugo very much, and I thought it was a perfect showcase for great 3D technology. It was such an impressive *visual *feast that I was sorely disappointed with the over-acting (especially from Ben K. and Asa B.) – but I have a feeling Scorcese wanted this to be a kid’s movie, so he must’ve deliberately directed their performances that way.
I was tremendously disappointed with Chloe’s performance, because she blew me away in Kick Ass and Let Me In. I think she was concentrating so much on doing a crappy British accent that she couldn’t focus on her acting.
But all in all, it was a cool experience. I would highly recommend seeing it in 3D.
I saw that, but I don’t see the point of including it at all.
[spoiler]When Harold Lloyd did it, it was exciting, not least because it wasn’t CGI - Lloyd was really dangling. This Hugo kid wasn’t, and the notion of him hiding by hanging outside like Quasimodo was ridiculous. It’s one thing to make a tribute. It’s another just to rehash someone else’s work.
Plus, this was not supposed to be a tribute to Harold Lloyd. If you need to include a remake of someone’s work, make it from the person you are supposed to be honoring. [/spoiler]YMMV, obviously.
[QUOTE=smaje1]
I have a feeling Scorcese wanted this to be a kid’s movie.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe that’s part of the problem - if this is supposed to be for kids, [spoiler]why is it so boring? Why would kids care about some forgotten silent movie maker unless the movie gives them a reason to?
But I agree with you about the acting. The only performance that seemed to “fit” was Sacha Cohen. The rest was way overdone, and with the badly timed revelation about the automaton, the whole movie was off-balance and without a genuine payoff. [/spoiler]
Regards,
Shodan
Nah, I agree with you on the Harold Lloyed bit - it seemed both obvious and misplaced.
I can’t imagine this actually being a kids movie. It’s more a movie that kids could watch (I think Scorcese even said that - he wanted to make a movie his 15-year-old could watch). It was absolutely slow in parts.
As far as the timing and plot pacing, I can understand not liking it (in particular the long exposition towards the end seemed at a different pace to the rest). But, in the end, it still worked for me.
We were in a group of about a dozen late-20s early 30somethings, and were about evenly split between “liked” and “hated”.
Late to the party as always, but I really loved it. It’s not so much a children’s movie, though it’s kid safe and might appeal to an intelligent imaginative child. It’s really a movie for adults that happens to have children as main characters.
Yes, it’s slow but I didn’t mind due to the completely immersive nature of the 3D. The Montparnasse station was so richly detailed and full of life I just got sucked into it. I recognized Joyce and Django Reinhardt, but missed Dali. When the plot kicked in I wasn’t bored at all.
I was surprised at how close it came to the actual life of Méliès. Obviously the automoton was fantasy and the children were fictional but other than that most of the things really happened: great success, decline, working in the toy and candy shop, films destroyed and lost, rediscovery.
I’d recommend it. It’s the first great 3D movie, and shows what the medium can be like in the hands of a great talent. (Avatar also had stunning visuals, but the story was kind of hokey.)
My wife and I saw it yesterday in 2D. And I don’t care what y’all say, I was grinning ear-to-ear through almost the entire thing–last time I remember that happening was when I saw Pulp Fiction in the theater. This movie absolutely hit all my buttons. It was gorgeous, it took time to explore beautiful little things like the holding of hands or the movement of the clockwork or the setup of a special effect. The lead actress was charming, and Ben Kingsley was wonderfully vicious. It skirted the line between real and fantasy in a way that I love.
It reminded me a lot of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, but where Terry Gilliam is a hot mess of a genius, this film felt deliberate and precise in every shot.
Seriously, I couldn’t have loved it more. And since the last few movies we’ve seen have been such terrible disappointments, I figured I was due :).
FWIW, I’m by no means a moviephile. This may be the third movie I’ve seen in the theater this year (that’s a guess–I don’t remember the last time I saw one), and we rent movies to watch on our monitor about once a month or so. This movie’s appeal is far broader than just to the community of moviephiles.
As for the question of whether it’s a kid’s movie:
It’s certainly not a kid’s movie in the modern sense. Many shots went on for longer than two seconds, and there were no fart or poop or barf jokes, and it didn’t rely on pratfalls to keep the audience interested. The pacing was so slow that I’d be very careful what kid I took to see it.
I would, however, think it a perfect date movie for nerdy teenagers in love.
I actually saw this a few weeks ago but I haven’t gotten around writing to this thread until now. Anyway I honestly thought Hugo was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I didn’t know anything about it before I saw it except what I saw on the trailer which made it look like an adventure sort of film set in England. So when I was watching it and found out it’s actually a drama set in Paris I was a bit perturbed. (It doesn’t help that I pretty much hate the French because I got stuck taking it in college. Anyway lets just say when they have to trick you into seeing a movie with a trailer that’s basically for another film that’s not a vote of confidence. It left a rather sour taste in my figurative mouth.)
So while I was watching it all I could think to myself, “If I were to make a parody movie of what you have to do to shill for Academy Awards I’d basically come up with Hugo.” Really, it was so blatant. (Oh we love old movies and paying homage to the “classics.” Hey, lets shove Ben Kingsley in it, the academy loves him. Don’t forget everybody should have English accents even though they’re in France. Remember English accent equals class and class equals academy awards. Don’t forget that cliche line “Happy endings only happen in the movies” and then the guy who says it has a happy ending. They eat that shit up.)
Seriously all I learned from that movie is that old movies are to modern ones what 2600 video games are to modern games. (IE it was great when that’s all we had but have you actually tried to play those games recently. Their time has long gone.) Honestly after that piece of excrement I’m actually going to avoid any new Scorcese film pretty much from now on. (Since reviewers will say how great it is no matter how terrible. It’s just expected.)
Fair enough, but just be clear that for some of us, it hits our tastes as exactly as it misses yours. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a Scorsese movie before (actually, just looked at IMDB, and I did see Casino in the theater; enjoyed it but hardly thought it was a masterpiece). My love for this movie has nothing to do with its reputation and everything to do with its beauty.
I just returned from seeing it with my two children (ages 8 and 11) and we all loved it. I am SO GLAD to finally have a movie to take them to that isn’t stupid, and doesn’t rely on poop jokes to move the plot. It was stunningly beautiful, and just… wonderful.
I really cannot understand the people who didn’t like it. We adored it.
True very true. (People’s tastes are what they are.) I think you’ve hit the nail on the head though. If you wanted to construct a film experience to make me hate a film as much as possible you couldn’t have done much better than this flick. I mean having a trailer trick me into seeing a film about a culture I hate didn’t put me in the best of moods. Then all the bits that I saw as blatant pandering didn’t improve my opinion.
Was anybody really surprised when Borat saved the kid at the end? I mean I was only mildly surprised the first time when it turned out it was just a dream. Come to think of it I didn’t think the “crazy dreams segment” really fit in but then again I didn’t think much of anything fit in.
Took my 6 year old to see it a couple of weeks ago, right around Thanksgiving. I agree with those who, with a sigh of relief, point out that this isn’t a “kids’ movie”, but rather a movie that kids may like, but adults will understand.
She felt it was good, pretty to look at, and she was more interested retroactively, when I told her that Georges was a real person who really made movies when they were just starting out. I’m afraid she may now think that Georges was working in 3D, but we’ll clear that up soon enough! I wish I had known a little more about it before we saw it, 'cause I would have known that the “true(ish) story” angle would pique her interest, but I also understand why the marketing for the film didn’t make it clear. The dream sequence was just enough scary for her to feel like watching it without freaking out was an achievement. She, of course, loved the dachshunds.
I shared the feeling of some in this thread that, while I loved loved loved lot of moments in this film, and it was a visually stunning achievement, I didn’t love the film as a whole. I also felt like it was 2 or 3 movies loosely tacked together, and thought it would have been improved by tightening up the edit a little bit. Not so much as to be a “kids’ movie”, just a nip and a tuck here and there.
And…were all those dust motes intentional? I’m sure they must have been, because nothing that computer heavy would have such a large amount of unintentional images. I thought they were a bit much at times, visually distracting rather than enhancing.
Overall, I lean towards “like it”, but honestly, it’s already fading in my memory.
Have a little sympathy. He was “tricked” into seeing a movie set in Paris by a trailer which shows the Eiffel Tower five times, in which the protagonist is pursued by a cartoonish gendarme past loads of french language signage and commercial art and a representation of French Liberty personified. Clearly, there are challenges to make allowances for.
You realize this movie is based on a book, yes? A Caldecott Award winning book? And that Scorcese wasn’t throwing anything at all into the movie to pander to the Academy? He was just filming the story from the book, pretty much exactly as written?
But don’t worry about checking it out from your library…it has French people in it. You’ll hate it.
The whole story is in the book. Just like it was on the screen.
Heh. I wonder if that’s even worse than the mother sitting behind me during the showing, who in the opening shot where you see the Eiffel Tower, told her children “Look, it’s London!.”
