Finally saw it tonight. Put me in the column of “visually stunning, but the story was weak and unabsorbing.” I liked it, and I’m glad I saw it in a theater (and in 3D), but I’m not going to be recommending it to people I don’t think.
We just saw it, and I disagree with many comments here. We found the film charming, but the use of 3D was hideous, intrusive, and distracting. We discussed with several people when leaving the theatre, and got the same reaction. The scene where the hound chases Hugo through the station made me car-sick and gave me a headache as things blur in and out of focus. The continual use of sudden focus changes (with huge “distance” between foreground and background, even when in real life there wouldn’t be so much distance) gave me a migraine.
We liked the movie a lot, but found the use 3D to be horrible. It reminded me of the 3D movies of 20 years ago, at Disney World, where butterflies and snowflakes come out of the screen right at you. Simplistic. Amateurish. Not what I would have expected from Scorsese.
Finally saw it this weekend. I missed most of the Oscar-nominated movies this year, so I’m desparately trying to catch up with at least the Best Picture nominees. 5 down, 4 to go.
Unfortunately I had to see it in 3D because it’s almost gone from theaters around here and 3D is the only option left. But the 3D was mostly inobtrusive.
I thought the movie was quite charming, and very beautiful. The boy actor was overmatched by the rest of the cast but that was minor. I really liked the interactions with Kingsley and getting to see all the clips of the classic Melies movies. I remembered learning about him in my film history classes in college.
One thing that bothered me: what became of the boy’s notebook? We’re told it wasn’t burned, but if it fell out of that box hidden in the armoire I must have missed it. They never mention it again.
The movie didn’t quite live up to my favorites of the year so far (The Artist and Midnight in Paris) but definitely worthy of the nominations it received.
My wife and I watched Hugo a week or two ago. We had some mild interest in December but I was reluctant to see a Scorcese film because I didn’t think much of Raging Bull or The Departed (or, for that matter, Casino or various other Scorcese projects). But there was a Sunday morning news show on CBS that had a feature on Automatons – yes, they really did exist and, for those who watched Hugo, they really were often used as magicians’ props and the Méliès biography wasn’t unbelievable (though I have no idea if it was accurate to the real person’s life) – and the geeky garage-tinkerer in me was intrigued enough that I wanted to see Hugo. It was clear that the feature, ostensibly about automatons, was created and broadcast specifically to generate additional interest in the movie to keep it drawing theater viewers for a couple more weeks. The ploy worked; my wife and I went to see it.
Wife and I thought it was a nice enough movie but not something to rave about.
Likes:
My wife liked the little side-stories that played out, and the way they played out. I thought Hugo should have had a positive hand in each of them somehow, but he didn’t. They were side-stories, though, so that didn’t irritate me much.
The scenery was lovely. It was clear that the earliest scenes, even before the title overlay, were shot with 3D in mind. Wife and I saw it in 2D, though, so they didn’t have the manipulative effect of hey-watch-as-we-go-through-these-gears but they were still cool to see. I’ve always felt 3D should be like any other special effect: A good writer builds a good story and uses it when appropriate; building a story around special effects doesn’t make a crappy story better.
Papa Georges and Isabelle (and Monsieur Labisse, the librarian) really have a lot more presence than Hugo. Of course, that could be expected of Kingsley and Lee.
Dislikes:
It was clear that this film was at least partially trying to fill a void left behind by the concluded Potter series – lets appeal to young kids by putting young kids in as the main characters. In fact, I felt a few of the shots tried too hard to make Ms. Moretz look like the young Emma Watson did at the beginning of the Potter epic.
Some of the scenes seemed a bit pedantic. Yes, the dreams were frightening, but the first dream was an obvious set-up for the later ‘reality’ version and the second was obviously an attempt to distract you from the obviousness of the first. [I realize, however, that the story is aimed toward a younger crowd, and the cues for the audience may not have been so obvious to less experienced movie-goers.]
Other Comments:
I had heard of Sacha Baron Cohen from only one product: Borat. My wife rented a video-on-demand showing of Borat when the cable company was offering it for 99 cents. I saw part of one scene and decided it wasn’t worth watching any more. My wife watched about a third of the movie and skipped the rest. At the end of Hugo, my wife said she thought the train station cop was Sacha Baron Cohen from Borat. I said, honestly, “Wow! If I had known he was in the movie at all I would have skipped it. He did a decent job – probably because he wasn’t trying to be funny.”
It occurred to me, in the middle of the ancient film viewing scene, that Kingsley and McCrory were probably chosen specifically for their resemblance (close enough to let the Make-Up department do the rest quite easily) to Georges Méliès and his wife.
Someone else has already responded to the ‘no reason to be so bitter’ comment, but I’ll extend that a bit to criticize the ‘such a jerk about just a mechanical mouse’ comment. The man was already bitter about his life work being disrespected to the point that the cellulose was melted down to be reused as heels for shoes. He was understandably frustrated by the fact that his life’s efforts left him not as a retired famous director but as merely the aging proprietor (i.e. still working to survive) of a tiny little toy shop at a train station. And then some little punk keeps on stealing his product – his PROFITS! Yeah, that’s reason to get pissy. Also, the station has its own security-guy whose main preoccupation seems to be to catch stray kids; that seems to imply an overall shoplifting problem, for which the toy shoppe is just one of many victims of many orphaned kids. Hugo was the one he caught who was the protagonist of our story; no doubt other kids were caught as well, before and after our tale.
I didn’t quite understand how the automaton was programmed to make a picture of the moon with the rocket in the eye, when that image wasn’t created for the movie poster until after the movie was made which was after Méliès took parts off the automaton to make his own camera and shot other films with it. It’s a timing, thing, really. By the time the iconic image was made, wasn’t the automaton a long-forgotten partly-dismantled relic? Whatever programming was in it (via the cams and bobbins and such) was already there before parts were stolen for the camera project. How did it get the programming for an image that wasn’t created until later? Was the image from Jules Verne’s book?
As the movie closed, I was expecting to see the Automaton start up, then the camera zoom in and twist around to show some artful drawing and the word FIN in the middle (or C’est tout! or something like that).
—G!
C’est tout!
The implication I got was that the movies were always in Geroges’ imagination and dreams, and he just adapted them to film later. So he made the automaton that drew that picture, and then later decided to adapt that same image to film.