Review of Hugo
What started
out as a whimsical kid’s movie turned into another PSA for Scorsese’s “Save the
Film” foundation. I half expected him to come on screen at the end and try to
solicit donations from us working class Americans who were just seriously
questioning the financial implications of buying the large diet sprite. Screw
you, Hollywood. You spend more on one dinner than I make in a month. Restore
your own damn films.
It must be
an off year for this film to be a serious front-runner for the Best Picture
award. Scorsese can’t seem to get out of his own way. He sets the scene for
this to be a fun-loving kid’s movie and then bunks it up with this kinda true
based on real life story of this artist upset because he had to give up his
dream and get a real job. I doubt any child is going to give a crap about George
Melies and how true to real life his film studio was. If it’s a kid’s movie, there
are other ways to involve the adults than a history lesson on early 20th
century film. If it’s a biopic on George Melies, there are other ways to frame
it. But Scorsese’s need to indulge his passion for film restoration left the whimsical
world of Hugo behind for this new storyline to develop. Don’t cross the
streams, Martin. NEVER cross the streams.
The movie is
billed as magical. It is not. The Neverending Story and The Adjustment Bureau
are magical. This had potential. The automaton could have gone somewhere and
the scene where the papers flew around the room gave me hope. That box could
not have possibly held all that paper and the manner they flew around the unventilated
room pointed to something magical. And then the wife says “there are some
things you are too young to understand.” Ben Kingsly couldn’t even look at
Hugo, his nemesis, in the eye. I got excited. This story is finally going
somewhere after an hour-long first act which grew weary with Hugo’s
twitchy-faced close-ups and the Keystone Cops chases through the train station.
Here’s where it went. An artist had to give up his artist’s lifestyle to make a
living. Yippie. This happens to 99.7% of all people in the world that aren’t in
the Scorsese family. I don’t think the kids were too young to understand that.
Neither is the audience.
In the interest
of full disclosure, I did not see it in 3D. Maybe I would have been fooled by
the magic of it all to realize how slow and meandering the story was. The emotionally
charged, everybody wins ending did a good job of making you forget how long it
took to get there, but it wasn’t worth the payoff. Too much screen time was
wasted trying to unnecessarily turn Borat into a two-dimensional character and
the Melies story made me feel more like I was back in Fine Arts 306 trying to
keep my eyelids open through a lecture for Intro to Film. But it looks like Scorsese’s
venture into 3D will earn him enough to restore all the films he wants so I don’t
have to sit through another ad with him and Clint Eastwood on any more of my Netflix
DVDs. 3 bugs (out of 10).
