I have come to a conclusion about magic tricks: you don't have to be ignorant of how a trick is done to be amazed by it. Nor is being ignorant of how a trick is done a guarantee that you won't be bored. A magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat? I don't know how it's done but, been there, seen that. Yet I remember seeing an article in the latest incarnation of LIFE magazine with photos, taken in a park, of a forty-foot marionette that was manipulated and moved around the park by means of a gas-powered forklift-like vehicle that stood behind and above the marionette. Everyone could see the strings (they were more like two-inch thick cables, if I remember correctly), everyone could easily see how the magic trick of bringing the marionette to a semblence of life was done...and yet everyone was amazed.
Movies are another sort of magic trick (or perhaps I should say "illusion"): a series of pictures, each motionless in themselves, are displayed in rapid succession to give the semblence of motion. Most people know how this is accomplished, and there are all too many movies that are boring. But when done right, a movie can surprise and amaze. Martin Scorcese demonstrates this in the first scene of Hugo, his most recent movie based on the picture book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick: at first the viewer sees the inner workings of a clock, gears rotating and meshing, pendulums swinging to and fro. You can tell it's CGI (yet another technolgical marvel that can nevertheless be boring if not done, or used, correctly), but as the scene progresses, it changes. The axis of the largest gear slowly becomes the Arc de Triomphe in the city of Paris, France. And the clockwork dance that whirls around it becomes the nighttime Parisian traffic.
When I first heard of Hugo, I thought it was just another Harry-Potteresque tale like the ones that have been cropping up in the wake of J.K. Rowling's monstrously successful books. But that is not quite the case here. The main charater, Hugo Cabret (played by Asa Butterfield), is indeed an orphan, and he encounters much adversity as he ekes out an existence in the dark corners of a Paris train depot (he has been oiling and maintaining the depot clocks, for no pay, ever since the disappearance of his stinking drunk uncle, who took him in after the death of his father). He is constantly on the run from the police (in the person of a station inspector played by Sacha Baron Cohen, who gives the part a slightly comic turn -- one can only wonder what Peter Sellers would have done with the part) because he has to steal to eat. And he gets in trouble with an old man named Georges (played by Ben Kingsley), one of the people he steals from. See, Georges runs a little toy shop in the confines of the train depot, and Hugo has been stealing toy parts -- gears, specifically -- because he needs them for a project he's been working on.
That project is a humanoid clockwork automaton that Hugo's father had been repairing and left unfinished. Before his death, Hugo's father had a sort of hobby of digging old clocks and other clockwork mehanisms out of museum store rooms or garbage heaps, dusting them off and fixing them up. Hugo wants to fix up this particular automaton because it's all that his father left behind. And the automaton is apparently designed to write something. Hugo thinks that if he gets it working again, it will relay to him a message from his father from beyond the grave.
When Georges learns of the automaton, he reacts strangely: he regards Hugo with resentment, though Hugo can't understand why. In fact, Georges actively tries to sabotage the repair process. But Hugo finds an ally in Georges' goddaughter Isabelle (played by Chloe Grace Moretz, who does very well here, as she did in Let Me In), and together they work to get the automaton repaired, and to determine what its connection might be to Georges.
I won't reveal any more, because that would spoil the surprise (that would be the true sin here, not revealing how the trick is done). I'll simply say that this is a movie about movies -- specifically about the magic movies can conjure when they're done right.
Movies are another sort of magic trick (or perhaps I should say "illusion"): a series of pictures, each motionless in themselves, are displayed in rapid succession to give the semblence of motion. Most people know how this is accomplished, and there are all too many movies that are boring. But when done right, a movie can surprise and amaze. Martin Scorcese demonstrates this in the first scene of Hugo, his most recent movie based on the picture book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick: at first the viewer sees the inner workings of a clock, gears rotating and meshing, pendulums swinging to and fro. You can tell it's CGI (yet another technolgical marvel that can nevertheless be boring if not done, or used, correctly), but as the scene progresses, it changes. The axis of the largest gear slowly becomes the Arc de Triomphe in the city of Paris, France. And the clockwork dance that whirls around it becomes the nighttime Parisian traffic.
When I first heard of Hugo, I thought it was just another Harry-Potteresque tale like the ones that have been cropping up in the wake of J.K. Rowling's monstrously successful books. But that is not quite the case here. The main charater, Hugo Cabret (played by Asa Butterfield), is indeed an orphan, and he encounters much adversity as he ekes out an existence in the dark corners of a Paris train depot (he has been oiling and maintaining the depot clocks, for no pay, ever since the disappearance of his stinking drunk uncle, who took him in after the death of his father). He is constantly on the run from the police (in the person of a station inspector played by Sacha Baron Cohen, who gives the part a slightly comic turn -- one can only wonder what Peter Sellers would have done with the part) because he has to steal to eat. And he gets in trouble with an old man named Georges (played by Ben Kingsley), one of the people he steals from. See, Georges runs a little toy shop in the confines of the train depot, and Hugo has been stealing toy parts -- gears, specifically -- because he needs them for a project he's been working on.
That project is a humanoid clockwork automaton that Hugo's father had been repairing and left unfinished. Before his death, Hugo's father had a sort of hobby of digging old clocks and other clockwork mehanisms out of museum store rooms or garbage heaps, dusting them off and fixing them up. Hugo wants to fix up this particular automaton because it's all that his father left behind. And the automaton is apparently designed to write something. Hugo thinks that if he gets it working again, it will relay to him a message from his father from beyond the grave.
When Georges learns of the automaton, he reacts strangely: he regards Hugo with resentment, though Hugo can't understand why. In fact, Georges actively tries to sabotage the repair process. But Hugo finds an ally in Georges' goddaughter Isabelle (played by Chloe Grace Moretz, who does very well here, as she did in Let Me In), and together they work to get the automaton repaired, and to determine what its connection might be to Georges.
I won't reveal any more, because that would spoil the surprise (that would be the true sin here, not revealing how the trick is done). I'll simply say that this is a movie about movies -- specifically about the magic movies can conjure when they're done right.
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