Hugo is a children’s fantasy set during the early 1930s at a Paris railway station. Our story concerns a 12 year old boy, Hugo Cabret, who maintains the congregation of clocks around the train depot. He’s an orphan and lives between the air ducts and hidden passageways that connect the timepieces. Hugo’s primary passion is refurbishing a broken automaton his father was fixing before he perished in a museum fire. The gadget looks like a metal mechanical man who writes with a pen. Hugo now spends his days locating the numerous hard-to-find parts so that he might get it to operate one day and complete his father’s work. The mechanism is still conspicuously missing a heart-shaped key.
THE GOOD: Hugo is a beautifully shot, big-budget, family epic in 3-D. In fact it’s probably the best use of 3-D since Avatar. In an era where movies are converted into 3-D for the purely monetary reasons, Hugo actually utilizes the format to its advantage. For example, when Hugo and Isabelle locate a small wooden box in the ceiling of her home, a mass of paper, sketches, and paintings are expelled from within after it comes tumbling to the floor. The effect is a perfectly realized vision of drawings flying throughout the theater. On the surface, the action involves getting this automaton to run, but there’s much more. The plot delves deeper and exalts the formative years of film and the importance of French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Ben Kingsley is engaging as the pioneer. The story has a real appreciation for his important contributions to the development of cinema. This is much more than simply a kid’s picture and anyone with an appreciation for movie history is sure to be engaged.
THE BAD: The pacing of the narrative is incredibly lethargic. The first half is at times painfully slow. Our callow star doesn’t help. Young actor Asa Butterfield is too vague and lifeless as Hugo Cabret to carry the picture. A sad little boy, he’s the human equivalent of a tranquilizer. Sacha Baron Cohen provides mild comic relief as the Station Inspector, but he too becomes tiresome. Only in the second half do things pick up with the focus on Ben Kingsley’s character. Even then, the exposition frequently feels more like education than entertainment.
Hugo is a sincere valentine celebrating the value of film preservation from the heart of Martin Scorsese. An admirable perspective and one that definitely will resonate with any lover of the medium. But the chronicle can be a bit didactic. An adventure should be fun and this often feels like a lecture. Luckily production design wins out over those dilemmas. The re-creations of George Méliès’ cinemas are extraordinary and some of the most elegant images I’ve seen all year. It inspired me to seek out his most famous film made way back in 1902, A Trip to the Moon. Granted the story is probably more appreciated by adults than children. Even I struggled with the momentum at times. However it’s a gorgeously realized work of art. Without question an exquisite use of 3-D. Hugo celebrates a lot of what I love about movies and for this film fan, that was enough.
The Muppet Show was a British television program, syndicated in the US, that originally ran for 5 seasons from September 5, 1976 — March 15, 1981. What made the production such a watershed in Jim Henson’s career was the capacity for both young and old to enjoy it, as opposed to his creations for Sesame Street which were strictly aimed at toddlers. Indeed The Muppet Show was born out of American puppeteer Jim Henson‘s concern over being labeled a children’s entertainer. The Muppets were highly successful and their popularity reached a zenith of sorts with The Muppet Movie in 1979 becoming one of the top 10 box office hits of that year. Since then the Muppets have released six theatrical features of varying quality with the original cast, but nothing has ever quite captured the lightening in a bottle of that original picture. That is until now.
The tenuous relationship between two sisters is further tested with the possible threat of the end of the world. A rogue planet named “Melancholia” is traveling through the solar system. Melancholia is not only the name of the sphere looming close to Earth, but also of our protagonist’s demeanor. Director Lars von Trier’s rumination on the events during and after a wedding party is the subject of this vile little picture. I’m now convinced that audiences do not enjoy Lars von Trier movies so much as they suffer through them.
King Hyperion has declared war on Greek humanity and it‘s up to a common peasant named Theseus to rise up and stop him. Hyperion is searching for the legendary Epirus Bow which will allow him to free the Titans from a mythic dungeon. This then would give him the control to enslave Greece and absolute power even over the gods. Hyperion has murdered Theseus’ mother in one of his many raids and now it’s personal for the young stonemason.
Pleasant computer animated tale spins off the Puss in Boots character as a prequel to his first appearance in Shrek 2. The plot concerns our feline hero and his scheme to steal a goose that lays golden eggs. He’s aided by a female Tuxedo cat named Kitty Softpaws and his estranged boyhood friend Humpty Alexander Dumpty. Zach Galifianakis voices the churlish egghead and he’s memorable – a welcome addition to this cartoon universe. But the story drifts into the past and the explanation of why these good friends have now become alienated is somewhat labored. The plot involves their childhood roots in an orphanage, a long held grudge and some magic beans. The narrative is rather convoluted, but if you don‘t analyze it too much, it’s entertaining enough.
Fast Film Reviews 