‘Hugo’ comes to town
Based on the book ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ by Brian Selznick
and Martin Scorsese's choice for the children's film that he has long
wanted to make, ‘Hugo’ is a cinematic delight that pleases on every
level that one could desire.
Scenes from Hugo |
The story about a young boy named Hugo who lives behind the scenes in
a Paris railway station where he tends the station's clocks and also
tries to solve the puzzle of a clockwork automaton that his father and
he had been attempting to fix will appeal to children for its spirit of
adventure, but equally so to adults as it also but not alone contains a
well-realized connection to the earliest days of film in the personage
of French filmmaker Georges Méliès.
Under Martin Scorsese's direction, ‘Hugo’ has a freshness, a degree
of mystery, and an exuberance that is very seldom managed in today's
film offerings.
Scorsese (working with cinematographer Robert Richardson [Oscar
winner]) marshals an incredible blend of superb production design/set
decoration by Dante Ferretti/Francesca Lo Schiavo (Oscar winner),
judiciously utilized visual effects supervised by Rob Legato (Oscar
winner), and an entrancing music score by Howard Shore (Oscar
nomination).
He also draws uniformly fine work from all the members of a cast that
includes Asa Butterfield as Hugo, Sacha Baron Cohen doing his best work
on film to date, Ben Kingsley as a mysterious clockwork artifact seller,
Emily Mortimer, Chloe Grace Moretz, Ray Winstone, Christopher Lee,
Richard Griffiths, and Jude Law. For Scorsese, the result is a tour de
force on a par artistically with any of the great gangster films for
which he is so well-known and revered.
‘Hugo’ received 11 Academy Award nominations and won in five
categories at the recent 2012 Oscar ceremony. It was also successful in
the area of sound recording and sound mixing.
The movie is screening at Liberty Lite cinema. |