Hugo
Dir: Martin Scorsese
2011
**
Hugo wins the award for most over-hyped film of 2011. I liked most of the story, I have no doubt it is a wonderful children's book, it just doesn't come to life very well. The 3D/CGI effects are sickly sweet, it looks only marginally better than a Robert Zemeckis animation, which I can't say I'm much of a fan of. The cast is impressive but none of the actors seem to play off each other particularly well and the kid's performances are the type of overacted RADA taught 'This is how British kids are' crap that I loathe (also, why is everything British when the film is set in Paris?). Pretty much every scene with them in was overlong and painful. Sacha Baron Cohen can be funny with his style of ad-lib comedy when he's in one of his own characters but Scorsese couldn't have made a worse decision than to let him have full freedom of performance. It's evident throughout the film that he hadn't quite decided how to play the character or even what voice to use. He wasn't very funny either. Georges Méliès was a great director, one of the great fathers of film but this is a very odd tribute. I got the few nods to classic films but I'm not sure they worked as a tribute in any way, in fact most of the time the visuals were just lazy copies of famous images, like the Montparnasse train crash of 1895 that wasn't part of a film but will be remembered by most as an Athena poster, usually adorned in student digs with the words 'Crap!' written above it. Too long, a bit boring and just a bit lazy. I can't say I was that impressed at all and really don't understand the hype.