Astonishingly wonderful

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2011)

It's amazing how great the movies have become in recent years. And Hugo is certainly one of the great ones. Some of your critics showed disappointment with the movie. I guess they were expecting something else. What I saw was a highly successful combination of biopic and documentary about a great film pioneer. We saw it only in normal vision without 3D so I can't comment on that. But all the sets and visuals were of course stunning and incomparable.
After all of Melies' talk in the movie about how he had to sell his films (about 500 of them) into destruction for making shoe heels, on the IMDb site we see the same 500 films going back even as far as 1896 when Melies started. So these films must be accessible in some fashion even today if only to have their credits listed. I remember back 20 years ago when I was residing in New Zealand the big news broke that one of Melies' films had been found in a local film archive and the discovery was all over the papers.
It was piquant to see portrayed on the screen real live contemporary to their time artistic figures like guitarist Django Reinhardt, painter Salvador Dali, and author James Joyce. My wife and I commented that one of the actors certainly resembled James Joyce and that's who he turned out actually to be in the film. When I saw the guitarist I said he reminded me of Django Reinhardt and that's exactly who he was supposed to be.
We were delighted to observe Scorsese's "Hitchcock moment" when he cast himself as a photographer taking Melies' picture in front of his studio.
What a precious way to become wrapped up in the early history of cinema through this extraordinary film! It reminded me of the movie The Road to Wellville (1994) which similarly immersed the audience in another time and period through its visual fineness and its portraying of genuine historical figures like the Kellogg brothers of Battle Creek circa 1900-1910,about the same turn of the century time as Hugo.
Astonishing film!