Hugo

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Hugo is sweet and tender and trite and saccharine; its visual exhuberance is beautiful but its sentimental nostalgia overpowered me, like a young man who's spritzed himself a few too many times with his father's cologne. I, too, want to fear for my life druing a movie if a train is coming off the screen frame and right at me, but in Hugo, it only appears to be doing so––maybe I need to see the 3D version. But, regardless, isn't the art of the greatest magicians that which hides the illusion and avoids the temptation of self-referentiallity viz. you don't need a scene on a Parisian bridge where the characters say, earnestly, "Cinema is Special Place." Don't the great magicians know that any mention of their craft as illusion turns wonder into mechanical know-how, a metaphor made too literal throughout Hugo? Most people who didn't like Scorsese's Shutter Island thought it was too messy and weird; I loved that about it and dove right into the indulgences because suspension of disbelief is a viewer's responsibility. Avoiding explicit lectures about the greatness of movies is likewise the director's, and in Hugo, Scorsese too often mistook his director's chair for a podium. B-

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