It's been a couple of days, but forgive me as it has been CAH-RAZY busy!! Nothing I've built in the last two days has lasted more then an hour on the floor before selling! I've been pounding them out as quickly as quality maintaining can allow.
last night was the first night I've been home relatively on time, and that's 'cause it was Family Movie Night and I got the movie Angi's been itching to see, "Hugo"
What can I say about this film but..."enh."
Another Multi Million dollar "eye candy" fest with minimal story.
OK, right to the meat. Hugo is a Dicken-esque trip into minor Steam Punk territory only set in Paris (where apparently this time around NO-ONE has a French accent, but rather British). Hugo is a young orphan living in the bowels of a railway station working diligently as the clock keeper. A vocation he acquired by his drunkard uncle after his father died tragically in a museum explosion. Hugo is attempting to unravel a mystery he and his father had been working on of an automaton his father discovered in the storage of the museum where he worked.
Although some of the cinematography is breathtaking in it's complexity there are a few trite plot tools employed I have always found infuriating. When the protagonist of the film finds him or herself in a moment of emotional or physical conflict and rather then explain or talk to the other parties involved they remain silent allowing the others assumption to win the day, thus prolonging the solution to their predicament until the films inevitable catharsis. It REEKS of poor storytelling!
The other MAJOR problem I had was roughly in the middle of the film there is an INCREDIBLY sloppy edit. In the scene when the Inspector of the railway station is walking away from his encounter with the young flower vendor it literally jumps to a pull away of a huge library where Hugo and his young friend are walking along a runway as you hear a voice over of the book seller directing them to a volume regarding film makers.
?
It was so bad we had to pause the film and rewind, checking the track counter on our blue ray because we thought there was a glitch in the film! It made it hard to absorb the scene, as we were all trying to catch up with where the film was taking us. It was of course at this point, in retrospect you discover the film is no longer about the boy and his father, or the mysterious automaton, but rather a lavish love letter addressed to Georges Melies, prolific film maker of the turn of the century and the father of science fiction in the silver screen. I won't take the time to go into all his accomplishments, you can google it, but suffice to say certain aspect of his life were either omitted, or altered to fit the script of this movie (another plot tool I take issue with)
I'm sure the folks working on this film thought it a clever vehicle on which to hitch their passions, but I would have preferred they just make a dramatized documentary on his life in which to memorialize him, not unlike Robert Downy did for Charlie Chaplin, or consequently Johnny Depp did (somewhat) for Buster Keaton in "Benny and Joon".
I hate to be redundant but Yes, technology has allowed us to produce cinematic miracles, but lets start spending more effort on plot and story development and less on trying to perfect computer animated snow.
And now back to work! Here's what's left of what was built yesterday...
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Funny thing about accents in Europe: When I was knocking about over there some years ago, I found that the German kids all spoke English with a pronounced English accent. None of them sounded anything like Col. Klink or Schultz, as we idiot Americans expect. The reason: They had been taught to speak English by instructors from England; hence, the very English accents. So yes, I would expect the same English accent from a young person in France. Very sorry to hear about the film, though. It looked lovely in the trailers.
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