From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- Cinema Memories-Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for martin Scorsese’s film, Hugo.

Hugo, starring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Christopher Lee, Jude Law. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Paramount Pictures, 2011

A film about film-making, or about a slice of life of the history of film-making and filmmakers, must always be an appealing subject for any director, and especially for a quirky and historically-immersed director like Martin Scorsese. We are all children of the film age (including Hugo and the other children who pop up in this film) and thus it was interesting to see as the “plot” unfolded how film began to be used the movies as a modern metaphor for humankind’s imaginations, of its dreams and of the process of going from disbelief to the suspension of disbelief that is part of any film experience, including this film.

As for the film itself, based on an adaptation of novelistic treatment of the wonder of discovery, of invention, and of pure fantasy inherent in trying to make dreams come to life it works pretty well. And to place that challenge in the hands of a child just adds to the effect. One might argue, and should, that the length of the film including its little redundancies (the constant background shots of the railroad station and it inhabitants) could reasonably have been shorter by about fifteen minutes. And, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that it really does take film’s magical suspension of disbelief techniques to take a plot that is centered in Paris while the cast speaks the Queen’s English making one think that we could have been in the center of London just as easily. Other than those minor points this film was entertaining. And isn’t that what film should be all about. That is what its founders thought anyway.