Why I want Hugo to win Best Picture

Let's be real: The Artist is probably going to go all in on Sunday.  Which I'm not pleased about.  I haven't seen all of the Best Picture noms (I'm short War Horse, Midnight in Paris, The Descendants, and Extremely Inconvenient & Incredibly Annoying), but I did see The Artist and I did see Hugo and there's no question to me that Hugo is a superior film and a superior experience.

For one thing, Hugo IS an experience.  Watching The Artist, it felt like a lot of work on my part for not a lot of payoff; I didn't feel like the filmmakers had made the same kind of effort that they were requiring me to make.  Let me try to explain that better: Hugo is a film that I felt asked for effort on my part (mostly it demands an emotional investment) but was also clearly a labor of love and craft.  The Artist demands intellectual effort by virtue of its form, but seems lazy in how it was put together.  Down to the performances (I thought Asa Butterfield and Ben Kingsley both turned out more convincing jobs than Jean Dujardin, no matter how charming he might be) I was more involved, more enraptured, more rewarded by Hugo.

Other wins I want to see tomorrow: Viola Davis for Best Actress, Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress, Jonah Hill for Best Supporting Actor, Margin Call for Best Original Screenplay.  I want to see some slammin' dresses on the red carpet, and I want Billy Crystal to pull it out and be awesome as host.  We'll see how it goes!

2011 In Review

I don't really have a top ten list of films for 2011 because I don't feel like I saw a complete sample of things that came out - I missed A LOT of movies that I wanted to see.  But several things did come out that, if I had a top ten list, would most likely have made the cut:

X-Men: First Class and Captain America, both two of the finest super hero movies the genre has turned out since, well, ever.

Drive, which won't get nearly as much awards press as I want it to.

Hugo, which I liked a whole lot more than I expected to, due to an unfortunately misleading trailer.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a movie which manages to be more exciting than both the original source material and the first adaptation.

Margin Call, which I tried to write about but had difficulties I can't really articulate; it's a wonderfully sharp piece of writing and acting that I maybe didn't really understand completely?  There's a lot of financial business that I didn't get, but it's a testament to the power of the actors that it didn't matter.  Check it out if you get the chance - I don't understand how it didn't get a wider release, with the surplus of powerhouse names in it (Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Bradley Cooper, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany).

Maybe Moneyball?  I didn't write about this one, either, because I have a problematic relationship with it.  I want to recognize the wonderful writing and excellent performances (especially by Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, and Philip Seymour Hoffman), but...it didn't resonate with me the same way it seems to have with the rest of the world.  I just didn't feel like there was enough of a story to fill the whole time slot - all the bits about Pitt's family life felt like padding to me, and didn't really add anything in terms of emotional development.  I wish it had been a really tightly-focused 60 minute film, concentrating on the baseball aspects of Pitt's character's life rather than a weakly-written relationship with a daughter I didn't care about.  The fascinating moments of this movie are the negotiations and the game itself, not the private lives of the characters.

If I get the chance to see more 2011 films before the end of January, I'll do a list for you guys.  Otherwise, what's above is pretty much my greatest hits of things I actually saw.

My biggest hope for 2012 in terms of film is simple: MORE.  ANIMATED.  MOVIES.  Is it just me, or was 2011 COMPLETELY LACKING in good animation?  I'm not sure I realized it until I watched the Golden Globes on Sunday, but to follow 2010, a year which gave us Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, and Tangled with a spat of sequels and poorly reviewed items that disappeared almost as soon as they hit theaters seems...sad.  I hope Pixar delivers with BRAVE, is all I'm saying.

A Reaffirmation on why I love movies

I love movies.

I love them because they're transportive, because they're sentimental, because they're exciting.  I love them because they tell you so much about the people who make them.  I love them because I can watch the same one, over and over, and continue to get something back from it.  I love how they move me.  I love everything about them.

And apparently so does Martin Scorsese.

Hugo is a giant love letter to cinema.  Affection saturates every frame.  Set against the lush backdrop of Paris in winter, there is not a moment of this film that fails to remind you how powerful movies are and how deeply they resonate with people.  It starts as a mystery: Hugo, an achingly young boy who lives orphaned in the walls of a train station taking care of the clocks, is trying to fix a small automaton, a project originally started by his father.  Fixing the automaton is how Hugo stays connected to his father; he is convinced that, once functional, the writing machine will reveal a hidden message from the deceased Monsieur Cabret.

To fix the machine Hugo steals bits of clockwork from George (Ben Kingsley), who owns a toy shop in the train station; his god-daughter is Isabelle, enchanted with the idea of the great adventure and loquacious from devouring every book she can get her hands on.  She meets Hugo when he's caught by George and has his notebook (full of mechanical sketches done by his father) taken from him by the older man.  Working together, Hugo and Isabelle begin to discover that the automaton is more than it seems and may help George re-discover his purpose in life.  (I won't tell you who George is, if you're trying to preserve the surprise, although IMDB has his full name listed.  If you're interested in the real person Kingsley is portraying, click here.)

I'm not the first person to use the phrase "love letter to film" in description of Hugo, and I use it now because it's the only phrase I can think of that encompasses the beauty and poetry of this film.  Scorsese gives us a symphony of light and clockwork, punctuated by gusts of steam from passing trains and the snowy streets of Paris.  Visually this movie is stunning: the train station is all warm, golden light, framed by the faces of clocks and ornate iron grates.  Paris is blue and white winter, with the lights of the city (and especially the Eiffel Tower) picked out like stars in the sweeping shots of the city.

Asa Butterfield as our titular hero has huge blue eyes that break your heart in nearly every shot.  He and Chloe Moretz (as Isabelle) are the focus of the film, and they do an excellent job of the heavy lifting.  I'm always ready to simply accept the job that child actors do in films, and when a young person comes along who can actually carry his scenes next to a veteran like Kingsley I'm properly impressed; both Butterfield and Moretz pull their roles off beautifully.  Moretz should start winning awards any day now, if she continues doing this well.

It was interesting to me that Scorsese chose to do a movie that's essentially an ode to silent film and the history of film in 3D; I understand now, I think.  We get scenes from some of the earliest films made, and to think about how far the film industry has progressed since those first efforts is really breathtaking.  About 98% of the time I think 3D is poorly done and completely unnecessary; here, it's beautiful and thought-provoking.  The early filmmakers were inventing the wheel that Hollywood keeps trying to re-imagine, and every once in a while a film comes along that shows you not only a new way to build that whee, but a whole new purpose for it you could never have imagined.  Hugo is this kind of movie.

Go see it.  You won't be disappointed, I promise.