What’s love got to do with it, plenty if you’re part of that American demographic that goes to see movies that are not so much about love and art - as the film Hugo is - but mainly about violence, sex and horror.
While the movie “Hugo” has earned plenty of awards already for director Martin Scorsese and producer Johnny Depp – with an eye on winning the Academy Award for best-picture next month at the Oscars – the film does not have gratuitous violence, sex and horror that’s the current Hollywood box-office formula for movies that most Americans flock to see. Thus, despite “Hugo” high critical acclaim – with its most recent honor of earning “best period film” from the Art Directors Guild awards Feb. 5 – the film has had very poor box-office, with Variety and other trackers of how much a movie earns, stating that as of Feb. 2 “the film grossed just over $59 million in North America, along with just over $30 million in other regions, with a total worldwide total of about “90 million, against its budget of $150 million.”
Hugo pushes back against trash films
Thus, what Scorsese and Depp had hoped would appeal to Americans who enjoy a good “love story” -- that’s also featured in the ever popular 3-D -- it’s a failure by Hollywood standards because Hugo does not draw the American youth crowd.
In turn, Hugo suffers from what youth today call “boring” if a film they’re watching doesn’t have the usual action sequences every 15 minutes; while most popular films also add a dash of sex and horror to those action scenes that main street Americans have come to expect in the films they see to escape their boring real-life reality, explained one top film critic.
At the same time, “Hugo” has received almost universal critical acclaim with the reviewing tallying websites reported that “177 of the tallied 188 reviews were positive,” for a score of 94 percent approval for this film that has no violence or sex but plenty of feel-good moments that express love and caring for those “who are broken, who need to be fixed.”
Hugo appeals to those who view film as “art”
Martin Scorsese’s “masterpiece” – as the new Oscar nominated best-picture “Hugo” has been called – is based on a popular children’s book titled: “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” by Brian Selznick.
Also, John Logan – whose screenplay for “Hugo” has been nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay – told NPR recently that the real emotion in the film comes at “the moment of Hugo’s actual break. He achieves sort of emotional critical mass and everything falls apart.”
For example, the Hugo Cabret character states in the film: “Listen to me, please. Please. Please, listen to me. You don't understand. You have to let me go. I don't understand why my father died, why I'm alone.”
When film is "high art"
In turn, Logan states that “the way he expresses his pain; when Hugo, a 10-year-old boy finally has to grapple with raw emotion and there's no more artifice around him, you know, when he really has to speak from his heart, that's when the playwright in me comes out most, I think.”
At the same time, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film four-out-four stars saying: "Hugo is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life. We feel a great artist has been given command of the tools and resources he needs to make a movie about – movies."
Moreover, there’s a key scene when the 12-yeaer-old boy Hugo Cabret is to be taken to an orphanage, but Ben Kingsley’s character says “no,” that Hugo is his boy and he hugs him with love.
It should be noted that when this reporter viewed “Hugo” recently at a movie theater, there were snickers at that touching scene of love and depth of human feeling. Those snickers came from both adults and youth in the theater. It seems that any offering of love in film’s today “doesn’t seem to ring real with many Americans” say critics, because “what’s real to most people today is lots and lots violence and sex on film.”
Hugo celebrates the early days of cinema
A recent “Hugo” review in the New Yorker may have explained this film best. “At the moment of greatest rapture in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D “Hugo”—a film with many moments of happiness—a twelve-year-old Parisian boy, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), and his pal Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) are leafing through a book of film history, when images from the pages start to move and then spring to full motion-picture life. The time is the nineteen-thirties, and Scorsese and his technicians are looking back to the pioneers, jumping through restored versions of films by the Lumière brothers, Edwin S. Porter, D. W. Griffith, and, most centrally, Georges Méliès, the inventor of fantasy and science fiction in the cinema.”
For Scorsese, the early movies are a procession of miracles. For instance, the New Yorker explained how “the (early) directors realized that sixteen frames passing through a camera every second could yield illusions, disappearances, transformations, magic.”
In recent years, while making his own movies, “Scorsese has dedicated himself to film history and preservation. He has put this ardent attention at the center of a beautifully told and emotionally satisfying story for children and their movie-loving parents,” adds the New Yorker review.
Also, the review noted how “Hugo” is both “a summing up of the cinematic past and a push forward into new 3-D technologies. James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ was a luscious purple-green spectacle—a fantasy of the natural world. “Hugo” is a fantasy of the mechanical world: much of it is devoted to the workings of a clock, a camera, an automaton, and a train station that functions like a huge machine. No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.”
The “look" of Hugo is terrific
Also, the “art of Hugo” comes from parts of “Hugo”—the station, interiors of apartments—were shot on sets, but the movie depends on painted and digitized backgrounds. “They are intentionally artificial, like something in a children’s book, or, more to the point, like the fanciful sets that Méliès used in his movies. In a flashback, Scorsese re-creates Méliès’s glass-walled studio and his films, with their exuberance of creatures, “natives” with spears, nymphs hanging from the stars—sheer exultant zaniness, part magic show, part burlesque, and all cinema,” added the New Yorker review.
That’s why it’s no surprise that “Hugo,” though an exhilarating 3-D spectacle of the first order, adds the New Yorker review; while also explained how “the application of 3-D technology passes virtually unnoticed—it’s simply the way that Scorsese imagines the world of the story, the representation of his inner experience of it. His film is a reminder that realism and artifice aren’t opponents or opposites but the very systole and diastole of cinematic life.”
The primordial artist of cinematic fantasy, Georges Méliès (played by Ben Kingsley) is one of the movie’s main characters and why, with great acting by all, this film will win the Academy Award for best-picture.
Moreover, the New Yorker noted how “Scorsese expressly links the story of the film with the history of film preservation and revival screenings and with its artistic results.”
Image source of the movie poster for “Hugo” a 2011 adventure drama film that’s been nominated for an Academy Award as best-picture. Photo courtesy Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_(film)
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