Marty's Kids' Movie. In 3D!

The more I think about Hugo the less I like it. I have mentioned before that I have never felt like Scorsese movies really have anything that connects them – there have been a lot of good movies, but he doesn't have an aesthetic voice like Spielberg or, say, P.T. Anderson or Nolan or the Coens. When I watch one of their movies I know I'm watching one of their movies, whereas Scorsese's movies sometimes feel to me like they could've been directed by a whole variety of people. (This might be a good thing. I am not criticizing; just noting.)

I said earlier on here, also, that I kept thinking Tintin Hugo was an animated film. It's not. Well, it's partially not. There is so much CGI in Hugo that at times I thought it would've been better as an animated film. Hugo is also as candy-coated as Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, but lacks the real magic of that picture.

Hugo follows a small orphaned boy who repairs clocks in the train station in Paris. And he lives in the train station and scrounges for food and tries not to get caught by the local security guard (played by the impossible-not-to-like Sacha Baron Cohen). He is trying to repair a little metallic automaton who he thinks can write him a message from his dead father, so he is stealing little machine parts from the toy vendor in the train station.

There are all kinds of charming side characters, as well, not one of whom is developed beyond a line or two. This is a particular shame because they are played by Frances de la Tour, Richard Griffiths, Christopher Lee, and Emily Mortimer.

Okay, well, the plot begins to revolve around this mystery. Who is this toy-maker (Ben Kingsley) really and what secrets does he hold? The trouble with this is that we know that Ben Kingsley knows the solution to the mystery from the beginning of the film. So all of the machinations of the film, the running around, the near-death experiences, the crying, the run-ins with Sacha Baron Cohen's giant dog, could easily be avoided simply by coming clean to Ben Kingsley about what they know. Instead, Hugo and his playmate do not, and we have a movie. I say this to say that I spent the whole movie waiting for Mr. Scorsese to tell me the information that I knew he was keeping from me. This made the whole thing excruciatingly predictable.

Hugo has been referred to as a love letter to the movies by many critics, and they are right. There are long sequences where we watch very old films. All of those sequences work like gangbusters. They are fabulous. And I would've preferred them put together in a documentary film narrated by Martin Scorsese instead of in this film that looks, for all the world, like a film by Frank Capra.

There is much more to say about this picture, I suppose. I loved Helen McCrory in it, and Dante Ferretti's production design is just gorgeous, occasionally breathtaking, even. Howard Shore's score is lovely and may even be nominated for an Academy Award (His scores for Scorsese are almost always disqualified by AMPAS because Marty uses well-known music in all of his films for the really important sequences. He does that only once in Hugo, as far as I could tell, using one of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies at a key moment.) Mostly, though, I just thought this film was slow, like its timing was just off for the entirety of the picture. It was pretty, and the old films were nice, but it was more predictable than Thor.

So Foreign

Last year I didn't manage to see all five films that were nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. This happens not infrequently, obviously, as many films don't find a release in the United States even if they do manage to snag an Academy Award nomination. So, last night I finally saw the last of the five and I thought I would cover these films briefly.

I rated Biuitiful my favorite film of 2010. I found it deeply moving, with a central performance by Javier Bardem that is simply incredible. This is another of 2010's films about parenting, and like the others (The Kids Are All Right, The Illusionist, Mother and Child) I felt like Biuitiful really connected to me in terms of where  I see myself right now. Biutiful is very similar in tone and style to Alejandro González Iñárritu's other films, but where those films don't quite work all the way, Biutiful works in every way. It has a sense of the mystical about it, the interconnectedness of things on a spiritual plane, but even more importantly – though both part of Iñárritu's project – a sense of the global, that the small choices we make can affect profoundly the lives of others. Biutiful manages to be about Chinese migrant workers and Senegalese migrant workers at the same time as it is about dying of cancer, discovering one's relationship to one's father. It does all of this extremely well. I have heard that this film is hard to sit through for some. I had precisely the opposite experience. I found the entire thing exhilarating.

I am not sure what Dogtooth is about any more than you will be if you get to watch it. It's incredibly violent, but it's also, well, frankly, bizarre. I found it very, very interesting. And if it didn't quite make sense to me in terms of plot or theme or whatever other so-called Aristotelian aspects a narrative is supposed to have, Dogtooth made for compelling viewing and I would definitely watch this again before watching, say, The King's Speech again. I've written more about this movie here, so I'll shut up about it now.

Hors la Loi is a movie by Rachid Bouchareb starring his usual trio of Sami Bouajila, Roschdy Zem, and Jamel Debbouze. I don't think I'm ever going to be very interested in Jamel Debbouze (I guess I'll never get his performance in Amélie out of my head), but Roschdy Zem is great in this and I am a little obsessed with Sami Bouajila. I think he is just brilliant. Hors la Loi is about the fight for Algerian independence on French soil. I didn't know this before the film, but during the Algerian struggle for independence from France, an Algerian party also planned and executed many terrorist attacks on French soil itself. This is what Hors la Loi covers. The trouble is... Bouchareb can't help but make everything sentimental. The movie spends long periods of time attempting to pluck at the heartstrings instead of simply trying to tell the story. The movie wants to be a kind of neo-noir gangster film at many points, and it is here where Hors la Loi works best. But Bouchareb is constantly distracted by a desire to also make an inspiring historical epic that has a giant emotional impact. So he romanticizes and sentimentalizes and by the end of the film I was mostly just frustrated at all of the emotional manipulation the film manages to do. The men creating the revolution aren't sentimental, so why must Bouchareb continually look at them with a sentimental eye?

I thought Incendies was a bit of a fail, as well. It is well acted, and I was with the film for about its first hour. The movie jumps back and forth between Lebanon in the 1970s and Canada in 2009, when a pair of twins is trying to figure out what happened to their mother a quarter of a century earlier. Incendies is based on a novel that I haven't read, but my main thought about this film is that it misses the story of the mother because of its need to include the story of the children. Every bit of the mother's story in Lebanon in the 1970s is utterly fascinating. Every bit of it. And every time the film jumped back to the twenty-first century I felt myself fidget in my seat. Villeneuve also makes the film into a mystery. We do not know what happened, so we must figure it out. But mysteries only work if you hide what happened well enough. Because the film jumps back and forth, we frequently know what happened before the onscreen detectives figure it out. This simply does not work, and I couldn't help but think that there was a really interesting story in here somewhere if only the novel had been adapted differently.

I loved this movie. In Another World is a Danish film by Susanne Bier (she has made at least one English-language movie now), and, like her other films, this film packs a huge emotional wallop. The movie is about violence in Africa and in Denmark both. In Denmark, the film follows the violence of adolescents as they try to figure out how to seek revenge or end a chain of violence. The film asks all kinds of interesting ethical questions about how we train our children, how important it is to be "strong" in front of them, and how best to respond to violence committed against us. This is a film about parenting, too, of course (there I go again), but even more importantly it is a movie about being a responsible citizen of the world - in the same way that Biutiful is, really. In Another World is a real achievement; it's compelling from start to finish; and it manages to unpack all sorts of questions about domestic terrorism, violent impulses, and revenge. Definitely worth seeing.

Three to Go

Tonight I saw A Very Long Engagement (Un Long Dimanche des Fiançailles), the new film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Jeunet uses the same tactic he used in 2001's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulin, which is basically giving us loads and loads of information ancillary to the central story in order both to show the interconnectedness of all life and to add emotional weight to his tale. I thought that Cuarón did something similar with Y Tu Mamá También to great success. This storytelling device worked splendidly in Amélie, which I'm sure everyone has seen. The additional information made the story even more charming than it already was and served to point out how we can often take small, very precious things for granted. This tangential information serves pretty much the same purpose in Engagement and has an equally successful effect. Engagement is a charming film in its own way but is as far from a comedy as genre gets. It's a war movie through and through. It's also a fascinating mystery and an intelligent, gripping, love story that is never schmaltzy or sentimental.
This is a film that is never boring, incredibly charming, though surprisingly sober, and still manages to show the horrors and evils of war. It's not All Quiet on the Western Front and it doesn't want to be, but it's also an excellent film about World War I. Definitely recommended.

All that is left are The Polar Express, The Merchant of Venice and Hotel Rwanda.