Hugo

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: John Logan

I'm surprised that Hugo has literary origins. It's such a tactile and mechanical film—it's so cinematic! Such an ode to the analog, the industrial, the mechanical—clocks, cranks, gears, trains, robots—so possessed of a nostalgia for all things pre-digital. So, though it tells the story of post-heyday Georges Melies, and restores appropriate awe and majesty to the works of the Lumieres, Edwin Porter, the silent comedians, the silent beauties, and of course Melies, I'd say it's less a love letter to cinema's origins than to its foundations: to light, legerdemain, and whirligigs. So isn't it funny then that some of the movie's most magical moments—the dance of the wind-up mouse, the epic train-crash nightmare, the jaw-dropping opening shot—are obviously achieved with the help of computers?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


Watch the trailer: