Hugo: Or, Young Scorsese in Love

 Oh, hello.  I swear I didn't mean to set down the pen for so long.  It's actually been a very eventful few months.  There was much frolicking around the New York Film Festival, and my extensive foray into the films of '11 has kept pace ever since.  I've even managed to work in some revival screenings of favorites - the exhilarating Raiders of the Lost Ark, the mesmerizing Red Desert - so suffice it to say I've been having a good year.  And yet it's telling that it took a film like Hugo to inspire me to reopen the Library after what has been my longest absence since I first got it up and running.  Hugo, you see, is my favorite kind of film, a movie fueled solely by a burning passion of movies, and as such, it's a movie about falling in love.  That is was made by the reigning cinemagician of the day was just too perfect.  And now, awestruck and inspired, I've returned to recount what dazzling sights I've now seen.

You likely only know the vaguest details about Hugo, Martin Scorsese's first sojourn into the family film, and perhaps more significantly, the current 3D craze.  Residing within the walls of a Parisian train station is a mischievous waif who embarks on what's sure to be a wild and magical adventure.  So the trailer indicates.  That it reveals little else is just as well, for it allows even those who get a whiff of what's coming derive not-insignificant wonderment from the artfully handled reveals.  But I've already made up my mind to lay the cards on the table, so while this is not a film which hinges on any grand twist, should you prefer to remain in the dark, now is the time to turn away.  Just do so with my most enthusiastic endorsement on your mind.

Down to business.  Movie about movies come in all colors.  There are the clever, insider baseball kinds (The Player), the ones who take rapture in the creative process itself (8 1/2), and the one's that do or die based on your tolerance for name-checking (hi Quentin!).  And on the rarest of occasions, there are those that lovingly crafted odes to the medium itself, which without fail win me over every time, whether they're maudlin (Cinema Paradiso), erotic (The Dreamers), or practically perfect in every way, which I may prematurely be stating, is how I'm feeling about Hugo.  I mean, this film gets quite literally to the core of the medium, what with a budding cinefile stumbling upon the aging George Melies in (of course) a fucking train station.  And no one but no one was better suited to bring this story to the silver screen than Marty Scorsese, as not a director alive (save Godard...perhaps) possesses a better command of film grammar, nor a more deeply rooted love for his chosen profession.

And we're back again to love (or have we ever left the topic?).  Here it's a quantifiable object emanating from every frame of the film, though how much of that translates to each member of the audience will vary considerably.  While in no way inappropriate viewing for kids of any age, I suspect many will find the first half especially an exceptionally nice nap.  More than a few adults will sympathize with this as well, but I don't doubt that those who have a genuine love for movies will find within Hugo the ultimate validation for their obsession.  Here we get an automaton reminiscent of Metropolis, and our hero hanging Harold Lloyd style from a clock hand, and a runaway train breaking off the rails (and through the 4th wall!) as it careens through the station.  And of course the great Melies himself, illuminated late in the film though the most magical and heart-wrenching flashbacks you'll ever lay eyes on.  The honest devotion of Scorsese's achievement is enough to silence any cries of pretension, and those who find it overlong, my reasoning is that I'd rather spend a slow hour in a world as enchanting as Hugo's than a quick one anywhere else.  The movie isn't too long.  Your attention span is too short.

I haven't even scratched the surface, have I?  Perhaps some specifics then.  The cast populating Scorsese's Parisian snow globe circa 1930 is an absolute dream.  As Hugo, Asa Butterfield makes the ideal mirror image of any young artist or dreamer, not the least of whom would be Marty himself.  Chloe Moretz provides a nice foil, what with her literary aspirations aligned to counter his cinematic ones, and she delivers with great relish a handful of precocious adjectives ("clandestine" being my favorite).  There is Christopher Lee in a marvelous brief turn as a bookseller and Michael Stuhlbarg nearly stealing the show later on in full film preservationist glory.  We all could have used a little more Emily Mortimer, Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, but their parts were the minor details that really elevated the show, and love him or hate him, Sacha Baron Cohen has all the mannerisms of the stars of silent cinema in his bones, and nowhere has this daring been put to better use.  Ben Kingsley and Helen McCrory are better still.  They're situated right at the emotional crux of the only film this year to bring tears to my eyes (three times, but who's counting?) and they breath such humanity into Georges and Jeanne, but also sadness, fear, and eventually wonder.

Technically, Hugo is no less an achievement.  Scorsese's use of 3D is never flashy, and if not absolutely crucial to the viewing experience, here marks one of the few instances where I've found it add to, as opposed to cheapen, the overall impact.  Thelma Schoonmaker's editing reaches new heights in the artfully constructed flashback sequences, Robert Richardson's photography thrives from being ever curious of its surroundings, and Howard Shore's score may even top his exceptional work in A Dangerous Method. 

But my superlatives are starting to sound silly.  It's abundantly clear by now that I love movies that love movies, and that Hugo is practically my new gold standard.  But while I'm here telling, Scorsese is out there doing a bang up job of showing, and you really won't find a better argument for why movies can mean so much to people than this film here.  And so that's what brings me back to this site, hopefully with a little more frequency, but certainly with a reignited passion for the medium I'm writing about.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: or The Crocodiles Who Look Back Into The Abyss of Time

As summer blockbuster season comes fully into bloom, the most prolific superhero of the last decade also returns to theaters, this time, wouldn't you know it, in 3D.  I'm talking, of course, about Werner Herzog, the maverick madman of German cinema, and recent usurper of Morgan Freeman's reign as documentary narrator extraordinaire (Encounters at the End of the World is, after all, the anti March of the Penguins).  And while Herzog's narrative features of late have had mixed results, it's in his most recent documentaries that the reckless spirit that characterizes earlier masterworks like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God most fully comes through.  His latest is a three-dimensional journey into the prehistoric Chauvet Cave in the south of France, and bears a name befitting any Herzog meditation - The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Here's your 30 second background lesson.  Rediscovered in 1994, Chauvet Cave contains the world's oldest known cave paintings, some of them dating back over 32 thousand years.  Fearing human damage such as that in Lascaux, the French government has greatly restricted access to the caves, limiting traffic to a handful of archeologists, anthropologists, and lastly, surprisingly or not, to Herzog and a minuscule film crew.  They were granted one week and a mere few hours each day, and it's from those short visits that the lion's share of the footage in Cave of Forgotten Dreams comes from.

The 3D element is bound to pique the most curiosity, as this is really the first we've seen of the technology popping up somewhere other than a special effects extravaganza.  Herzog's justification is  that the extra dimension was necessary to capture the contours of the cave walls, upon which the drawings rely, and upon beholding every bulge on every bison, there can be no doubt that his instincts were correct.  The previous images of cave art I have in mind seem to exist on a flat canvas, but these drawings gain motion from the curvature of their surroundings.  A 3D skeptic if there ever was one, I can take some comfort in knowing that in the right hands - a Herzog or a Cameron, say - it's a technology capable of elevating the medium under the right circumstances.  Considering how easy it would have been for an old dog like Herzog to dismiss 3D as a childish gimmick (which, granted, it often is), his open-mindedness is commendable, and the results are to everyone's benefit.

That's not to say that he has a total grasp on the technology just yet.  While many of the cave shots are mind-numbingly majestic, there's a fair share of clunkly camerawork, probably just as much a fault of the time constraints as any differences in shooting.  He also succumbs later on to the temptation of having objects dart at the screen (in this case a spear), and one researcher's mustache gains particularly vivid life thanks to 3D capabilities.  The other barrier standing between this and Herzog's greatest films is the loose structure, again, a likely product of the rushed shooting schedule.  The cave drawings a mesmerizing, and one could conceivable gaze at them for hours on end, but the film is light on content, and Herzog's philosophical musings are even more speculative than usual.

Alright, that last point isn't really a complaint.  In fact, there's plenty of fun to be derived from the batty half-theories, such as the improbable closing line that we somehow arrive at, "Are we today the crocodiles who look back into the abyss of time in Chauvet Cave?"  Yes, somewhere in the postscript, he brings crocodiles into the equation, and like only Herzog can do, makes them not seem entirely out of place.  Much in the same way that certain individuals seems drawn to him, whatever the film, whatever the subject.  Take, for instance, the French perfume expert who looks like he walked out of a Jean Rollin film, or the scientist decked out in reindeer fur who actually pulls out the replica of a primitive flute and begin to play terribly.  Did Herzog goad him into this, or was the man already so caught up in the director's past obsessions that he voluntarily went there?  Or is it that even when chronicling the history of a room unoccupied for thousands of years, Herzog can't help but find common threads to all his past work?  Whatever the case, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a must see for fans of the director, and it may just be the 3D event of the summer.