Hugo

A lot of people were loudly skeptical when they heard that Martin Scorsese would be directing a 3D family movie, but for some reason I wasn't. The main things I thought were that his films are successful because they are well crafted, not because they're violent, and he is a strongly visual director, so he could probably handle the third dimension as well as anyone in the business. Both of these proved to be true when I saw Hugo, based on a book that weaves a small part of the real history of film into a nice story about a young boy who finally makes some friends.

Hugo Cabret is a young orphan who lives in the walls of a Paris train station, and is left to maintain the building's clocks on his own when his drunk uncle skips town. He's also trying to repair a broken automaton that his father found in a museum and was working on before he died, and his quest to do so introduces him to Ben Kingsley's character, the owner of a small toy shop in the station, and his adoptive daughter played by Chloë Moretz, who loves reading but has never seen a movie. He takes her to the theater, and shows her the automaton, and they eventually stumble into revelations that that bring the seemingly disparate elements of a broken robot and the love of film together.

Visually the film is pretty stunning, whether you see it in 3D or 2D, though I saw the former. The sets and costumes are impeccably gorgeous on their own, and the depth from the 3D further brings the world to life in a pretty incredible way. I was definitely more impressed than I was by Avatar. This movie proved to me that the argument that 2D film is inherently superior because it is more dreamlike is absolute garbage. The visuals in this movie make it seem almost like it's animation even though it was filmed with live actors, and they bring you into a fantasy setting that doesn't seem real, but much more imaginative and fun than that. I don't like the over-saturation of 3D in the theater market, because most films aren't made with it in mind and don't seem to really benefit from the process. But Hugo was made to be shown this way, and the effect is great at pulling you into this other place, in the same way that many people probably felt when they watched a movie for the first time.

In a funny way, that 3D thing does really well to tie into the idea of the dawn of filmmaking and the newness of the concept when the film takes place. It's a couple decades after the cinema had become commonplace, but the characters do a good deal of digging into the medium's origins, and a good portion of the running time is just devoted to celebration of the art form. Scorsese is a big proponent of film preservation and film in general, so it makes perfect sense for him to get attached to this concept, almost to the detriment of the main plot of the movie. There were some flaws with the movie that detracted from the overall good feeling I got from the experience. I thought Asa Butterfield's performance was a little uneven, and while I liked Sacha Baron Cohen's inspector character, he only seemed to be in the movie because the story needed an antagonist. I definitely liked him more when he was awkwardly trying to be friendly than when he was the villain rounding up orphans.

And for a family movie, I don't know how much kids would actually like it. A good deal of what's interesting about the film is referential to things they probably wouldn't understand, and it was neither terribly funny not terribly exciting most of the time. There were a couple really fun moments, but what I liked most about the movie was the setting it created, and pretty much every kid's movie is decent enough at that. But if you enjoy Scorsese as a filmmaker, and still have a sense of wonder, and an appreciation for the history of human entertainment, you'll probably like the movie a lot.

Sherlock Holmes

How much you like this movie seems to depend largely on how much you care about maintaining the integrity and tone of the original Sherlock Holmes stories. I mostly don't care as long as they get the essentials right, and since seeing the core idea (an eccentric, detail-obsessed detective and his doctor chum solving elaborate mysteries) translate so well to the modern world in last year's British TV adaptation, I was totally ready for the thought of it also making the transition to big budget, special effect-heavy action movie directed by Guy Ritchie. He's one of the first directors I noticed to have a distinct and interesting style when I was still figuring out how different and interesting movies can really be when I was a young teenager, and I think Sherlock Holmes is his best movie since Snatch. Obviously most people would say that's not saying very much, but I liked the movie and its prospects as a series a lot.

It definitely starts with Robert Downey Jr.'s performance as Holmes. Originally Ritchie wanted to use someone younger, and have the movie act as sort of a Holmes origin story I guess, which sounds like a terrible idea, but the casting of Downey allowed them to get rid of that concept. Instead we just jump right in with Holmes and Watson, who have been working together for years. The action movie thing might not have worked at all without the right actor, but Downey is pretty much always the right actor when it comes to intelligent yet intimidating protagonists, and the whole thing just ends up succeeding. The way they integrate Holmes' incredible attention to minor details into his fisticuffs (which are an actual element of the original stories by the way, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia) makes the fight scenes more interesting than they might have been otherwise, and just every bit of the performance is a joy to watch. Jude Law makes a worthy companion as Watson, and Mark Strong is a pretty good villain as Blackwood. I didn't like Rachel McAdams much as Irene Adler, though she didn't kill the movie for me either.

So while Downey does a lot to make the movie fun and enjoyable, it probably would have been at least decent without him anyway. Of course some elements of the script wouldn't have been there without him, but the final work itself is pretty good, mashing together a pretty interesting pseudo-supernatural plot with some unique and entertaining action sequences. There are moments for many of Holmes' little tricks like his penchant for disguise, and while some of the deductions were disappointingly simple after a lot of the genius stuff in the British TV show (things like identifying family members merely by them having the same rare eye color feel like easy shortcuts), I think the combination of influences worked a lot better than you might expect. Ritchie's direction does a lot to further separate the movie from regular blockbuster fare, spicing up some scenes that would otherwise have been obvious with unique and unexpected choices. Some bits are a bit too familiar, and help prevent the movie from being a real genre classic, but it's about as good as you can reasonably expect something with its box office expectations to be. And while I don't think the intention was to actually imply that Holmes and Watson were ever lovers, the way some of their interactions were played in that light was generally humorous without going overboard. Definitely a movie that benefited from the talent working on it, and it's good to see they're coming back for the sequel. Also, apparently Stephen Fry will play Mycroft, which is just fantastic.