Hugo 3D

[El Dingo]

Someone gave us a Fandango gift card for Christmas so we decided to spend New Year's Day at the movies.

I'm a huge admirer of Georges Melies after seeing several of his movies in a film appreciation class. His mixture of magic and special FX still hold up today. They must have seemed miraculous at the turn of the century.

The cinematography is the real star of the movie. Long, unbroken shots that pull you through the Paris train station and the network of catwalks and clockworks above it. The 3D is used for great effect, not with things being thrown at you but with a glorious depth of field featuring bustling crowds, ticking gears and busy commuter storefronts.

The pacing was a little slow for a kids movie. If you've seen the trailer you've seen all the action shots in the entire movie. In our theater I only saw 2 kids out of 40 attendees so I guess more adults are interested in this film anyway.

Sasha Baron Cohen is top-notch as the frustrated station inspector. I can't wait to see him as Freddy Mercury in the Queen biography.

The kid that plays Hugo is OK, but his nostrils flare constantly. They are like eyebrows that move in and out, up and down or back and forth as the camera lingers on his perpetually startled countenance.

My only complaints were the seemingly forced 'slapstick' comedy chase scenes and the over the top train crash sequence that did not fit the tone of subtle magic that infuses the rest of the film.

Try and see it in 3D before it leaves the theater. It may lose something on the small screen.

[Drunk Monk]

Agreed on all of ED's points above. I'll add that Hitgirl was very charming as Isabel. Borat was reminding me of Miike the way he can command delightful kids cinema and totally wrong NPC flicks. The only thing that really appeals to kids is him and the dog scenes. Hugo kept reminding me of a bad Elijah Wood with those impossibly blue and worried eyes ...and those damn flaring nostrils.

The 3D is great. The mist and specks of dust constantly added depth, accentuated by the cinematography. Definitely one to experience on the big screen.

It was the kind of film that film critics love to deconstruct - lots of symbolism, thematic elements and foreshadowing - especially with the trains and clocks. That seemed a little contrived. A grey-haired couple in the back stood up at the end and applauded saying 'best film of 2011!' Mind you, there were only a dozen of us in the theater on a Sunday afternoon.

It was almost a French art film. It discussed film and art. There were cafes but no smoking (unless you count all the steam). There were odd tangents. There wasn't a random ugly nude woman or an abrupt existential ending. Perhaps another homage stroke by Scorsese. I hate French art films.



T said 'eh'. She read the book but doesn't quite remember it. She felt it was loyal enough. My mom loved it. My dad said 'yup' but he always says that. I enjoyed it as it was sort of steampunk, but a tad longwinded. A sword fight would have helped.

[Drunk Monk]

It was the kind of film that film critics love to deconstruct - lots of symbolism, thematic elements and foreshadowing - especially with the trains and clocks. That seemed a little contrived. A grey-haired couple in the back stood up at the end and applauded saying 'best film of 2011!' Mind you, there were only a dozen of us in the theater on a Sunday afternoon.

:roll:

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

I think I would have preferred the twenty minute short film they should have sent out for Oscar Noms. The film looked beautiful even in 2D. But I felt like I spent most of the 2010's watching it. For DM, I did at one point turn to the Queen and say "Now I know what Elijah Wood looks like when he was younger"

But it was beautiful. Those opening shots into the train station were the best. All I could think was that Scorcese must have been dreaming of that shot since he did the steadi-cam shot in Goodfellas. It also confused because it also made the film look like it was going to be completely Motion-Capture. When the got to the first shot of Elijah Wood, I thought wow had they come a long way with Photo-realism. Then I realized it was just realism realism.

Glad I saw it. Would like to cut about thirty minutes out of the running time.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

This is why 3D is good and I am just nattering nabob of negativity.

We always like to think movies can bring us together and heal our souls with fun and laughter. But apparently, some movies can literally cure some ailments—and Hugo 3D has rectified a man's lifelong vision problems.

Bruce Bridgeman of Santa Cruz, Calif., suffered from the visual condition stereoblindness, which is when images blend into 2D and the person has problems conceptualizing 3D images.

But all that changed when Bridgeman watched Martin Scorsese's Hugo in 3D. Though it seemed worthless at the time, it's a good thing Bridgeman took the plunge and spent a few extra bucks on the 3D version.

It turns out that decision would change his life.

When the movie kicked in, Bridgeman saw something he'd never seen before—3D. Luckily, it didn't stop when the movie ended.

According to Geeks Are Sexy, doctors have sometimes had success with visual therapies to fix these problems. For Bridgeman, his eyes had just been waiting on the right stimulation.

[thatguy]

I just read that headline the other day on the BBC site. I had no idea he was from Santa Cruz...:

<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-world">http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2012071 ... a-2d-world</a><!-- m -->

--tg

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

The Santa Cruz locale also caught my eye.

[Drunk Monk]

Bruce Bridgeman was my academic adviser when I was a PhD candidate at UCSC. When I dropped out of the program, I vowed to dance on his grave someday. He was a laughing stock at the psych department, something I figured out within my first month in the graduate program, and then struggled to find another adviser to no avail. Bridgeman's main skill was that he could write grant/scholarship proposals. That's how he got me. He managed to procure a 2-year scholarship for me, but what he really wanted was a lab assistant. He was working on 3D targeting systems for jet fighters, research that had absolutely nothing to do with mine. His eyes were fucked up, which is, of course, why he studied vision. I was working on expert vs. novices in psychomotor tasks - fencing specifically - as the Yeti might remember as he was one of my test subjects or tg might remember as he shot some photos for my experiment. So when I got to UCSC and it was clear that I wouldn't make a good lab assistant, Bridgeman threw me under the bus. I knew I was going to bail after year one, so I proposed to do what was needed to complete a Masters before my scholarship went dry and walk. Bridgeman assured me that I had already met those requirements with my first year presentation, but that simply wasn't true. I shouldn't have believed him and wound up frittering away my last academic year following the Dead, who I will quote now:

You analyze me, pretend to despise me,
You laugh when I stumble and fall.
There may come a day I will dance on your grave
If unable to dance, I will crawl across it
Unable to dance, I'll still crawl.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

LIfe is a circle.

That all leads to DM

[Drunk Monk]

...This one really bugs the shit out of me though, as it's very much like Bridgeman. He was always like that, getting weird headlines that you couldn't really validate. He used to fall asleep regularly in the weekly grad colloquiums and he even fell asleep during my first-year presentation. I have a lot of issues with him, obviously.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

At least you've gotten over your issues with him.

[thatguy]

...or tg might remember as he shot some photos for my experiment.

Wow, I must have pruned those brain cells. Either that, or I've repressed that memory. Did something bad happen?

--tg

[cranefly]

I will make Bridgeman a character in my next story and kill him.

Right now it's a toss-up between having him die in his sleep or get his head trapped in a fire-ant colony while a love-sick gorilla tends to his buttocks.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Living well is the best revenge. I'd say your revenge has been pretty good, so far. Keep it up!

[Drunk Monk]

Wow, I must have pruned those brain cells. Either that, or I've repressed that memory. Did something bad happen?
--tg

It was a series of B&W photos of artist's mannequins with swords attached. I made the swords out of self-hardening plastic. You shot about 40 of them for me, which I probably still have in storage. That was around the spring of 1987. It was a paid job, as I had a stipend while at UCSC, and I also worked as a TA, which paid pretty well back then as UCSC grad students actually had a union which was associated with the Teamsters. You had a some extra, so you shot a portrait of me holding a lava light in your room. I still have that somewhere too. It's one of my favorite portraits of me from that time period. Not that I've had a lot of portraits done of me over my life, but there was one of me that won some awards. Seriously. I was in fencing garb, no less.

As Greg so astutely puts it, it is all about me.