HUGO

Written by John Logan

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Ben Kingsley, Sasha Baron Cohen, Chloe Grace Moretz and Asa Butterfield

Isabelle: We could get into trouble.

Hugo: That’s how you know it’s an adventure.

Before any image even appears on screen, master filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, sets his scene with the sounds of his central character, Hugo Cabret’s life. Clocks are ticking, gears are clicking and trains are passing. These are the sounds one knows well when one lives behind the faces of clocks in a grand Parisian railway station. Once Scorsese shows us the images to match his intriguing soundscape, there is no escape. You are instantly taken on a 3-Dimensional journey that floats high above the snow-filled Paris sky and swoops seamlessly into the busy station. The magical ride that is Scorsese’s HUGO has begun and you won’t want to get off.

As Hugo, played by the talented young actor, Asa Butterfield, darts in and around clock gears and busy crowds, it is immediately clear that HUGO features some of the best, if not the best, 3D work to emerge from its current renaissance. In the hands of a skilled and dynamic filmmaker like Scorsese, the levels of depth added to the screen are dazzling. It certainly helps that Hugo’s journey, based on the Brian Selznick picture book, and the setting in which it takes place, are so rich and colorful to begin with. The train station where Hugo lives is populated not only with travelers but quirky, if not somewhat cliched, characters, and his unintentional interaction with them leads him on an adventure he hopes will heal his tormented past. It isn’t long before Hugo soon learns that he’s not the only one whose past haunts him.

While Scorsese’s intuition as a filmmaker lends itself incredibly well to the 3D format, his ability to tell a focused story is somewhat lacking here. Famous for hard hitting gangster films and tortured characters, his first foray into family filmmaking is certainly exciting but somewhat misguided. At times, it isn’t clear whose story he is actually telling. Is HUGO about a boy, orphaned after the recent loss of his father (Jude Law), struggling to find a way to move on, or is it a love letter to the great film masters of the past? Scorsese plays homage to film history throughout HUGO and, in doing so, he accomplishes two things. For one, he honours his influences with great style while bravely bringing film itself forward with his own commendable technique. The unfortunate offshoot though is that he seems to distract himself from the story at hand with his own visual prowess.

LET ME IN

Written and Directed by Matt Reeves
Starring Kodi Smit-McPhee, Chloe Grace Moretz, Elias Koteas and Richard Jenkins

Abby: Just so you know, I can’t be your friend.

I have a reasonable amount of sympathy for Matt Reeves, the director of LET ME IN. He made a perfectly adequate and genuinely authentic remake of Swedish filmmaker, Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, but there was no way for him to come away from the experience as a winner. Fans of the original, of which there are many, and of which I count myself among more or less, see no reason to mess with success. And so, to appease these fans, Reeves remains as true to the original vision as possible. As well intentioned as this is, it renders LET ME IN even more pointless as a result.


It begins with a children’s choir singing ominously over a humming that is eerily chilling. It continues with the same slow, quiet pace that allowed the supernatural elements of the original to appear fully natural. Owen and Abby (Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Grace Moretz), the American counterparts to Oscar and Eli (Kare Hedebrant and Lena Leandersson), meet on what looks like the same jungle gym, in the same courtyard, behind the same low income housing where Oscar and Eli met. He is the same loner kid who gets picked on regularly at school and she is the same little girl, hiding her vampirism from those around her. Both are ostracized and both find understanding in each other. Their relationship, in great part thanks to these two fantastic, young actors, is just as tender and terrifying as Oscar and Eli’s was. Is there any point in retelling the exact same story the exact same way though?


I’m all for remakes; at their best, they can take already brilliant screenplays and reimagine them visually in all new manners, with sometimes all new meanings. At their worst, they are embarrassments that can be so big, they even tarnish the reputation of the original. LET ME IN falls directly in the middle of this spectrum. As dark and delicious as it can be at times, it never manages to give any reason for its existence other than to make it more accessible for audiences uninterested in subtitles. If you’re going to make a remake, you should have a good reason to do so, perhaps a new take on the subject that makes remaking it relevant. Pandering is not one of these reasons.