Hugo (2011): adapted by John Logan from the novel by Brian Selznick; directed by Martin Scorsese; starring Ben Kingsley (George Melies), Sacha Baron Cohen (Station Inspector), Asa Butterfield (Hugo Cabret), Chloe Grace Moretz (Isabelle), Helen McCrory (Mama Jeanne), Christopher Lee (M. Labisse), Emily Mortimer (Lisette), Michael Stuhlbarg (Rene Tabard), and Jude Law (Mr. Cabret): Hugo pretty much swept the 2011 artistic and technical Academy Awards for sound, art direction, visual effects, and cinematography. It was Martin Scorsese's first foray into 3-D film-making AND Young-Adult-friendly narrative.
On the small, non-3-D screen, Hugo still boasts some impressive set and production design as it depicts a somewhat fanciful Paris c. 1932. Unbeknownst to the authorities as embodied in Station Inspector Sacha Baron Cohen, the orphaned Hugo Cabret keeps the clocks running in the film's central location, the main Paris train station.
Hugo also works to repair an automaton rescued from museum storage by his late father. And unbeknownst to Hugo, the cranky toy-stall owner at the station is seminal French film director Georges Melies. Is that a spoiler?
Hugo is slow in its initial hour or so, and the supporting characters never seem to be drawn sharply or funnily enough. However, the movie looks great, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz make a charming pair of investigators. More time devoted to recreations of Melies' fanciful films would have been nice -- there's a little too much lead-foot in the movie's shoes when it comes to film's ability to transport a viewer to new, strange places. Scorsese may simply be too rooted in the quotidian, no matter the goodness of his intentions, and John Logan (Gladiator, Star Trek: Nemesis) is something of a literal-minded plodder when it comes to the fantastic. Nonetheless, recommended.
The Boy (2016): written by Stacey Menear; directed by William Brent Bell; starring Lauren Cohan (Greta), Rupert Evans (Malcolm), and Ben Robson (Cole): Who names their son Brahms? Oh, well. Lauren Cohan plays an American hired as a nanny/au pair by an elderly English couple. She's there to take care of their eight-year-old son while they go on vacation. The son is a life-sized doll. OK!
The Walking Dead's Cohan carries much of the film's best moments, as improbable as they often seem. And the movie plays fair until the epilogue, which one could argue is as much an imagined nightmare as the 'hand shots' that appear near the ends of Carrie and Deliverance. Rupert Evans brings a muted affability to the thankless role of New English Love Interest. The doll is pretty creepy.
The director whiffs several times on disguising the fact that the movie was shot in and around Victoria, British Columbia rather than England. Either that or The Boy takes place in an alternate universe in which England has redwood trees. Lightly recommended.
Spider-man (2002): created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee; written by David Koepp; directed by Sam Raimi; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/ Spider-man), Willem Dafoe (Norman Osborn/ Green Goblin), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Cliff Robertson (Uncle Ben), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): Still a mostly jolly, romantic romp, this Spider-man. Maybe a bit too romantic, but the doomed love affair of Mary Jane and Spider-man was a key factor in drawing in a better-than-average-female-audience (for superhero and/or action movies, that is).
Raimi and company dumb Spider-man down, eliminating the comic-book wish-fulfillment genius that allowed him to create mechanical web-shooters and many other awesome Spidey gadgets, which is a shame -- organic web-shooters are gross, and suggest that Peter Parker must spend a lot of time eating high-protein foods after a particularly heavy bout of web-slinging.
Still, the cast -- even James Franco as Parker pal Harry Osborn -- is a delight. Would that they had come up with a better rendition of the Green Goblin's comic-book costume, though, if only so that many scenes didn't look like Spider-man vs. the Green Mattel Chocobot. Recommended.
Gateway (The Heechee Saga Volume 1) by Frederik Pohl (1977): Gateway won pretty much every genre award for best novel of the year for 1977: the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the John W. Campbell, Jr. And it holds up well, 35 years later. Science fiction can date very, very quickly, and there are some dated assumptions here. No surprise is that one involves computers, which seemingly everyone in science fiction saw as remaining giant things in a room somewhere.
But anyway. Several hundred years in the future, humanity discovers a 10-km-long cometary nucleus orbiting the sun in a right-angle orbit to the planets. That nucleus is honeycombed with tunnels, possessed of a breathable atmosphere, and loaded with hundreds of faster-than-light starcraft left behind by a mysterious race dubbed the Heechee, who had also left artifacts on Venus which the residents there, in their terraformed tunnels, had previously found.
The ships can be programmed to go to pre-selected destinations. And at these destinations may be Heechee artifacts or scientific discoveries worth a lot of money. And so volunteers spend their life's savings to get to Gateway (as the nucleus is dubbed), there to become the high-mortality-rate guinea pigs who will take these ships out and maybe return.
Pohl, a fine science-fiction writer and editor from the 1950's onwards, constructs a fascinating and mostly plausible future Earth, with a hungry population of 25 billion and a fascinating and plausible means of feeding them that doesn't involve eating people. His protagonist, Robinette Broadhead, is a sympathetic Everyman with major psychological issues. And the mystery of the Heechee, which would somewhat disappointingly answered in subsequent Gateway novels, is here fresh and unexplained. Why leave all the ships but not identifiable records? Where did the Heechee go, and why?
Pohl also seems to anticipate hypertext in the novel -- the main narrative is broken up with different 'documents' comprising computer coding, wanted ads from Gateway newspapers, official mission reports, and excerpts from interviews, letters, and lectures about Gateway. There are certain 1970's tics here that someone who has read a lot of science fiction from that period will recognize. People still smoke, even in small spaceships that take weeks to get where they're going. And everyone seems to have become bisexual in the future.
One of the ingenious elements of the novel is also very 1970's, in a Woody Allen way. Gateway alternates chapters between Robinette's story of his days on Gateway, and Robinette's much-later experiences on Earth with a computer psychiatrist who is trying to get him to deal with the trauma of his childhood and of his final mission in a Heechee spaceship. It's genuinely brilliant and very, very 'Me' Decade. All in all, highly recommended.
