Hugo

I admit I rushed out on Thursday evening to see “Hugo” before the Academy Awards on Sunday, just to see if it would change my opinion on anything. It’s a good film and I should have seen it sooner, but I didn’t get to see it in 3D because the theater just showed it in regular dimension. So much for the 3D experience!

My favorite part about “Hugo” is that it’s set in the Paris train station in the 1930s and is about a lonely boy who lives high up in the clock tower working the clocks. Like his deceased father, he’s a fixer of machinery and is desperate to fix an old automaton robot left by his father convinced that it will contain a message from him. But instead it prints a drawing that is linked to the station’s toy store owner (played by Ben Kingsley) who once was a filmmaker before World War I put him out of business. The boy, aided by the toy store owner’s goddaughter, comes up with a plan to get the reticent man to divulge his past and passion for making movies.

The sets and characters of the train station are terrific, with a funny performance by Sasha Baron Cohen as the station inspector. And though it’s been said that “Hugo” is director Martin Scorsese’s “valentine to the birth of cinema,” I found myself a bit more drawn to the trains, inventions, clocks and automaton of the station than the early cinema part of the story. The brass automaton especially captivated me; apparently such remarkable old machines really did exist in history, check out the YouTube videos at: http://www.theinventionofhugocabret.com/about_hugo_auto.htm.

It seems “Hugo” is both a film for kids and adults. Adapted from the 2007 kids’ book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick, it has a crossover appeal that reminded me a bit of “The Lion, the Witch and Wardrobe” film and perhaps a few other kinds of kid-adult combos.

Of course, Martin Scorsese deserves a lot of credit for this. I give him and “Hugo” a few awards in my Oscar pick list , which is likely to be heavily trumped by the film “The Artist,” which I have Not seen yet and therefore did not pick much. Of the films I saw and have reviewed, below is a list of favorites from 2011. Enjoy the Oscars!