fly by...

it was my birthday recently (i wont upset you all with a recount on how old i am... i prefer to be thought of a 'classic' rather than aged).

as is my habit for my birthdays: i manipulated people into doing exactly what i wanted when i wanted it.

hence the endless takeaway food and movie night on my birthday (don't ask what i did for my party: i mostly can't remember. there was a lot of champagne involved).

so i went and saw hugo (because i felt like seeing tintin twice in as many weeks was pushing the geek boundary).

hugo was a really great movie. in fact i'm pretty sure i loved it. however, i don't think it was quite right. it was a beautiful made (with slight tendencies to theatrics) and colourful film. the interior of the train station and where hugo lives with the clocks is like HELLA GOOD and old world and what not. it had a timeless quality about it.

the characters? totally made me cry. okay, one character made me cry: hugo. with his wobbly little lip that quivered and his big blue eyes that beseeched and said 'i am a sad, lonely orphan boy, love me and feed me', which made me blubber 'he's just a sad, lonely orphan boy, i just want to love him and feed him! also: somebody get that boy new socks!!!' the socks felt vitally important. one was just so pathetic and just hanging down on his ankles all sad and lonesome.

the train inspector was that lovely complex villainous sort of character that you had fifty levels of sympathy for but remained a main source of 'oh my god he will find hugo and take him away to the orphanage and then i will cry again because the orphanage is bad!' for reasons i didn't know. why is the orphanage bad? the boy's living in the clocks in the train station... would an orphanage not be better for his health? well, whatever the reason, it was made abundantly clear orphanage equals bad.

other than that though... the plot kind of lost me. i just couldn't make the emotional leap between clocks, and it's mechanisms, and cinema. was it an ode to cinema (in particular georges melies) or to clocks? because i was confuseded!

okay, not so much confused, the link was there to be had i guess, i just didn't buy it. or maybe i just wanted it to be one or the other: clocks or movies.

there was something that didn't quite fit in the movie. like it took a minor turn somewhere and was running parallel to the course it should have taken, so that you saw glimpses of what it should have been.

all in all though: i thought it was great. blue eyes pulls at the heart strings and the cinematography was all yeah i'm fine and i know it. 

i'm totes on the recommendation bandwagon. however, i don't think it's a movie for the kiddies necessarily. there's this totally creepy nightmare scene that had my, rather easily squeamish, stomach revolting.