'Hugo" is in 3-D, rated PG in the United States and features two 12-year-olds traipsing around a 1930s Parisian train station. All the ingredients for a cozy Disney picture, but in actual fact this is a Martin Scorsese movie, which picked up five Oscars at last weekend's Academy Awards.
Yes, the same man who gave the world "Raging Bull" and "Goodfellas" — and more recently the painstakingly elaborate horror movie "Shutter Island" — has ventured out onto a long and foreign limb. No psychotic gangsters blowing brains out by the half dozen, no obsessive boxers dieting and rebounding. This is his first 3-D family entertainment picture, and from the opening sequence (a boy watching various vignettes of a train station unfold from behind enormous clocks embedded into the brick walls), it's designed to enchant, captivate and wow the daylights out of parents and kids alike. In a nice way.
Yet while the book on which it is based, Brian Selznick's acclaimed "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," is considered suitable for readers aged 9-12, it's a bit of a stretch to imagine the average preteen and teen crowd thronging the theaters unless they happen to be enrolled in film school while having a deep knowledge of Charles Dickens and European antiques. Clocking in at a little over two hours, "Hugo" goes on like a French meal partaken in a dark and intimate restaurant. Each dish is a jewel to behold: veritable artworks of calories and tradition. But sit a 14-year-old down in front of such a dish and he or she could collapse from convenience-store ready-meal withdrawal. And the 3-D glasses ain't gonna help either.