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Untie the brightly colored silk ribbon from the softly textured wrapping paper concealing the delicately carved box containing the lustrous golden ornament that is “Hugo” and you will be rewarded with a wonderful film about film cloaked in an emotional and deeply rewarding, multi-layered children’s tale that has arrived just in time for the holiday season. Like the book it’s based on, Brian Selznick’s best selling The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which slowly draws in the reader with the turning of each page, so to does “Hugo” envelope the viewer.

“Hugo,” set in Paris in the early ‘30s, tells the story of recently orphaned young Hugo Cabret who is forced into an apprenticeship by his cruel, alcoholic Uncle Claude at a busy train station. In short order, Hugo, now abandoned by his uncle, finds himself living in the dirty, unseen crawl spaces of the station, dutifully keeping all the giant mechanical clocks running, a job for which he is well-suited as he is descended from a long line of clockmakers. It is a lonely existence, for he must survive on the temporarily unguarded croissants and fruits from the station café and stay in the shadows and hidden corridors lest the Station Keeper, a stern authoritarian figure with a wooden leg, courtesy of the Great War, and his menacing Doberman catch him and send him to a State orphanage. Quick on his feet, with the manual dexterity of a pickpocket, Hugo’s life is made pleasant only by his devotion to a project started with his father – the repair of a mechanical man found abandoned at the museum where his father worked and then died tragically. It is Hugo’s only remaining connection to his father and he spends his every waking hour (and sometimes his dreams) devoted to understanding the drawings in the notebook his father left behind and stealing the parts indicated by that notebook as being necessary to return the automaton to function. It is these minor thefts of gears and small tools from the station toy repair kiosk that is his undoing; for the owner, Georges, has been aware of Hugo’s thieving for sometime and finally catches him in the act, confiscating the beloved notebook. Thus Hugo is drawn into the mysterious and bitter world of Georges, godfather of his only ally, Isabelle, and a man of infinite secrets.

Source: Easy Reader

by Aiden R.

Is about the orphaned son of a clockmaker in 1930s Paris who lives inside the walls of a train station. When he’s not winding the clocks and dodging the evil station inspector, the boys spends his days stealing mechanical parts from a local toymaker in order to repair a broken automaton – the one possession his late father left behind. Eventually the toymaker catches him red-handed and takes the boy on as his apprentice in exchange for the automaton’s blueprints. The more time the boy spends with the toymaker and his goddaughter, the closer he gets to unlocking the mystery of his father’s machine that leads him on an adventure of a lifetime.

Man, it’s been a really . It’s not like the other movies were garbage, but that’s not much of a track record. So my first reaction to Marty taking on family fun in the third dimension was that the man had nuked the fridge. For a guy who’s best known for how many people he’s had whacked on camera, this didn’t seem like the most natural transition. But by the time it was all over, it seemed like a movie he’d been wanting to make for ever....