2011
way out in the water see it swimming
maura @ 8:00 pm
After a morning that included not only a metric ton of laundry but also me watching the Hunger Games trailer a couple of times (and unsuccessfully looking around online to see if another trailer had been released yet, which it hasn’t), it’s only fitting that we should go to the movies this afternoon.
The movies! We don’t see many movies in the theater these days though suddenly there are tons to see, many of them kid-friendly: the Muppets and there’s a Studio Ghibli retrospective coming up at the IFC soon, to name a few. The possibility of seeing so many Miyazaki movies on the big screen makes me giddy, though I think we’ll restrict ourselves to 2 or 3.
Today, however, we saw Hugo, the movie based on the the Caldecott-winning book from a few years ago called The Invention of Hugo Cabret. It was fantastic — beautifully filmed and fairly true to the story. Which is good cos it’s a great story: a mystery about an orphaned boy, an automaton, and the (real) history of filmmaker Georges Méliès. The book caused a bit of a stir when it won the Caldecott because that’s an award for picture books, and while it is a story told in words and drawings it clocks (ha!) in at 500+ pages. But I think the award was well-deserved.
The movie had lots of snow which made us feel cold, and steam and secret passageways which made us feel warm. Hugo is a clockworker and machines, gears, clocks, and mechanical things figure prominently. There were lovely fantastic touches, too — it had the feel of a Stephen Millhauser children’s movie, in many ways, which I guess it sort of is: magical realism for kids. Go see it if you can — I highly recommend it.
