TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN, part 1
Once upon a time, a good friend’s newly-wed husband looked deeply into my eyes and said of his wife: “Isn’t she the most beautiful person you’ve ever met?”
She was not.
However, this man was so intent, so devoted, so in love, that he could not imagine that anyone would think less of her than he did. I smiled and nodded.
And so, not wishing to irritate anyone, I will refrain from saying anything about Twilight at all. After all, I hate it when people diss Harry.
However, let me make some general comments about life and marriage that can be gleaned from this film. A few hints, shall we say, to guide us along our paths.
1. Don’t marry outside your species.
2. Don’t marry someone who will only have sex with you once and after that will only play chess with you.
3. If you are walking down the aisle, and your face is drawn and set as in, “I think I can, I think I can,” and when the wolfy guy behind you is the guy who really makes you smile and even “completes” you, turn and run. Far.
4. If you have to drink cups full of blood, O negative is best. Also, the straw is probably helpful.
5. Try not to ever be in the position of having to have a c-section without anesthesia.
6. Make sure they deliver the placenta too. They missed this part, unless they threw it to the wolves without alerting us. Also, make sure you get stitched up. (On a personal level, I’d like to recommend that if you have a c-section at all, with or without anesthesia, get a stiff painkiller for when you wake up. It hurts like heck, and you can’t walk straight, even if you’re just trying to get to the loo.)
7. It is critical that you learn to spell properly. (You have to stay through the credits for this information.)
HUGO
This is really a dreadful movie. I don’t know what anyone was thinking. Sascha Baron Cohen is a train-station inspector who captures orphans and puts them in cages, but in the end he finds true love. Also his leg brace works. Ben Kingsley is a movie maker who lost all his films when they were melted down to make heels for women’s shoes. Despairing, he opens a toy booth at the train station.
Hugo is a little boy who lives at the train station because his father was killed in a fire at the museum, and Hugo was taken in by his uncle, an alcoholic who dies in the Seine, but not before teaching Hugo to wind the clocks at the train station. Hugo lives alone at the station for months, stealing to eat, apparently never washing his clothes or bedding. He doesn’t ask for help, because this is a good place for him to work on the automaton, a robot his father left him, but it’s all broken up and Hugo has to put it together.
Turns out that Mr. Melies of the toy booth is actually the inventor of the automaton, and that he (Mr. Melies) can be brought back to movie-making productivity if only Hugo and Mr. Melies’s god-daughter (also an orphan) can sneak into the house a Parisian who has an actual museum full of Mr. Melies’s work, but Mr. Melies didn’t know there was an homage of a museum in Paris dedicated to him, nor did the curator/collector realize that Mr. Melies was still alive. Serendipitously, the two children run into the museum man while they are reading a book that he (curator) is the author of while at the library.
They are reading a book about old movies because Hugo’s father used to take him to the movies, but Isabelle has never been to the movies. They sneak into one, but get thrown out. Lots of old pre-talkie movie clips are shown. They are listed in the credits as the work of the real Mr. Melies.
This movie is better than Nutcracker in 3D, only because it isn’t a musical and it doesn’t have a doll-slash-Holocaust theme. It is not better than Twilight: Breaking Dawn, part 1, and I say that as someone who didn’t think it was all that cutting edge for the wolves to be speaking without moving their mouths, and who thinks that when a 120-year-old man (albeit in a boy’s body) stalks and lusts after a teenager, he’s a pedophile. Of course, he only wanted it once. After that, she dies. But don’t worry, part 2 is coming, but please, please, no one even think about Hugo 2. One was far more than enough.