BOARDWALK EMPIRE

HBO has a reputation for producing quality, cinematic television and BOARDWALK EMPIRE is a perfect example of this. Set in Atlantic City during the prohibition era, the show focuses around the city treasurer, one Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, played with great weight and resolve by Steve Buscemi. Often relegated to showy, albeit still mere, character roles, it is incredible to see Buscemi take the lead in this series and to see him do so with such impressive strength. He leads an ensemble made up of actors who are often not given their due, from Michael Pitt and Michael Shannon to Kelly McDonald and Michael Stuhlbarg. Altogether, they make up one of the most dynamic and effective ensembles on television today.

The first season, now available to rent or own on either DVD or Blu-ray, consists of twelve addictive installments. The series itself was created by Terence Winter, one of the main writers on another HBO gem, THE SOPRANOS, but the pilot episode itself, which reportedly cost $18 million to make, was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese. Scorsese, who also serves alongside Mark Wahlberg as an executive producer, is the Godfather of gangster cinema (sorry, Francis) and his gravitas anchors the series from the very beginning, allowing it to go to places that are often shocking and moving. The first season, based on the Nelson Johnson novel, Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City, follows Nucky as he gets his bootlegging business off the ground, falls for a recent widow (McDonald) and struggles to ensure the Republican party, the one he controls from behind the scenes, remains in power. It is at times uncanny how some of the issues people wrestled with then are still prominent today.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE presents the golden age of gangstering and it does so with such class and subtlety that it burns directly into your mind, leaving you wanting to get back to that boardwalk as often as possible. If more television series took as much care with their stories and characters as this one does, I think its fair to say I would have a lot less free time on my hands.

HUGO

Written by John Logan

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Ben Kingsley, Sasha Baron Cohen, Chloe Grace Moretz and Asa Butterfield

Isabelle: We could get into trouble.

Hugo: That’s how you know it’s an adventure.

Before any image even appears on screen, master filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, sets his scene with the sounds of his central character, Hugo Cabret’s life. Clocks are ticking, gears are clicking and trains are passing. These are the sounds one knows well when one lives behind the faces of clocks in a grand Parisian railway station. Once Scorsese shows us the images to match his intriguing soundscape, there is no escape. You are instantly taken on a 3-Dimensional journey that floats high above the snow-filled Paris sky and swoops seamlessly into the busy station. The magical ride that is Scorsese’s HUGO has begun and you won’t want to get off.

As Hugo, played by the talented young actor, Asa Butterfield, darts in and around clock gears and busy crowds, it is immediately clear that HUGO features some of the best, if not the best, 3D work to emerge from its current renaissance. In the hands of a skilled and dynamic filmmaker like Scorsese, the levels of depth added to the screen are dazzling. It certainly helps that Hugo’s journey, based on the Brian Selznick picture book, and the setting in which it takes place, are so rich and colorful to begin with. The train station where Hugo lives is populated not only with travelers but quirky, if not somewhat cliched, characters, and his unintentional interaction with them leads him on an adventure he hopes will heal his tormented past. It isn’t long before Hugo soon learns that he’s not the only one whose past haunts him.

While Scorsese’s intuition as a filmmaker lends itself incredibly well to the 3D format, his ability to tell a focused story is somewhat lacking here. Famous for hard hitting gangster films and tortured characters, his first foray into family filmmaking is certainly exciting but somewhat misguided. At times, it isn’t clear whose story he is actually telling. Is HUGO about a boy, orphaned after the recent loss of his father (Jude Law), struggling to find a way to move on, or is it a love letter to the great film masters of the past? Scorsese plays homage to film history throughout HUGO and, in doing so, he accomplishes two things. For one, he honours his influences with great style while bravely bringing film itself forward with his own commendable technique. The unfortunate offshoot though is that he seems to distract himself from the story at hand with his own visual prowess.

MARGARET

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Starring Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo and Alison Janney

Lisa Cohen: I just need to talk to somebody who doesn’t completely misunderstand who I am or what’s going on inside me.

It isn’t easy growing up, no matter who you are and no matter what you have to live through while you’re doing it. Take Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) for instance. She is a 17-year-old girl living on the Upper West Side in New York City. She goes to a private school and comes from a broken home. Her pre-occupations are not unlike any other girl’s her age - she bickers with her family, she wants to lose her virginity, she has opinions about worldly subjects she is only beginning to understand. And she is only just realizing that it is up to her to make sense of her own world when she inadvertently causes a fatal traffic accident. Suddenly, the world makes even less sense than it did just moments earlier.

MARGARET is writer/director, Kenneth Lonergan’s highly anticipated follow-up to his Oscar nominated 2001 feature, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME. The film went into production in 2005, when the now 29-year-old star, Paquin, who certainly gives a vibrant and youthful performance, was but 23. It then spent years in turnaround as Lonergan tinkered with the lengthy 3-hour+ runtime, trying to get distributer, Fox Searchlight, to sign off on it. It was scheduled to be released in 2007 but the cut was deemed unreleasable. In the midst of legal battles, Martin Scorsese and his faithful editor, Thelma Schoonmaker came on board to see what they could make of it. Their edit is the official theatrical release and both company and director are apparently happy with the end results.

Indeed all parties should be pleased as MARGARET is an engaging coming of age story. Lisa does not know how to process what she has witnessed and has no idea how to make right what she caused. She looks down every road for solace but constantly runs into walls and subsequently, she begins to act out as a means to make her life about something other than that accident. Perhaps in her own self-destruction, she can eradicate her guilt. If only life were that simple though. If it were, not only would Lisa find a simple path to peace but Lonergan would have found a simpler path to finishing this film. Life allows for things to pass in their own time though and with that, MARGARET needed to take this long to be released. Like Lisa, it too had some growing pains to go through first.