Some context: Hugo is a 2011 epic historical adventure drama film directed and co-produced by Martin Scorsese and adapted for the screen by John Logan. Based on Brian Selznick's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it is about a boy who lives alone in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris in the 1930s. A co-production between Graham King's GK Films and Johnny Depp's Infinitum Nihil, the film stars Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Helen McCrory, and Christopher Lee. Hugo is Scorsese's first film shot in 3D, of which the filmmaker remarked, "I found 3D to be really interesting, because the actors were more upfront emotionally.
The backstory and primary features of Georges Melies' life as depicted in the film are largely accurate: He became interested in film after seeing a demonstration of the Lumiere brothers' camera; he was a magician and toymaker; he experimented with automata; he owned a theatre (Theatre Robert-Houdin); he was forced into bankruptcy; his film stock was reportedly melted down for its celluloid; he became a toy salesman at the Montparnasse station, and he was eventually awarded the Legion d'honneur medal after a period of terrible neglect. Many of the early silent films shown in the movie are Melies's actual works, such as Le voyage dans la lune (1902). However, the film does not mention Melies' two children, his brother Gaston (who worked with Melies during his film-making career), or his first wife Eugenie, who was married to Melies during the time he made films (and who died in 1913). The film shows Melies married to Jeanne d'Alcy during their filmmaking period, when in reality they did not marry until 1925. The movie actually downplayed the number of movies Melies created, stating he had made "over 500 films." When, in actuality it was over 1500.  The automaton's design was inspired by the Maillardet's automaton made by the Swiss watchmaker Henri Maillardet, which Selznick had seen in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, as well as the Jaquet-Droz automaton "the writer". A portion of the scene with Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923), hanging from the clock, is shown when the main characters sneak into a movie theater. Later, Hugo, like Lloyd in Safety Last!, hangs from the hands of a large clock on a clock tower to escape from a pursuer.  Several viewings of the film L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat are portrayed, depicting the shocked reaction of the audience--although this view is in doubt.  Emil Lager, Ben Addis, and Robert Gill make cameo appearances as the father of Gypsy jazz guitar, Django Reinhardt, the Spanish surrealist painter, Salvador Dali, and the Irish writer James Joyce, respectively. The names of all three characters appear towards the end of the film's cast credit list.  The book that Monsieur Labisse gives Hugo as a gift, Robin Hood le proscrit (Robin Hood the outlaw), was written by Alexandre Dumas in 1864 as a French translation of an 1838 work by Pierce Egan the Younger in England. The book is symbolic, as Hugo must avoid the "righteous" law enforcement (Inspector Gustave) to live in the station and later to restore the automaton both to a functioning status and to its rightful owner. The particular copy given to Hugo looks like the 1917 English-language edition (David McKay publisher, Philadelphia, United States) with cover and interior illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, but with "Le Proscrit" added to the cover by the prop department. There is also a depiction of the Montparnasse derailment, when at 4 pm on 22 October 1895, the Granville-Paris Express overran the buffer stop at its Gare Montparnasse terminus.
Is there anything interesting about the film?
A: The book is symbolic, as Hugo must avoid the "righteous" law enforcement
Some context: Frederick II (26 December 1194 - 13 December 1250; Sicilian: Fidiricu, Italian: Federico, German: Friedrich) was King of Sicily from 1198, King of Germany from 1212, King of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 and King of Jerusalem from 1225. His mother Constance was Queen of Sicily and his father was Henry VI of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Frederick's reign saw the Holy Roman Empire reaching its all time territorial peak.
Historians rate Frederick II as a highly significant European monarch of the Middle Ages. This reputation was present even in Frederick's era. Lansing and English, two British historians, argue that medieval Palermo has been overlooked in favor of Paris and London:  One effect of this approach has been to privilege historical winners, [and] aspects of medieval Europe that became important in later centuries, above all the nation state.... Arguably the liveliest cultural innovation in the 13th century was Mediterranean, centered on Frederick II's polyglot court and administration in Palermo.... Sicily and the Italian South in later centuries suffered a long slide into overtaxed poverty and marginality. Textbook narratives therefore focus not on medieval Palermo, with its Muslim and Jewish bureaucracies and Arabic-speaking monarch, but on the historical winners, Paris and London.  Modern medievalists no longer accept the notion, sponsored by the popes, of Frederick as an anti-Christian. They argue that Frederick understood himself as a Christian monarch in the sense of a Byzantine emperor, thus as God's "viceroy" on earth. Whatever his personal feelings toward religion, certainly submission to the pope did not enter into the matter in the slightest. This was in line with the Hohenstaufen Kaiser-Idee, the ideology claiming the Holy Roman Emperor to be the legitimate successor to the Roman Emperors.  20th century treatments of Frederick vary from the sober (Wolfgang Sturner) to the dramatic (Ernst Kantorowicz). However, all agree on Frederick II's significance as Holy Roman Emperor. In the judgment of British historian Geoffrey Barraclough, Frederick's extensive concessions to German princes--which he made in the hopes of securing his base for his Italian projects--undid the political power of his predecessors and postponed German unity for centuries.  However, the modern approach to Frederick II tends to be focused on the continuity between Frederick and his predecessors as Kings of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperors, and the similarities between him and other thirteenth-century monarchs. David Abulafia, in a biography subtitled "A Medieval Emperor," argues that Frederick's reputation as an enlightened figure ahead of his time is undeserved, and that Frederick was mostly a conventionally Christian monarch who sought to rule in a conventional medieval manner.
who was his critics
A:
Modern medievalists