Why does the trailer allow us to hear Asa Butterfield pronouncing his character’s full name, i.e, Hugh Cabret? Won’t that alienate the bubbas out there who don’t like to hear any French-sounding words? Paramount changed the title from Hugo Cabret to Hugo for precisely this reason, right? In fact, why not play it safe and dub the film so that Hugo’s last name can be changed to Flabbergast or Appleseed or Wishbone? Wipe that French off the map!

Question for those who saw Hugo at the NY Film Festival: Is Hugo specific enough to identify the Paris train station where most of he action takes place? Is it Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est, Gare d’Oreans, etc.? Or it just a generic storybook Paris with a single unidentified train station? Because giving it a name would confuse the kiddies?

Q: What’s with the Metropolis-like wire-framed robot figure? A: Brian Selznick‘s book “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” “is the true story of turn-of-the-century pioneer filmmaker Georges Melies (played by Ben Kingsley in the film), his surviving films “and his collection of mechanical, wind-up figures called automata,: says the Wiki page. “Melies actually had a set of automata, which were either sold or lost. At the end of his life M√©lies was broke, even as films were screening widely in the US. He did work in a toy booth in a Paris railway station, hence the setting.”

Paramount will release Hugo on 11.23.