At a New York screening of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo last night, things didn’t exactly go as planned, unless Scorsese really did want to remix his 3D animated film about the early history of cinema with ghostly images of dancing Kia hamsters. According to Gothamist, after the film broke twice, moviegoers watched the climactic thirty minutes of the film with the ads that go before the film on top of it. The 200 audience members were ultimately offered refunds and free tickets by management.Then again, perhaps this unwanted video mash-up was a kind of accidental gift, a kind of fortuitous dadaist project along the lines of Sosolimited, that crew of MIT grads that perform live remixes of television clips and presidential debates. (See our video interview with them here). Or maybe we can read it as a kind of anti-SOPA protest mixed with a comment on Hollywood’s growing obsession with product placement: proof that sometimes big budget movies about the history of movies are much better, or at least funnier, when they’re mashed up with the ads we thought we went to the movies to escape. -Derek Mead
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