Scorsese! Borat! Polarized Glasses!

Everyone is jumping onto the 3D bandwagon these days, and yet there is something joyfully weird about the idea of legendary director Martin Scorsese joining the brigade. Scorsese is an institution, and a technical wizard, but his filmography isn’t littered with giant special effects spectacles. He’s always been known as a film lover’s filmmaker, someone who can direct a lavish production like “The Aviator” and not make it feel crass or commercialized.

So it’ll be interesting to see what Scorsese does with “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” an adaptation of a gigantic children’s novel that he plans on making with Sacha Baron Cohen. From Variety via the delightful Den of Geek:

Variety has confirmed that Scorsese will definitely be shooting his next film, The Invention Of Hugo Cabret, using 3D. He's set to start production on the movie in the UK in June, with an eye on a release in December 2011… The casting that's been announced thus far sees Sacha Baron Cohen and Ben Kingsley on board, as well as Asa Butterfield (from The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas) in the title role. Hit-Girl herself (from “Kick-Ass”), Chloe Moretz, is also in the film's cast.


“Hugo Cabret” is about an orphan and clock keeper who lives in a Paris train station. The book itself is part novel, part graphic novel, with hundreds of illustrations coloring its more than 500 pages. It’s a huge story, the kind that takes a good $200 million or so to put up on a 3D screen.

I remember when Terry Gilliam made “Baron Munchausen” when I was a kid. The movie was a notorious flop, but I kinda loved it. It was a giant spectacle of a film, and yet it was so WEIRD. You can’t have Terry Gilliam direct a movie without his sensibility showing up, and Scorsese is the same way. No matter how big this production gets, it will still have all the loving details and small homages Scorsese puts in every movie he makes. And that will make for an interesting, if uneasy balance.

Scorsese is coming off of two very big hits (“The Departed” and “Shutter Island”), so he knows how to please an audience. But this is a family movie, and those two hits were very much adult crime dramas. It’s unlike anything Scorsese has done before, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

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