"The Invention of Hugo Cabret" is shaping up to be not your average 3D family movie. But, then, it was never your average book. Nominally a young-adult novel, Brian Selznick's 2007 work is one of those magical experiences that sucks in anyone who picks it up -- kids, teens, self-serious grown-ups, whatever -- and spits them out a few hours later dazzled and dreamy. The book is an artifact in itself: 500+ pages long, over half of which are spooky pencil illustrations, "Cabret" feels like it fell out of a wormhole from the steampunk era -- it has heft. And the story it tells, of a resourceful orphan boy, who lives between the cracks of a Paris train station, and the sad old inventor he meets -- an inventor who turns out to be Georges Méliès, the pioneer of movie special effects in the earliest days of cinema -- is a tale to warm a film-lover's heart.
So who better to bring the novel to the screen than Martin Scorsese, the closest this country has to a Cineaste Laureate? The movie version of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" -- now apparently just "Hugo Cabret" and being shot with the latest iteration of 3D camera technology -- is about to start filming in London, and the cast is solid, weird, and deep. Asa Butterfield (he was the over-curious German kid in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas") will be playing Hugo, with Sir Ben Kingsley as the mysterious Méliès and Chloe Moretz -- Hit-Girl in "Kick-Ass" -- as his daughter. Sacha Baron Cohen has been cast as the villainous Station Inspector, and in smaller roles are Jude Law, Christopher Lee, Ray Winstone, Richard Griffiths, and the marvelous British stage actress Frances de la Tour, last seen as the wifty aunt of "Alice in Wonderland."
The bad news? We won't see what they've all come up with for another year and a half -- the release date for "Hugo Cabret" has been set for December 2011. Until then, you'll have to content yourself with Moretz's on-set Twitter feed, which is very much what you'd expect from a 13-year-old girl. (I've got one of those at home and have enough OMGs and multiple exclamation points already, thank you.) Some of us can wait. When Scorsese tackles 3D, even in a nominal kiddie flick, the technology may have finally come of age. Just be thankful he got "Shutter Island" out of his system first.
