Twelve Days of Scorsese

Lydia pointed out last week that this year marks the blog's second most prolific output since its inception. In honor of this, I've decided to adapt a philosophy of quantity over quality and try to make 2011 the most prolific year in the blog's history. In order to achieve what I hope will be enough to put us over the mark, I've decided to watch and review the bulk of Martin Scorses's canon starting with Hugo, and then working my way through the highlights as I am able to get a hold of them.

Now, instead of using this post as a freebie and just reporting what I plan to do, this will be the first post of the series.

I should begin by saying I hate 3D movies, and I feel that 3D is a marketing ploy to make unwatchable films interesting. In reality, my hatred stems from the release of Avatar and the style of the 3D glasses. At the time I was wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers as my normal prescription glasses, and somehow I was well ahead of the fashion curve. Sadly this would not last as the new world of 3D glasses would not be red and blue paper frames, but plastic frames modeled on the frames made famous by Jake and Elwood Blues. As I walked into the theater to see Avatar, some young pup proudly announced that my glasses were just like hers. I have yet to recover.

And as an aside, as someone who has to wear glasses regularly, the thought of wearing another pair of glasses over my glasses to watch a film is just awful.

All of this aside, Hugo is an absolutely brilliant film and a better argument for the transition from 2D to 3D than any film before it. As egregious a director as James Cameron can be, Avatar was a fine film and a great argument for 3D film making. However, the success of Hugo as a film stems from contextualizing the argument for 3D by showing the history of film making as one that constantly benefits from advances in technology.

In a flashback, Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) is on the set of a film choreographing a fight between four men and four skeletons. In order to show the defeat of the skeletons, Méliès stops the camera from rolling any further, has the actors pause and hold their position to allow for them to disappear from the frame. Now only a few moments before, there is a scene where Méliès watches the Lumiere Brothers' film of the train pulling into the station, and we begin to understand that technology in the right hands makes "dreams come true." The step from filming reality to creating it through technological means is the same thing that is happening now with the transition from 2D to 3D. We could continue to make films in one way, but if there is potential to use the medium to create then we should embrace it.

Side note: It should be said that in many ways the argument could also be made that with absolutely no digital support, Georges Méliès made more stylistically innovative and brilliant films than most of the people working in movies today. If I had seen the 2D version of this film, I might have had a different impression of the film.

With my pride firmly past my larynx and on the way to my stomach, I do want to point out that the film makes a few bizarre choices. Primarily, the film is set in Paris a city which appears to be wholly devoid of French speaking people. Sadly, the film for all of its innovation falls back on the cliched American device of casting British people to represent any group of foreigners (think Dr. Zhivago, etc.). At times it was extremely grating, even when the acting was amazing. As the French say, "That's Life."