There are two types of Scorsese fans. Those that just want him to make a bunch of tiresome gangster movies, and those that are actually interested in what he can do as a director. Count me as one of the latter. My favorite Scorsese movie is Bringing out the Dead and normally, the more he stretches himself and the further away he gets from that mob-movie cliché people clamor for, the more interested I get.

So Hugo should be my most anticipated movie of the year. It’s clearly the least-Scorsese thing the acclaimed director has ever done. The movie’s first trailer has arrived and it does a pretty good job of positioning this as some sort of feel-good, family fantasy movie in between hammering into our heads that this will be in 3D.

Check out the first trailer for Hugo (formerly titled Hugo Cabret) in HD on Apple or embedded below.



Hugo should be my most anticipated movie of the year, so why isn’t this trailer doing anything for me? Maybe because it looks a little too much like Mr. Magoriums Wonder Emporium set in a train station? It’s definitely not a fear of clockwork robots. Maybe it’s Sacha Baron Cohen, who seems as though he’s trapped in some sort of awful French mustache farce as the station inspector. Is Sacha intentionally channeling Jerry Lewis, because this is set in Paris? Or maybe it’s just that this is a bad trailer overrun with cliché music and overbearing, Oprah-like title cards.

The movie is based on the historical fiction novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, first published in 2007. It tells the story of an orphan who lives in inside the walls of a Paris train station. There he searches for the answer to a mystery left to him by his father. Apparently there is also some sort of robot. America likes robots.

For more on the movie, including a look at the new Hugo poster, visit our page in the Blend Film Database.