Caffeinated Clint
Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” is, in my humble opinion, the film of 2011.
An adoring telegram to silent cinema and wholesome delicacies, it’s got a little bit of everything – romance, drama, thrills, adventure, comedy… Gandhi.
The film hasn’t been a raging success at the box-office – it was always going to be a hard-sell; I was speaking to the owner of a Drive-in cinema lately who loved the film also but was convinced it’d be hard to get cars in – but the critics, and the few families that have caught it, seem to adore it.
If, by chance, the movie starts making it’s bucks around awards time (it’s definitely a shoe-in for a few statues) and later on DVD and Blu-ray, are we likely to see a sequel? There is, after all, plenty of material fit for one.
Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the steadfast station inspector in the film, says there’s another film simply in his character :
“I wanted to know why was he so obsessed with chasing children?”, the actor said. “Was he actually, you know, a class villain or was there reason for his malice? And, I sat down with John and Martin and we started talking about perhaps he was World War I veteran, and maybe he was injured. So we came up with the idea of the leg brace. Originally, it was a false leg, which the audience wouldn’t have realized until it was going to be the first chase. Then I was going to turn a corner and then my leg was going to fly off and go into camera in 3D. And that was going to be the first big 3D moment. Unfortunately, practically I was made aware that I would have had to kind of strap up my leg for four months in order to do that. So we kind of abandoned that, and I started wearing a leg brace instead. But yes, there was that whole, you know, we were trying to examine the kind of roots of evil. You know, this station inspector who is doing incredibly unpleasant things. Why was he doing that? We kind of realized that maybe he himself was an orphan, and was put away in a work house and that’s the kind of any structure that he knew. And that’s what he is kind of trying to impose on these young children. So as for the future, is there a sequel? Is that what you’re asking? I’m sure there is.”
He’s sure there is?
Well, I don’t know that anyone else involved is as confident as Cohen, but whaddyasay? “Hugo 2”?
