Martin Scorsese makes a movie for kids

Or becomes part of an insidious scheme to associate the imagery of childhood and fantasy with the music of 30 Seconds to Mars, presumably to create an army of cubicle-ready five-year-olds prematurely keen of the mediocrity of life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYIm6bJPolU

Directors don’t necessarily pick the music for trailers, alex. Marketing departments do that. And song aside, this actually looks pretty cool to me.

Yeah. Did they change the song half way through? In the early bits, with the acoustic guitar, I actually got chills.

It’s sarcasm, but some more famous directors (Fincher, Nolan, etc.) like to have a commanding hand in their film’s marketing. Doesn’t change the fact that this looks not so good.

Seems a weird fit in Scorsese’s overall library (and his next projects seem to be a return to his usual, more mature fare), but the most interesting development here might be that it’s his first adventure filming in native 3D. I’m not much for kids’ movies in general, but I’ll be interested to hear the eventual commentary track.

As an aside, if you want to see a great example of how marketing departments work, check out the history of Cronenberg’s trailers sometime. He cut his own all the way up to M. Butterfly, and the difference is hilarious. The trailer for M. Butterfly makes it look like a sweeping, epic historical drama, meaning they used literally every exterior shot for the movie in the trailer.

And I still think this looks cool. Granted, the idea of secret hiding places, especially ones in public places, is one of those things that always turned my crank as a child. (I was one of those kids that kept pushing the back of my closet on the off chance it would open into Narnia one day.) Plus Hit Girl’s in it, so that’s a plus, and the art design looks great. And if I’m not mistaken, Scorsese’s never made a G-rated movie, so I’m interested to see how he works within that constraint.

This looks wonderful. It doesn’t hurt that The Invention of Hugo Cabret was an utterly charming book.

The book was great. Such a nice object, too, with all the richly illustrated pages and fantastic design.

Some of those trailers look like the fake ones from Grindhouse.

Was Robert Zemeckis not available to do this?

With Spielberg doing one as well, it seems the CG 3D animated movie is the popular thing to do.

Well, you know, it was 1975. They Came From Within is super low-budget even by the standards of 70s Canadian cinema, which means it probably cost about as much as Michael Bay spends on hair care products in one day.

Bill Viola is worth 10 Martin Scorseses … just sayin’

here’s proof

Viola is indeed great but I am not certain that’s a fair comparison, newbrof.

Greenaway seems to be complaining that narrative cinema grammar hasn’t evolved much in the past century, and using Scorsese as a proxy for any other well-known director you could care to name. It’s a fair point, but I’m not sure cinema grammar has to keep evolving for it to produce interesting or meaningful works of art. Sort of like knocking Beethoven because he worked within the same system of tonal harmony that J.S. Bach did a century earlier. (In point of fact, there have been innumerable minor developments in movie grammar over the years, but it is fair to say that the fundamentals were laid down by the time of Porter and Griffith.)

(yes, pretty much what is said in his cinema militans lecture from 2003
http://petergreenaway.org.uk/essay3.htm).

Looks awesome. And wow, what a cast: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Grace Moretz, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, Ray Winstone, Christopher Lee, Helen McCrory, Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Emily Mortimer, Michael Stuhlbarg.

I guess it’s Chloe Grace Moretz from now on.

Wow - that’s a great essay. I still don’t know what Greenaway is trying to do with the Tulse Luper suitcase thing, but the bits about film grammar were very interesting.

For some reason I read the title of this as “move” instead of “movie.” Gave a whole different impression of what this thread would have been.