Award winners

I don’t often say the movie was better than the book, but this time I believe that “Hugo” is heaps better than Brian Selznick’s “The invention of Hugo Cabret”.

In 1931, Hugo Cabret, a 12-year-old boy, lives with his widowed father, a master clockmaker in Paris. Hugo's father takes him to see films and loves the films of Georges Méliès best of all. After Hugo's father dies Hugo is taken in by his uncle, an alcoholic watchmaker who is responsible for maintaining the Gare du Nord railway station clocks.

The library

 Hugo lives between the walls of the station, maintaining the clocks, scrounging food from the vendors and working on his father's most ambitious project: repairing a broken automaton who is supposed to write with a pen. Convinced that the automaton contains a message from his father, Hugo steals mechanical parts to repair the automaton, but he is caught by toy store owner Georges Méliès who takes Hugo's notebook with notes and drawings for fixing the automaton.

Hugo meets Georges's goddaughter – Isabelle who promises to help. Méliès agrees that Hugo may earn the notebook back by working to pay for the things he stole from the shop. Hugo introduces Isabelle to the movies, while she introduces Hugo to books. Activating the automaton produces a drawing of a film scene – the first film his father ever saw (Trip to the Moon), the drawing is signed with Isabelle's godfather’s name.

Isabelle and Hugo

A book on the history of film by Rene Tabard, refers to Georges Méliès as having died in the Great War. Hugo, Isabelle and Tabard go to Georges's home to show "Trip to the Moon", Georges appears while they are watching the film, and explains how he came to make movies, invented the special effects, and how he lost faith in films when the World War I began and also believes the automaton he created was lost in the museum fire, and that there is nothing left of his life's work.

Hugo goes back to the station to get the automaton, is almost run over by a train, when the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen’s best performance) saves him and the automaton and proceeds to detain him. Hugo pleads with the officer when Georges arrives and claims that Hugo is in his care.

Absolutely amazing CGI

Finally Georges gets a tribute ceremony for his movies, Tabard announces 80 of his films have been recovered and restored. Georges thanks Hugo for his actions, and then invites the audience to "follow his dreams". Hugo becomes an apprentice of Georges and Isabelle decides to be a writer.

Paris from the station clock tower

“Hugo” won 5 Academy Awards – best cinematography, Art direction, Sound mixing, Sound editing, and Visual effects, it is the CGI that creates the wonderfully atmospheric railway station. "The invention of Hugo Cabret" also won the Caldecott Medal, and is on the Premier's Reading Challenge list too.

Brian Selznick has written both “The invention of Hugo Cabret”, and the “Hugo movie companion”.  

Game over in a grand slam

The abandoned Dunlop-Slazenger Factory in the Sydney suburb of Alexandria is an urban art gallery of graffiti.

The factory is huge, spanning two massive levels in two separate buildings, with a maze of rooms large & small.

Layers of graffiti cover every wall and surface – bright colours on the dull concrete.

Littered throughout the entire building are thousands of empty paint spray-cans in a large variety of colours.

On the upper floor, the holes in the roof create a beautiful light pattern when the sunshine filters through. The material looks like asbestos sheeting, could possibly been damaged in that hailstorm that hit Sydney in April 1999.

I'm glad I went there in October 2011, as the Dunlop-Slazenger buildings have since become the location for the redevelopment of the site as a mixed use development of residential apartments, commercial offices and retail units. So another abandoned building will bite the dust (currently listening to Queen).

Slazenger was founded by brothers Ralph & Albert Slazenger in 1881, manufacturing golf clubs in 1890, Slazenger tennis balls were first used at Wimbledon in 1902. The first Australian factories began in 1922. Slazenger acquired Dunlop in 1959. In 1963 Slazenger started its clothing line and the Panther logo.

In 1909 Dunlop entered the golf market in Birmingham England. The Australian arm began manufacturing sand-shoes in Melbourne in 1924, and the Volley in 1939. It launched the Flying D logo in 1960.

Dunlop-Slazenger sold to BTR (British Tyre & Rubber) in 1985.

Drive for real

Firstly I'm not a car nut, and would not normally check out a book on old automobiles, but I've made an exception with "Built for adventure : the classic automobiles of Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt" written by Clive Cussler with photography by Ronnie Bramhall.

The 1929 Duesenberg on the cover

It is an illustrated work about Clive Cussler/Dirk Pitt's classic car collection, and includes a chapter for each of these 56 rare, classic, and antique automobiles, with text on the general history and acquisition of each vehicle (yes he did find some rusting in barns), along with glossy colour photographs of the car, and other detail ones of the dash, or engine, name plate etc.
Models include a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost Touring car, Mercedes-Benz 630K, Duesenberg J-140, Cadillac V-16 Roadster, Ford Cabriolet Hot Rod, Packard V-12 and heaps more. My personal favourite was the 1933 American Austin Bantam Roadster, with the Harley bike a close second.

The Austin

The whole (larger, over 100 vehicles) collection is in The Cussler Museum in Arvada in Colorado.
Fans of Clive Cussler's bestselling Dirk Pitt series and its spin-offs, know that his hero Dirk has a soft spot for rare and classic automobiles, and that the vehicles that appear in the novels, are actually part of Cussler's own vast collection (wondering, does this make their acquisition some kind of tax deduction as a requirement for writing the book?).
I was keen on Clive's other non-fiction foray - "The sea hunters" which described Clive's searches, with the real NUMA, for historic shipwrecks, which is why I was interested to have a look at "Built for adventure".