The Dickbutt is Strong in This One

Formerly kimithegreat

[birdhug]

i cannot stop laughing at send no pee

[softhe4rted]

it’s rot girl autumn! we're decaying alongside the trees!

[nocnitsa]

[josie69am]

Rip to the queen but I can't stop having a fat ass

[iwasbored777]

Every time I'm having a bad day I come back to these posts I have a feeling they get funnier every time I see them

[obliviongate]

[rionsanura]

my family has spoken of this movie wistfully for decades. we saw it, once, perhaps, in an earlier age, and remembered it—not for its plot, passable enough, nor for its remarkable CG achievements (first completely digital protagonist), not for the hapless charm of Bill Pullman. no, we are a family of Building Appreciators. we wanted to look at that *house* again.

and now we have.

a service I have access to finally re-acquired the rights, probably seasonally, to stream the 1995 Casper movie, and I have avidly re-watched it with my mother for architectural reasons.

ye gods, the sets. the sets. I need to speak to the art director and the production design team and the set dressers like. how were the decisions made. cause I need to analyze this house. I couldn't tell if it was sets or a Location for the longest time, because they really heckin' Committed, but the consensus (and my architect uncle joined the council after some time as well) ended up at yes, it's a set, but they looked at the Gaudi apartments in Barcelona and the doors in Prague and the Vienna metro stations because we recognize those curves and proportions.

I suspect I am going to spend awhile Appreciating this thing now that I have acquired it again, but for now, just revel in the Grand Pan of Foyer Reveal.

[rionsanura]

before I have to go to work, I’ll start with just the exterior. the first clear shot is purposefully obscured with windy rain, but you can see the backlit translucence of the second nested segmented arch silhouetting the ostensible wrought-iron curves between the bigger concrete- or wood-looking separators, the gorgeous pendant lamps tilting in the tempest, and the Park Güell style curves on the handrails. I’m perishing about the kidney-bean lacunae in the porch rail, but that is one of the only departures on the entire front exterior from perfect grace, really, so I’ll take them.

we get a clearer, more expansive introductory shot of the exterior when the family switches the breaker and turns the lights on:

the detailing on the door is clearer here, and the outwelling of the porch at the entry makes more logistical sense in contrast to the curve of the rest of the house. I suspect that bare wood beam/truss support in the ceiling of the porch wasn’t meant to be so pointedly illuminated, since the rest of the exterior here is dressed to look like cast concrete, but its orthogonal sensibility doesn’t detract too much from the rest of the lines here.

[rionsanura]

the next split-second shots of the exterior when the rest of the lights are turned on are, of course, suspect. they didn’t build that nonsense, no matter how lumpy they made it in halfhearted imitation of the Casa Milà.

the matte painting we get later agrees; they tried to make a turret situation work, and the proportions of the lumps don’t work out to support them; instead, the whole thing is trapped on the awkward slide between fungal and phallic. not that I don’t dig a beautiful mushroom house! but I don’t think it’s what they were going for.

on the other hand, before they turned the lights on, we got a few stable shots of the entry. these kids are framed right in the nested arches that have nested ceilings, and the lines really work, even the column capitals interrupted echoing the slight keyhole on the door arch.

a slightly different angle on the front door shows that the random-seeming little curlicues off the ends of the arch supports are echoed by some of the moulding on the wall, as well as on the arch supports themselves. it brings the room together, considering the vast and many-turned spiral on the floor. once we get there.

[rionsanura]

now, when we get a full view of the foyer from the door... that’s nuts. they really did that. they built that whole place, including the Stargate Atlantis ZPM-ass mosaic chandelier you can’t even see most of in this shot due to the arch over the entry.

it’s still dark, but all of the shots once the lights are turned on are partial, and this one definitively shows the three different stories of entrances. four, if you count the separate staircase on the left there going to what looks like maybe a half-story in that one turret. but all of these doors have moulding to soften their slight rectangularity, even though they are wider at the bottoms and have that gentle curve inwards toward the floor. the stripe running along the wall at the second-floor landing is multicolored tile mosaic:

the stair rails are, I think, wrought bronze, and the stairs themselves are painted to look like green marble, though in a few scenes with non-ADR sound they are revealed to be wooden. (sometimes the carpet is there, other times it isn’t.)

that one blue window to the left of the doorway at the second-floor landing has charmed me immensely, though I don’t think we get a clear closeup of it; later on, in night lighting, it appears to be unlit. but that railing sure shines.

the second staircase, on the left side of the room, has comparably elaborate brass railings, complete with angry fish banister ends:

 and the mosaic window-or-fixture on that side of the room is only visible in this shot:

I really appreciate the trouble they went to with the Lamps in this movie. the wall detailing is so extra that they could have phoned it in and lit the movie like a movie, but they went all in and got Lamps for the House.

[rionsanura]

before we leave the foyer I just want to emphasize one more thing: 

they didn’t have to go all-out and do a curved entry ceiling that follows the line of both doors’ arches, but this upshot of the entry with the doors open shows that they did. and I love them for it.

now, once we get out of the foyer, we end up exploring various Hallways. they are of course plot-relevant for the many ghost chases and shenanigans that must ensue when we have a ghost hijink movie, and also when you have three separate floors with their own landings visible from your huge circular room in the middle of the house, but they sure did commit to Interesting Shapes in more places than just the entryway.

this one has string-instrument-scroll capitals on its faux-green-marble columns, with asymmetrical arches at really rather close intervals down the corridor; but that may just be the angle of the shot, which includes enough furniture that even this generous three-foot-wide (nouveau-patterned, of course) runner feels a little crowded by.

you get the opposite angle on this hallway when somebody walks into a room to move in, here, and you can see that the faux-marble isn’t just on the stairs, floor, and columns, there, it’s the moulding, and the wall that goes all the way up to the chair-rail level. the doors are, of course, nouveau-paneled rather than rectangular, which improves the vibe in every case.

with a lower-framed shot from the first angle, you can see that the column capitals are basically at eye level, which feels a little crowded; if it had been me, I might have raised them so that the top of the french curves on each one were tangent to the ceiling, or at least a little higher, enough that it doesn’t feel like I’m gonna trip my face on those scrolls.

I’ll never get enough of those pendant lamps, though.

[rionsanura]

so this is a broom closet in-fiction but. the tiny mosaic tile floor is laid (not well, but interestingly) in swirly non-orthogonal patterns and i just thought that should be acknowledged before we leave this particular hallway:

now this is a color. look at these light fixtures. I want them all. look at the proportions of these arches; they do the organic asymmetry, but they are fully plastered so it's also giving Sea Cave. the furniture, in this hallway as in the last, seems to be an afterthought, and I am not sure what these Orbs On Built-In Pedestals are, but by golly if I don't love to see a jewel-toned stained glass lamp in a swirly arch with a high dark baseboard.

looking down it the other way, we get a view of the (potentially exterior?) stained-glass window that is not actually recessed but is made to seem so by the construction of the arch around it; maybe this is supposed to be one of the dormer lumps on the outside of a phallic turret. how high are these ceilings? why do the apexes of the arches stop where they stop? this is a wack hallway, and I love it.

now, this lump in the carpet (a ghost) purports to be coming from behind the fleeing bucketfooted dad above, but what spatial relationship does this part of the hallway have to the one he just ran through? what is this organic staircase? SGA Wraith-ass vertebral lumpiness? I want that couch so much. look at how delicate and elegant and swoopy it is, and the upholstery looks like a nouveau thistle pattern. is that a matching chair on the other side of the Brown Lump Stairs? more pendant lamps

last Inderminately Located Hallway shot for now: look at the proportions on these bowed-out nouveau rectangular arches. this looks like the same shape as the doorways on the ground floor in the foyer. it doesn't open into there, at least not according to the geography of the consecutive shots in the movie, but it's gorgeous, and I want both the blurry orange ball lamp after the first arch and the sweeping wide-based pedestal/bar table in the foreground.

[rionsanura]

we never get a great still shot of the bedroom, partially because I think it's small enough that you can't fit most of the elements of interest in one frame, but. even with this fuzzy motionblur you can't tell me that this isn't modeled on Casa Batlló. The angle between the column and the little oval window and the curve of the bigger one.

a clearer view of that ceiling with embedded lamp with no ghost in the way, because it's glorious:

no matter how I start-n-stopped the pan over the right-hand wall I couldn't get a very good cap of the organically-shaped recessed stove with its tiled alcove and, I guess you could call it inglenook seating (the resident has put her stuff on the little tiled benches):

this shows off the variable-width moulding, too, on the baseboard and around the windows. this is the clearest shot i could get of both sides:

the alcove is symmetrical, although the wall surface is different on the right side of it.

and then we get the view of (and out) the bedroom door, which shows off its lovely paneling with lotus style capital in the middle, and some very fun stained glass:

[rionsanura]

it's very difficult to get an architecturally-focused, rather than plot-focused, shot of the kitchen, but it deserves to be seen.

this is the widest shot I could get, and it does show the generally half-circle vault and the incredible door with its adjacent paneling and windows that emphasize this half-circle:

those orange lights are embedded in the walls on either side of the door, and I love them. they don't quite gel with the pendant lamps, and this particular roomful of them look like they came from a sale lot full of slightly-pre-Nouveau accoutrements, maybe bleeding-edge late Victorian, but they may be of an earlier cast in order to make the steampunk kitchen multipurpose machine (not pictured) seem less of a departure. I wish the clerestory arches and the windows between the arch supports were not so pointedly cornered, but custom glass is a pain and this is just the kitchen.

what they did go all out on here is the doors from the entry side, the paneling next to them, and the flooring.

I'm pretty sure it's just painted and not actual mosaic, but it still looks incredible without overwhelming the color scheme in here. that's a very nice combo knicknack-dresser/serving buffet, as well, if less obviously curved than a lot of Nouveau furniture. the chairs are likewise relatively subtle, and the table (and its settings) are practically farmhouse in comparison.

can't really avoid getting some Plot in the shot of the other side of the room, but you can see that the arches are symmetrical and the corresponding openings where the clerestory windows should be mirrored have, instead, some cool paneling that we never get to see very closely. the steampunk multipurpose kitchen machine is barely visible with its post-hoc exhaust pipe into the ceiling, and they put some vaguely curvy wrought-iron filigree on the bottom of it but otherwise seemed content to leave it as Functional-looking.

[rionsanura]

So,,,,,,,,,,,, the library.

I cannot believe they did this for real. Incredible design on this mantel, and I cannot recall off the top of my head any inspiratory fixture in a building I have experience of. round fireplace, cut-in screen, little pedestal ears on either side of the mantel shelf, all set in the tall moulded catenary arch like all these doors all over the house, fitting the brief, textured like quarried stone and painted to look like Indian green marble. little street-lamp lantern posts on either side, in case you need some light next to your fire, and more on the mantel (i can't tell if they're built-in or not). just throw me in this fireplace. the windows on either side are no slouches, either.

and what's that? a return of the incredible brass railing on the library balcony? but the design is different and yet correspondingly complex without overdoing its elegance?

that's right, a spiral staircase with similarly wrought brass railings goes up to the balcony. and look at that curve on the edge of the shelf continuing out from the window, I didn't even see that in the last shot, there was plot in the way. (there's another tiffany lamp reproduction on the desk in the corner there, that's important, we'll come back to that)

now how did we get in here? that's right? one of those gorgeous panel-surrounded doors.

little did you know, the columns supporting the balcony are wrought to look organic, they got like. treebark. but nouveau. yes. YES.

turns out, upstairs along all the bookshelves, we still have the corner-topped catenary arch shapes interrupting every so often to break up the straight lines, and, due to in-house chair rail train-through-a-secret-door shenanigans (look at the curves in the relief on that secret door, it's disguised as paneling on the other side), there's another tiffany repro illumining the second story in gentle dragonfly-motivic stained glass.

a shot from the fireplace wall that shows the spiral staircase reveals that ALL the walls are covered in curved relief, and also that the proportions on this room are incredible. the balcony-supporting column tops have beautiful branch details, the place is a forest of nouveau detail without having so much contrast in each element that it gets overwhelming, and i already want to live in here.

so but also, when you look from the main door across the room past the fireplace on your right, it turns out. it TURNS OUT. ignore the hole in the floor, that's the chair railroad again for plot reasons but LOOK.

THERE'S ALSO A PIPE ORGAN IN HERE.

so. idk who's making custom organ installs where they arrange the pipes in a catenary arch and design the placement and shape of your console to complement the curves of your vaguely yonic but mostly just elegant wall relief, but. get at me. you think your steinway baby grand is nice in your salon? sir? madame? captain? well, how about the THREE-MANUAL BUILT-IN ORGAN in my LIBRARY.

that's right, it's got pedals. idk what kind of action it uses, but that's a full complement of stops in the console, you can do baroque repertoire.

and look at the little reading stand with its steps up to the shelf what's going on there. is that a podium. the curves on the wall below the bookshelf. the way the brass tree-column rises from a stripe of green marble (let's not get into the tiger and zebraskin rugs, but the floors are really doing things here).

so. this is my favorite room. there are a few more hallway/interstitial moments I may make note of, but. please. the library. let me have it.

[eyeball1126]

[uncanny-aesthetic]

[dsmsix]

this place sucks I’m going home

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

[ceramicdoggies]

[tellurian-vp]

[poppaholland]

Details of a golden sea, part II : Sunset at sea, by Diyarbakirli Tahsin (1875–1937)

[habbadax]

Took a wrong turn somewhere

[orcboxer]

i took a nap and woke up in all these goddam spinanch

[cardiac-ossification]

[the-punforgiven]

[spacey-daydreams]

[existentialterror]

[moosekleenex]

Soft boys ~

[1five1two]

'Night Flight'. Minyoung Kim. 2021.

[rustchild]

desperately craving weird surrealist arthurania. Knights with no faces wandering through the mists. Seams between Christian and pre-Christian Britain gaping like open wounds. Beafts and visions. Maybe a monk. Maybe the monk is gay

[1five1two]

'Landscape with a Sunlit Stream'. Charles Francois Daubigny. c. 1877.

[kaijuno]

[kienava]