#tile work

[toyastales]

Tile Coastal Wave Backsplash

[theinternetarchive]

wall tile with lotus flower, iran c. 1300-50.

[imagesofnyc]

Sunday, January 4th, 2026.

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

[blondebrainpowered]

Vintage bathroom suite designed by Luigi Colani for Villeroy & Boch in 1975.

[lost-lycaon]

Art and tilework of the National Palace of Sintra, Portugal

[runningtomacaria]

[4yuel]

[dukeofriven]

So I haven't watched Spy Kids for probably 20 years? It came out in 2001, I never saw in theatres, but my stepbrother had it on VHS. I remember watching it several times when my step-mum and father first started dating but never after they moved into a house together, which I think cannot have been any later than 2003. The podcast How Did This Get Made just got me to watch 2004's Sleepover staring Spy Kids' Alex Vega, and it had me going 'man, I should rewatch Spy Kids, a film I used to love—hell I should watch all the Spy Kids movies because I've only ever seen the first and Robert Rodriguez is a director whose work I want to dive into' and since its 2023, with a little bit of effort I can easily do that. (Also, I always thought, based on a vague knowledge of their similar poster design, that Spy Kids 3D and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl were the same movie, but apparently not! Also, Sharkboy et al. had a 2021 sequel? That was popular? And is getting its own sequel? Will have to investigate.) Thoughts on the opening ten minutes of my Spy Kids rewatch:

This production logo is so ugly it causes me physical pain. I hate this boy with his Kate Moss arms (Miraculous Ladybug arms, for you youngsters out there), his ugly beanie, and unbearable smirk.

Also, the telecine weave on the production logos is very noticeable, they're bouncing all over the place and it got me idly musing as to when more modern image stabilization techniques simply took that away. Not that we really noticed in 2001 because even with auto-tracking, gate-weave and other playback artifacts were just accepted as a given on your eight hundred pound convex CRT TV with 480 Ps of resolution that output enough radiation to kill grandma with a Jeopardy marathon. Do young people know about VHS tracking, auto or otherwise? Does the above paragraph make any sense to them at all? Do they know the pleasures of laying your hand on a still-warm television screen and having your whole body shiver as the static discharge runs through your unresistant flesh? Kids today with their big pants and their blue-tooth hula-hoops and their fancy PSPs just can't understand.

The opening shot of the movie is so under-exposed (or, more likely, over-exposed and then over-corrected in post) that Rodiguez's 'written and directed' credit is unreadable. You can see its blur to the right of the red 'FILM' there. It's so bad I thought there was something wrong with my copy so I... uh... found a new copy with a larger file size and it turns out that, nope, it actually just looks like that. Even in fancy 1080p this is just a terrible ærial shot. There's some fantastic shots and cuts in this film so to open with such a stinker is bizarre. Was it bad coverage that day, only one good shot in the can, did somebody fuck-up the film in the lab? I am curious.

Carla Gugino is so cute in this movie it's criminal. Not to be a lesbian but oh my god oh my fucking god. 12 year-old me was all about Carmen but adult me just wants 90 straight minutes of Carla Gugino in casualwear wandering around her lovely home smiling coyly. I would buy a BluRay player to own that movie on BluRay. I'd not picked-up that she played the mom on The Haunting of Hill House because she had long styled hair instead of this absolutely flawless textured pixie cut. 10/10, no notes.

I would like to spend an hour talking about the incredible tilework in that bathroom and nothing but the incredible tilework in that bathroom. I will update you if the film has any further shots of the incredible tilework in that bathroom but I fear it does not. As as an aside, kind of furious that this film was not more influential in the field of home decor. Two decades of effing shiplap and cold grey suburban blandness—what if we'd given up on bloated cookie cutter micro-mcmansion shitboxes and instead gone all-in on brightly coloured Andalusian rough plaster and stonework? What if we all had great tilework in our bathrooms, like the kitchen sink in Howl's Moving Castle?

You know what I mean, you depraved tile nerds.

I don't want you to think Antonio Banderas is not also a total smokeshow in this movie. Because boy howdy. He's a goddamn hunk.

There's a four-second long shot of Banderas flicking this ring box along the coping of the Eiffel Tower balustrade, and all I can think of how hard it was to get to get that box to stay in a straight line, how completely frictionless the box must be (did he shellac it?), and if his marriage prospects would have been ruined had it—in all rational likelihood—gone flying off the railing and smashed into the Champs de Mars.

You know you're in for a rollicking good time when the helicopter perfectly slices-off the stone heads of the two statues, but it's the padre giving the benediction while attack choppers go roaring over head that gives you chills.

A particular shout-out to this lovely unnamed bridesmaid on the left here who not only takes 'putting a parachute on the bride' in stride but looks gleeful and fabulous doing it. Where's her movie?

In 2001 we really thought computers were going to be cool and fun instead of machines that sold our personal lives to corporations and gave children crippling anxiety disorders.

Carla Gugino has a track built into the floor so that her vanity-computer chair can slide backwards across the room so she can have face-to-face chats with her husband. From this we learn two things: 1) she does this so often she's automated it for maximum efficiency, and 2) Banderos, in an ordinary desk chair, never attempts (or knows better than to attempt?) the reverse. To be continued?