One thing we loved when we originally took a tour of the house we would buy is the controversial staircase upstairs.
I think it is a pretty "love it or hate it" passageway due to the fact that it is terribly narrow and bendy and it is virtually impossible to fit furniture up without some serious deconstruction. By default, our bedroom is all Ikea due its deconstructable nature.
I immediately loved it and got into the idea that we would be going up some kind of secret passage when we went to bed each night. I've even been harboring the idea of creating a bookcase doorway to disguise the entrance...though I'm not sure it will work out spatially down below. We didn't paint it, either, but I kind of like the way it looks a little like an ice cave with the white floor and the lumpy old plaster dark blue walls.
We'd been looking for the perfect piece of art as the entrance to the cave and a couple of weeks ago we found it and I'm really happy with it.
It gets terrible lighting there (the dark walls don't help) so when I stumbled upon this original by Ian Dingman I knew it was just the right combination of light and "secret passageyness".
I might mention that I am utterly jealous of Mr. Dingman. I love his work and you can buy super reasonably priced originals right from his website and it seems like he updates it fairly often (this is not why I'm jealous). The jealousy come in when I learned he got to illustrate the new Criterion Collection version of Bottle Rocket!
How?!? How is it that Eric Anderson didn't do this one? How does one get an illustration gig for Wes Anderson without being his brother? I'm so so so jealous. But happy. I generally only practice jealousness resulting in happiness as opposed to that green stuff caused by evil. This cover is spectacular and I can't wait to own it. That is, I can't wait to own the cover AND the DVD. I think Bottle Rocket is my favorite Wes Anderson movie, actually. It might be partially based on nostalgia but I'm not going to discredit that.
I have a very big thing for the use of language and communication in the movies. More specifically, I like seeing how characters relate to each other when they can't speak the other's language. I have realized that this is one of the main reasons I love Jim Jarmusch movies. Down By Law, Ghost Dog, Dead Man, Mystery Train...actually, pretty much all of his movies have a component of a foreigner trying to communicate. My favorite part of any movie ever is in Down By Law when Roberto Bernini is left stranded in the Louisiana swamps and he just rattles off a lonely and lost soliloquy in unsubtitled Italian so not even the audience gets to know what he is literally saying. Unless, of course, you speak Italian. I've basically decided that I never want to learn Italian because I don't want to ruin the way the scene feels as a foreigner to his language. Bottle Rocket, too, has some lovely and sweet scenes of interlingual communication/non-communication.
I'm not sure how a post about a staircase ended up as a tribute to language in film, but there's my brain for you. Today's lesson: See movies, climb stairs, and learn/don't learn a language.
