K's digital Pongaio: That time comin' round... and Rosehill Cottage

Thursday, October 21, 2010

That time comin' round... and Rosehill Cottage

Warning!: Looooonng post! (with lotsa images!)

Already at the beginning of October the shops' Christmas decorations have been going up... a bit freaky, as just the other day was the beginning of the year!!!

Another sign of that time comin' round is the Christmas movies starting to be shown on tv.

One that I saw again a few weeks ago was The Holiday. I fell in love all over again with Iris's cottage! The next day, stopping quickly by a store on the way to wherever and looking through the sale table, I found the dvd of the film! Very inexpensive, which makes the joy even better!

Then, with the pleasures of googling and actually finding things as we can do nowadays, I found many references and, joy, joy,joy: images!

First the sad: The cottage wasn't a real one, but a life-sized prop at the location in Shere, England, complete with fake snow in June. (How do they get the vapor clouds from the mouths that we read as cold, cold, cold? digital effects?). The interiors were sets built in a studio in... LA., I believe. (writing this from memory as waiting for hair-coloring-goop to work its charm)

Oh, so that's why the cottage was so much larger on the inside than the out!!!

I realized that the interiors were sets when I started perceiving the Old Lady in The Shoe effect (how can you fit those "so many children" in the shoe without it being MUCH larger inside than out? I never saw it as such a huge boot as in the drawing below! Even so...)

Drawing of There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe by Kronheim, c.1875

                          There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
                          She had so many children, she didn't know what to do;
                          She gave them some broth without any bread;
                          Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

The earliest printed version in Joseph Ritson's Gammer Gurton's Garland in 1794 has the coarser last line:

                          She whipp'd all their bums, and sent them to bed.

from Wikipedia

(They were were so much more direct in 1794, no?)

But I did think that the cottage, by any other name, was still a Rose ... -hill cottage — that is, a real cottage.
I found that it all being a fake is sort of freeing. Now I can imagine my own little Rosehill Cottage, build it in my brain, and all will fit marvelously inside.

I also found out that the producer of the movie, Nancy Meyers, has made many of the movies that I watch over and over, many for the storyline, but all certainly for the "backgrounds": the houses! Something's Gotta Give and It's Complicated are just two of these.

"... the production team was led Jon Hutman - but Beth Rubino, so wonderful on the set of SGG, was absent for The Holiday. And just as with Something's Gotta Give, Nancy Meyers' personal interior designer has photos of "The Holiday" houses on his web site, but he is not mentioned in the film credits." — Côte de Texas, The Holiday Houses. Meyer's "personal decorator" is James Radin, James Radin Interior Design.

The Holiday's story and acting is in my "ok" range... Cameron Diaz a bit over at times. It is an enjoyable movie, in the light&cute style. The imagery is lovely... Jude Law's blue eyes (grey? turquoise??... does it matter, as long as we can look?) are always a nice holiday touch. The LA house is also beautiful, but it doesn't warm my cockles as the cottage does.

I believe this movie is based on one I saw many years ago about house swapping. That one was between a Colonial home in perhaps New England?, and a cottage in Ireland? The two women were also trying to forget problems... I think one a love affair, and the other the death of her child in the pool (???... of the Colonial?). As I can't remember the actresses or the movie's name, I can't find any references of it. And "house swap movie" and its variations only come up with The Holiday. So far.

The best definition images I found were from the site OutNow.ch - "Bilder zu The Holiday (2006)". I've posted them below, but they aren't as large as the ones directly on the site [my image hosting sites automatically cut down the size : ( ]
Click on the images to see the larger ones, with all the amazing detail that went into making these sets.

Iris's Rosehill Cottage

*all imagines from OutNow.Ch unless otherwise noted
(I don't know who the original photographer is)