Mostly about movie costumes

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Past tense Happy Birthday to Rohinee. (Happied Bornday?)

On Friday, I saw a guy on a bus wearing a t-shirt whose lettering 
said 'League Champions' and 'Municipal Softball' but whose picture 
was a parody of the HP&SS cover -- those pillars, and the softball 
player was desperately stretched in some diagonal position, to 
resemble Harry on broomstick. I didn't offer to buy it off his back, 
so I can't show it to you.

Yesterday I went to FIDM to see the movie costumes (you can see last 
year's at http://www.fidm.edu/features/gallery/academy_2002/index.html 
altho' the photos are disappointing). Like last year, the LOTR 
costumes cast our movie's (and just about everyone's) costumes 
totally into the shade. So real! So detailed!

As last year I was disappointed that WB had not sent Snape's costume 
to FIDM (they didn't send it this year either), this year I was 
disappointed that the one of Lucius's costumes that WB sent was the 
one with probably the least silver on it, just a pair of snake 
cloak-clasps and another snake at his neck. His cloak was trimmed 
only with fur and his waistcoat was embroidered with red (matching 
the pinstripes of his anti-canonical Edwardian trousers) and nearly 
invisible green. He was wearing that absurd little fur cap that no 
one but Lucius Malfoy could have looked handsome and intimidating 
while wearing. Why did the costume designer design such a stupid hat?

Supposedly the mannequins on which the costumes are displayed are 
normal standard display mannequins (last year I fell in with a guided 
tour whose guide showed them that Nicole Kidman's (?) dresses from 
Moulin Rouge were too small for the mannequins because the mannequins 
were the standard size 4 and Kidman (?) is a size 1, damn her), but 
they somehow fix them up to resemble the actors (they imitate large 
hairdos, but not Dumbledore's beard, with ruffled paper) and the 
mannequin with the arrogant bearing (and handsome face) of Lucius 
Malfoy made it difficult to judge the costume as itself. Tim sneered 
at me viewing it with a pencil and various other purse-contents held 
in my field of vision to try to block out the mannequin, but I 
concluded that in this case, it was the MAN who made the CLOTHES: if 
Borgin had been wearing that outfit, he would still have been an 
obsequious shopkeeper, albeit one who spent a good bit of money on 
clothing.

Going ENTIRELY off-topic, I was struck by the costumes of the 
STARTREKNEMESIS movie -- I was struck by how cheap and hasty and 
unimaginative they looked, as if they'd been made for a weekly TV 
show episode instead of for a movie. I was PARTICULARLY struck by a 
pink ballgown for Troi -- it looked so much like a circa 1958-62 
prom dress that I asked Tim if it had been a time travel movie. One 
difference from that era is that it was decorated with LARGE 
arrangements of artifical flowers, in a Victorian or Regency kind 
of way.

At first I criticised the (otherwise pretty) flowers for being 
exactly positioned to block the places where a dance partner would 
normally put his hands during a waltz, foxtrot, or similar ballroom 
dance --- an arrangement of about a dozen pink roses, with the usual 
baby's breath, leaves, and other floral bulkage, trailed gracefully 
from waist to hip, with a smaller arrangement of some three full-
blown roses and their acoutrements at her opposite shoulder. But then 
I thought it might be intentional, and asked Tim if Troi can't stand 
to be touched, and might therefore have asked her dress designer to 
come up with a dress that would prevent dance partners from touching 
her.

But then, I am so very bad at knowing left and right, and not very 
knowledgeable about ballroom dancing either, that I could be entirely 
wrong about the flowers being an obstacle.