The Secret Matinee in Exile: What is she wearing?

Yesterday, the Grand Illusion starts its Secret Saturday Matinee. For twelve weeks, there will be a different fun movie, along with an old time serial of Batman and Robin. This is superheros month. Superhero movies from an era before digital effects.

But I had to miss it because yesterday was the Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival at the Cinerama in Seattle. Laurel and I go every year - except for the year when we thought we could just buy tickets at the door.

Although missing the matinee makes me the Sad Panda, we have a lot of fun movies to see.

Before we get to that, let’s talk about the costumes.

This festival is run together with EMP which includes a Sci-Fi museum. Every year, they display some costumes from their collection in the lobby of the theater. Here were the ones on the south side of the concession stands:

The costumes are The Dude, Leeloo, Tyrell, and Robin Hood.

One clarification - when production company makes a movie, they don’t just have the costume designers make a single costume for a character. According to the Lord of the Rings additional material on the DVDs, they made ten copies of the same costume for Frodo in good, clean condition, and then ten in torn, dirty condition. Since movies are usually filmed in a different order from the order of scenes in the final movie, you have to have clean costumes for scenes early in the movie. And you need several to allow for wear and tear. And for Lord of the Rings, there also had to be matching costumes for stunt doubles and for other doubles.

So, the costume on the left there might or might not have actually been worn by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski. They may not have needed as many as the Lord of the Rings movies, but still.

That said, it’s kinda nifty to look at the costumes and recognize artifacts from Battlestar Galactica or Blade Runner. These are the shows and movies that I grew up with.

Notice the second costume from the left?

Well, that’s from The Fifth Element, where Bruce Willis saves the whole galaxy and Lola in a remake of the cult classic Heavy Metal. (No, the actor isn’t actually the same as in Run Lola Run. The Fifth Element woman did go on to be Alice in the Resident Evil movies, though.)

So, what’s that orange thing she’s wearing?

I recognize a shirt, even without its midriff, and extremely tight pants, but what’s that orange thing? It doesn’t hold anything up. It offers no protection that I can ascertain. It seems well suited to ride up into Milla’s butt crack and lady parts, but I’ve been told that women are ambivalent about that. If it’s supposed to be attractive, somehow, well, there are articles of clothing that are uncomfortable to wear, not very useful, and extremely sexy, but this ain’t one of them.

I may have needed to read the plaques to recognize the Dude or Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood, but the ones on the north side of the lobby, I knew all those right away:

That’s Commander Adama, Rachael, another replicant, and Seven of Nine. No, I can’t name the other replicant without looking it up.

Next time, some of the short films.