Three Fittings: Fantastic Beasts' Odd Costume Win

New Series! Three Fittings celebrates costume design in the movies. The number is necessary self-restraint for we love the art of costuming too much.

By Nathaniel R

Dear reader, I didn't think I'd ever need to see Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016). I thought, solid reasoning given the golden trajectory of most franchises, that Oscar would want to move on after a year of regular craft nominations for the series. I thought, surely they'd never hand one of them an actual Oscar if they hadn't done so by now. But in the interest of completism, after Colleen Atwood's generous fourth statue for costuming this particular movie and its bluray release, I caught up. 

I was both impressed and utterly perplexed by what I found.

While Atwood does unusually understated work (for her), there are far fewer costumes than you might expect (approximately one per man, two per woman). Sussing out why they voted for this confident minimalism within a fantasy over more traditional costume perfection in Jackie, the primary color bliss of then-frontrunner La La Land, the erotic glamour of Allied, and the flouncy Most-ness of Florence, proves nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, here are three key looks to discuss:

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The Furniture: Magical Unreality in "La La Land" and "Fantastic Beasts"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. This is the first of two columns discussing this year's Oscar nominees. Here's Daniel Walber...

At a pool party in La La Land, Mia (Emma Stone) is granted the unique misfortune of being introduced to a generic Hollywood screenwriter. “I have a knack for world-building,” he says, instantly conjuring spectres of a Game of Thrones economy. Mia quickly extricates herself, destined for a different man in love with his own talent.

The moment is fleeting, but it peels back the curtain on Damien Chazelle’s own view of world-building and filmmaking. His version of Los Angeles isn’t at all overstated, with the exception of its ever-present automobiles. The characters don’t quite inhabit an identifiable city. Rather, they exist against a backdrop of imagined Hollywood, built from relentlessly colorful skies and busy studio lots...

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Two silly questions about dressing up and playing house with the Oscar contenders

Okay, one final round of question for Team Experience about the Oscar nominations. We've talked about people who didn't make the list and the nominations that delighted us. Now, two burning questions inspired by the Production Design and Costume nominations.

Which production design nominated picture would you most want to live inside?

GLENN: Hail, Caesar!, but only if Tilda Swinton and I find ourselves running around movie studio backlots set to a zippy orchestral soundtrack. I might just sneakily pop into Passengers' robot bar for a drink when we're done.

DAVID: The moment I saw the ridiculously giant Ingrid Bergman wall in La La Land is the moment I knew that film was definitely on my wavelength...

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Fantastic Box Office and Where To Find It...

Where to find it? With franchises, naturally. Audiences are quite predictable that way.

Fantastic Beasts won the weekend easily and though it's opening wasn't really at the Harry Potter level it's got the Thanksgiving weekend coming up to make mountains of money to store in Gringotts to help fund further endless more installments. We'll never be free of Harry Potter. But, dear reader, I'm personally skipping this one. Those films just weren't my scene so unless this one also nets Oscar nominations I need a break; four years off wasn't enough! Among the other new films opening Edge of Seventeen and Bleed for This  failed to excite moviegoers landing toward the bottom of the top ten. Ang Lee's soldier drama experiment Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk had a disastrous wide expansion taking in less than 1 million dollars in its first weekend...

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Beauty vs Beast: Before the Beasts

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "let's retreat into fantasy for sanity's sake" edition of "Beauty vs Beast" -- you probably saw some people, maybe you were one of them, sharing a Harry Potter meme this week in the wake of the US election. It is timely, what with the next entry in the Potterverse, the first of the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series, opening - we'd probably have had Muggles Inc. on our minds anyway.

But JK Rowling's fictional creation helped us sort through the Bush years and so it's no surprise that a horcrux joke or two would make their way into the conversation. The series was always explicitly political. And so let's turn our eyes to the endless battle between Good and Evil one more time today to seek out some small comfort among friends...

PREVIOUSLY One week ago we lived in a different place (what would you give to go back there right about now), one where I felt fine making a bold Hillary Clinton prediction (it was my arrogance that ruined everything, no doubt) while joking about Alexander Payne's Election - well the blonde political spitfire Tracy Flick at least got her landslide, with over 70% of the vote. Said Row-bin:

"This is one of two movies I actually enjoy Matthew Broderick in, but Tracy Flick is one of the best realized performances I've ever seen out of Reese Witherspoon. She's so unapologetic in knowing what she wants and is such a great example of well-roundedness in a character."