David Duchovny in 'Return to Me'

David Duchovny as Bob Rueland
Brian Howe as Mike







Ok, so David Duchovny is the Principle of a Design/Build firm in Chicago who's married to a gorilla veterinarian who works at the Lincoln Park Zoo. And she dies. But she was an organ donor. A year later David falls in love with a waitress who received his wife's heart, but he doesn't know that shes has his wifes heart. And, this whole time hes been building a new gorilla range for his dead wife, he's falling in love with the new girl who received her heart.


Yes this is a real movie, not a mad lib. Hilarity ensues and they kiss in the end.

Matthew Perry in Three to Tango

Matthew Perry as Oscar Novak
Oliver Platt as Peter Steinberg
John C. McGinley as Strauss
Bob Balaban as Decker





Matthew Perry as Oscar Novak is in Love with Neve Cambell, but everyone thinks hes gay! In fact out of the four architects in this flick, Novak is the only one who is straight. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Anyway, hilarity insues and they kiss in the end.

Not bad design, for a movie architect. Not that theres anything wrong with being that.

Novak and Steinberg make up the firm of Novak+Steinberg, a small firm that is vying for the 900 million dollar civic project that the firm of Strauss+Decker are also going for. The first scene in the movie is a set up of the bad blood that exists between the two groups.

Decker+Strauss Novak+Steinberg

Strauss: Oh look at this! Gilligan and the Skipper too.
Decker: What have you two studmuffins been up to lately? By the way, congratulations on the work you did on that men's room in the bus station.
Strauss: Yes, your use of mosaic in the urinal trough was vaguely reminiscent of the 90 foot mural we did in the lobby of the Hancock building.
Decker: Except people don't line up to piss on ours.
Steinberg: That is not true! We read the reviews.

D+S present the project to the developer by having him wear a virtual reality goggle set that was all the rage back in 1999.

The reviews were true

Struass: Sir, the Charles Newman Cultural center would redefine cultural life as we know it in this city. There would be a museum, an opera house, an international food court.
Decker: Picasso, Madame Butterfly, Burritos!

Well, the developer sets the two firms in a competition with each other for publicity. He tells them to build what seem to be quarter scale models for presentation to the public, where the winner will be decided and announced. So Steinberg and Novak set out to design and build their model, and they apparently set up a whole new office on the site of the design.

I really don't get why people think hes gay

At the office, a girls walks up to Steinberg, and after a brief condescending glance from the goatee'd architect, she runs away crying.
Novak:How much are we paying them?
Steinberg:They're interns. They're free.
Novak:Yeah, well, we're getting ripped off.
Steinberg: *nods yes

Modern Barbie Play House at Quarter Scale

Anthony LaPaglia in "The Architect"

Anthony La Paglia as Leo Waters







The Architect tells a tale of two families, one poor black family living in a southside Chicago project and the upper-middle class white family of the architect who designed the projects. It is great in that it deals with a many number of issues, cause and effect, HUD housing, and the ability of architecture and architects to create effective public housing, but not so great in the writing, acting, pacing and 'wtf' subplots.

Tonya Neely is the matriarch of the family living in the projects, where she is campaigning to get the buildings demolished. She shows up one day to confront that architect, Leo, who designed the building, an architecture professor at Northwestern University (false), and gets the runaround. Eventually, Leo takes it upon himself to make some architectural modifications to the buildings in hope that Tonya will quit her crusade to demolish his work.



Leo: I think you're going to be excited about what I've done here. OK, now this represents part of the problem. Each building is going to be resurfaced with the same glass facing. And then I'm going to open up the apartments, and use the glass atrium as a community porch. See, that way the residents have a place where they can interact and relax. Now, the sculpture in the middle unifies the whole design. Its a bekon, for the community. Aside from the external design, there are internal modifications and repairs than need to be taken care of...
Tonya: This doesn't solve anything, Mr Waters. There are systymic problems that go beyond repair.
Leo: Well, its not the design, it may be the excecution, but its not the design. Tanya, I was hired to build cheap homes. This was a state funded program. These are not luxury homes, Architecturally, this is a good design.
Tonya: People are lining up to leave. They are unhappy, they get sick.
Leo: Its mass housing. Mass housing does not cater to the individual needs of people. Look, you can redesign it, you can tear it down, but the problems are still going to be there. There will always be unemployment, there will always be drugs.
Tonya: Mr. Waters, they did not hire you to build houses, they hired you to house people. Can't you see this isn't about you, this is about so much more than you. We're not blaming you, clearly you put alot of work into this, but couldnt' you see from the state of the projects that they were beyond repair?
Leo: I redesigned this from my own original plans.
Leo's Wife: (butting in) You haven't seen them?
Leo: What?
Leo's Wife: You didnt visit them? I mean, things must have changed since you designed it. Did you want to see?
Leo: I didnt think it was necessary. I didn't want to cloud my perspective.
Leo's Wife: (who previously was infavor of the redesign) I think you should knock them down.

At the end of the film, Leo does visit the project and changes his mind. He signs Tonya's petition, only to be told that the vote was already passed, the building is scheduled to die.

Two interesting notes on the movie:
1) This is the second movie that I've reviewed in which Isabella Rosalleni plays the emotionally distant wife of an architect, the first being Fearless with Jeff Bridges
2) While the movie takes place in Chicago, the situation reminds me of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, a housing project that was built in 1956 and demolished in 1972.

Keanu Reeves in "The Lake House"

Keanu Reeves as Ted "Theodor" Logan as Alex Wyler
Christopher Plummer as Simon Wyler
Eban Moss-Bachrach as Henry Wyler






Reeves and Bullock team up again in this supernatural story about a mailbox that sends letters though time. Reeves is Alex, a contractor who was trained as an architect under the supervision of his starchitect/professor father Simon. When we first meet the father, he is teaching a design studio at an unknown Chicago school. The professor's youngest son, Henry is in this course and starts to explain his project's concept to his father...

Bowtie? Check.
Drawings of ionic columns? Check.

Henry: Obviously I derived my inspiration from the metophor of The Louvre ...[pauses]...uh, yeah...

They scene abruptly cuts, but they imply through dialog in the next scene that the father stood their for two hours without speaking in order to humiliate his son. Which is what all good architecture professors do when they aren't busy either making students cry, setting models on fire, or speaking only in words that they read in their bedside thesaurus the previous night.

To cool down from the ordeal, the brother goes out to get a beer with his older bro, Alex, who has been absent from the family for a few years. Alex goes on to explain to Henry what hes been doing....

Henry: Condos?
Alex: I don't believe it. I come back after 4 years and I get this infront of me.
Henry: What?
Alex: My little brother thining he's Frank Lloyd Whatever.
Henry: Ah, Come on!
Alex: Dad keeps you hostage in that myth-making factory of his, but you still haven't built so much as a telephone booth or a hamster cage.
Henry: That's funny you say that actually, I have a hamster cage in mind. A development of them actually. Prefab, no foundations, What do you think about that?
Alex: See? That's what I'm talking about! You have visions. Speaking of which, I bought a house...

Its like Speed, but in a house. Over a long drawn out 4 years. And no explosions. But Keanu and Sandra do kiss in the end.

When Alex shows his little brother the house for the first time, a house that their father built for the family in the 70's, before their mom left the father...

Henry: When did he build it?
Alex: You weren't born and I was 8.
Henry: Corbusier meets Frank Lloyd Wright
Alex: Did you know, dad played cards with both of them.

Probably more like Corbusier meets the Victorian era. In truth, the stage that was built as the house had no toilets or running water. Seriously.

Alex: There should be a stairway down to the water, a porch, a deck. Here, you're in a - in a box. A glass box with a view to everything that's around you... but you can't touch it. No interconnection between you and what you're looking at.
Henry: I don't know, you know. He's got this big maple growing right in the middle of the house.
Alex: Containment.
[He pushes a button which opens a glass door]
Alex: Containment and control. This house is about ownership, not connection. I mean, it's beautiful. Seductive, even. But, it's incomplete.
[He pauses]
Alex: It was all about him. Dad knew how to build a house, not a home. But you know... I think he wants us to do what he couldn't. But, admitting that would mean admitting that he came up short in some way... that he could do more. And that tortures him.
Henry: Do you remembering being here with Mom?
Alex: I remember she tried to make it work here... with us... with him.

In this next scene, Ted hatches a plan to travel back in time to nab Core-Bus-Air for his architectural history thesis.

In the series of letters that Alex sends Sandra through the film, they get to know each other. When asked to discribe his favorite things, Alex writes, "For me its this city. On a day when the light is so clear I can touch every detail, every brick and window of the buildings I love..."

He then goes on to include in his next magical care package for her a map of Chicago with all of his favorite buildings on it in hopes that shes goes on a walking tour of the city and shares in his joys. She does. Along the path he drew for her, he spray painted a note for her (two years in the past, remember the magical timetraveling mailbox?) on the side of a building that reads, "(Sandra), I'm walking with you right now." Really, this seems like a jerk thing to do, defacing the buildings that he loves in the city that he love. I guess that the light wasn't so clear that day.

Customized walking tour maps are like the mixed tape of the architecture world, when you want to tell a girl how special she is.