Architects and city landscapes on film

I’m in denial. Christmas has just passed and I’m writing this in that funny week between the 25th and New Year’s Day. No one really can work and no one’s really serious about anything in this lull. The year 2006 is just around the corner, but I’m really not in the mood to jump into another year of madness just yet (although it does seem like there’s much to look forward to despite the politics – but I’ll go into that in the next few weeks).

For now, just ease back and let me offer some fluff – a pair of movie reviews…sort of. Two recent films featured cities and landscapes as settings and backdrops for action, drama and romance. King Kong is a monster remake of the original 1930s film while Just Like Heaven is a romance – an updated, lighter version of Ghost. What was my interest in both? First was to see how Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings fame, handled a remake of a classic and how Hollywood handled a story that features, for the first time, a landscape architect as the romantic lead.

First to King Kong: The movie was made for computer game players. My partner described it best as "relentless." It had non-stop CGI (computer generated images) action that stretched the film to three hours. Really, it could have been trimmed down to an hour and a half without compromising the story. The actors also seemed to just phone in their performances, playing second fiddle to the mighty, and surprisingly emotive, Kong. I’d give him the Oscar.

The two settings that amazed in that movie were the mysterious tropical island and New York. If Jackson had shot the movie in one of our jungles, our tourism industry would have boomed immediately. Look what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand. Maybe we could convince Hollywood to do a remake of Tarzan of the Apes to be filmed here, possibly in Busuanga, Palawan. Another blockbuster could be a Hollywood version of Zamboanga, that wonderful, 1937 Fernando Poe Sr.-starrer, a "lost" Filipino film that was recently rediscovered in Finland.

The filming of movies here would bring in a hefty portion of the average $100 million (over P5 billion) budget for each Hollywood flick! And that’s not all. Movies would also damage the environment a lot less than mining or logging. Even with incentives for tax, movies would bring in more than they would take away – compared to large mining projects, which reportedly extract up to P375 million worth of natural resources a year but cough up only P30 million or so in taxes.

Anyway, this King Kong movie really taxed me. My senses were already on overload by the time the amorous ape climbed the Empire State Building in the movie’s climactic (and again, overly long) end. The production design for New York was superb. The detailing was mind-boggling – all the way down to the fire hydrants and posters on the walls.

From mind-boggling to heart-rending, we switch to Just Like Heaven. I made a point to see this movie because of an article in the American magazine Landscape Architecture. It reported that this film was the first to feature a lead actor playing a landscape architect (which is one of the hats this writer wears). Although this is seemingly peripheral to the film, the ending’s setting tied the leading man’s profession to the story. Mark Ruffalo, as landscape architect David Abbott, presents to Reese Witherspoon, as the object of his affection Elizabeth Masterson, a beautiful rooftop garden.

There have been many films that featured actors playing architects. There were comedians like Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, Steve Martin in The House Sitter and Gary Cole (as Mike Brady) in the Brady Bunch movies. Michele Pfeiffer was a harassed single-parent architect in One Fine Day. Architects were also played by hunks. There was Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Baby and Richard Gere in Intersection. Christopher Reeves played a disabled architect in the remake of Rear Window (originally played by James Stewart as a magazine photographer).

The classic image of the film architect, however, was played by Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead. It was based on the Ayn Rand novel, and in it Cooper played an idealistic modernist architect unwilling to compromise his futuristic minimalist designs to the dictates of his conservative clients. He burns the drawings for one such boxy masterpiece when pressured to redo the façade in the Neo-classic revival style his client wanted. Since that movie, the architect has always been played as a loner tilting at windmills with an interesting love life.

The truth (most of it) is very far from fiction. Most architects are masters of give and take, and decisions, at least in large building projects, are made by committees. Most architects also have to work with a large group of collaborators, among them engineers, interior designers and landscape architects.

The romantic image of the architect, or landscape architect, persists because most people have little knowledge of the design professions. So romance favors the mysterious and that’s where we find Ruffalo’s character in the film. He bumps into Witherspoon’s character (a career-driven doctor) in a new apartment in San Francisco that he rents. The guy seems to have a lot of time on his hands, which is the case for designers in between projects. Also, he is still recovering from the loss of his wife a few years earlier.

In any case, so as not to give too much away: boy meets ghost, ghost turns out to be girl in a deep coma, boy falls in love with spirit (and vice-versa) and tries to spirit away girl in coma and, after a little suspension of disbelief, comatose girl wakes up but does not recognize boy. Enter: the roof garden. Girl recognizes the landscape as one in her dreams and in a Hollywood moment finally falls in the arms of her landscape architect beau.

I’m still planning the dream garden for the love of my life. She’s resigned to the reality that it may not happen but I believe, in my heart of hearts, it will – in one form or the other. If all else fails then maybe I’ll make a movie.

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Remember: No guns tonight. Don’t drink and drive and watch your fingers when you set off those mini-bombs. You’ll want all those limbs and body parts still attached to you when you get up in the morning!