The San Fransico Chronicle has an article today looking into why so many movies make their leading men architects. Adam Sandler, Keanu Reeves, and Luke Wilson all played architects this summer, and (thankfully without seeing the movie) I know that Mark Ruffalo played a landscape architect in last year's Just Like Heaven. I hadn't noticed this trend until just a year or two ago, but the Chronicle's Ruthe Stein takes us in the wayback machine to show us just how cliche it is—right up there with the leading women working as journalists. Both careers have the same thing in common—the implication of creativity and the plausability of a high salary, to justify the inevitable to-die-for apartment and pricey wardrobe.
Robert Osborne—of my one true television addiction, Turner Classic Movies—had this to say (surely walking toward Stein as he was speaking to her):
There are very, very few professions that still have a ring of heroism about them, and architecture is one of the few that does. If an architect is portrayed going off the deep end, it's always because they are so committed to what they're doing and that's an honorable thing. And it's one of the last manly professions—you are building something outdoors.
Of course, if you've ever encountered an architect, you know they're often not the most heroic sorts. [See here, on a daily basis.] Will Peter Cook kill Hollywood's untarnished vision of architects? I guess we'll have to wait for the next cycle of romantic comedies to find out.
[via ArchNewsNow]
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