Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
looking at my list, all of my favorite chicago films are from the 70s & 80s. it's about damn time that someone makes another definitive "chicago" film, but i can't think of any chicago films from the past 20 years or so that can stand up to those classics.
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It's weird, because while there are perhaps more movies being filmed in Chicago than ever before (or at least, since the 1920s) but none of them resonate with Chicagoans, primarily because nearly ALL of them are set in a generic city and Chicago is the stand-in.
I absolutely love Stranger Than Fiction, for example, which shows off Chicago beautifully, but is set in a generic city, and used the Downtown Manhattan skyline on the DVD box and poster, for some unexplainable reason.
A similar situation exists in:
Wanted
Eagle Eye
Batman Begins/Dark Knight
The Informant
With TV shows, there is the opposite problem: plenty of them are supposedly set in Chicago, but few of them actually do filming that shows off the city. That's obviously a budget limitation, but shows like Seinfeld and Beverly Hills 90210 managed to definitely convey a sense of New York and a sense of LA, respectively, through the characters' behavior and through the unique locales that each show used.
The short-lived A&E series "The Beast" showed off Chicago very well, and it was actually set in Chicago for a change. However, it wasn't written very well, IMO, and failed to draw public attention. ER also did a great job showing the city.